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Old 09-28-2007, 03:27 PM
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Default Kent's Excellent Eleuthera Adventure or Don't Hand Feed The Sharks

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Originally Posted by kent View Post


Actually that was a great hog fish. I shot that in Eleuthera when we were filming our wind and wave sports documentary. There was a killer area just off the cliffs across the island from "Surfers Beach". We had about 100 ft. of visibility and the water was only 15ft. deep. We were using slings and therefore needed to be in fairly close to shoot. I saw a few large and spooky mutton snapper, but couldn't get a shot. I then jump this nice hog, but he disappeared into the rocks. While I was hunting around for him, I looked up and he was just starring me in the eyes about 4 ft. away. I took a quick shot and was able to snag him. I tossed him on a rock and continued to hunt for a while. I ended up with a nice grouper about 20 minutes later and headed back to meet the crew. I have included a killer photo of the place that we were diving. Hope you can post it Rick.



Later in the trip we headed north to dive an area called "Current Cut". This place was freaky! When we arrived the current was ripping in the cut at about 6 knots and there were 3 foot standing waves. I was like "no way in hell", but we were with a local named "Surfer Pete" and he assured us that it would be cool. A few of us hopped in a bit early to check it out. Tons of grouper around on the East side before entering the cut. As it turned out Surfer Pete picked the tide perfectly and we drifted into the cut and hunted along the way. We saw Cuberra Snapper up to 85 lbs. cruising the bottom and tons of Grouper everywhere. It was a very nice sand bottom with some overhung ledges. The Grouper season had just opened again and the spawn was still on. Surfer Pete hit at least 6 nice fish before any of us (Todd, Tom Dunfee, Surfer William Kimball, and myself) had even taken a shot. I feel pretty confident that I could have shot a few fish, but most were in the 20-50 lb. class and I didn't think that I could pull them out quickly enough.

Suffice it to say that this area had the potential to be very, very sharky. My buddy William has been down on this place many times and he once had a 12 ft. Tiger swim right up to him. With this much moving current you don't want to have to dig out a bleeding grouper for more than about 2 minutes.

At any rate, Surfer Pete had his fill and got out just as the tide changed to ebb. The rest of us stayed in to try our luck. At one point I remember diving down to wait out a 25-30lb. grouper and I noticed the 5 or 6 Grouper in the area reacting very strange and darting around the bottom. I was thinking that was weird. When I got to the top, Tom and William said, "wow can you believe that? How cool, boy they were close". I was like, "what the hell are you talking about?” Apparently when I was on the bottom, focusing on my Grouper, about 5-6 large and fast swimming spotted dolphins came racing through the pass and blasted by me with in 1 ft. of my head. I didn't even see the large mammals. This was fine, however it did kind of bring up the point of how easy a large Tiger or Bull Shark could have easily swam up and popped my head off with about 1/2 of a bite.

At any rate, William, Tom, Todd, and I started to drift out with the tide and Will nailed a nice 15lb. Grouper. He was thinking of getting out of the water, but I persuaded him that we would be fine to finish the drift and that we would all keep an eye out for each other. About 2 minutes later, William kind of freaked and said that he just had a bad feeling. He quickly climbed over the edge and got out of the water. Tom decided to get out as well, but Todd and I wanted to finish it out. At this point the tide was starting to kick out pretty good and we were hanging on to the rocks on the East side of the cut. We were in about 7-10 feet of water just next to a straight drop that goes to 40-45 ft. With William, Tom, and the bloody fish safely ashore, I said to Todd that we should boost off. I placed my masked face into the water and was just shoving off when about 4 ft. away from me hovering over the deep water edge a large and thick 8-10 ft. Bull was just sizing me up, no doubt here to find the animal that blood had previously been leaking out of. I stopped my push off the rocks and frantically said,” BULL SHARK, BULL SHARK, GET OUT!" before Todd could push out.



We quickly exited the water with tons of energy. It just goes to prove that in the Bahamas you must be very careful when spear fishing, especially in an out going tide that flushes over deep water.

In all the out islands are awesome and I strongly recommend them for anyone looking for great surfing, kiting, windsufing, fishing, and spearing. The out islands offer a very unique type of adventure travel that is super close to home.

Kent



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