Day 5 – Lion Tamer

Today we were going to change the odd. Darryl and I got up early in the morning and went back to Tildens to get our scuba tanks filled and decided to rent the gear for one more day. I was also on a mission to find a ZooKeeper. A ZooKeeper is a brand of a holding tube used when catching lionfish. 

Once you spear it, you simply stick it in the tube and pull the fish off on

the flap located at the top of the tube. Tilden's did not have it but did have what looked like a Home Depot 5 gallon bucket. The manager told me it would work great! Not sure what medication she was on, but there wasn’t a chance in hell I would use such a thing. After checking at Halls, we finally found two at West Marine. Yeah – West Marine!!! Now we were ready!

We lollygagged around the house until about 10am before getting on the boat. Darryl, Tobi, Lane, LT, and I headed on the boat for gas first, then out to Sombrero Beach for bait, and then finally out to the reef. We dropped anchored about a quarter-mile off of the lighthouse near a ledge. I went down and managed to spear 3 lionfish.

While I was looking for my fourth lionfish, a nurse shark started to swim around me. Beautiful creature! It started to circle me and thought this is odd behavior. I petted it and then tried to push it away. It kept circling and then a prodded it gentle with the spear tip. It did not make a difference. Finally, it occurs to me that it was likely smelling the lionfish I had shot that were now in my holding tube. Swimming forward my eyes now were concentrating on to things, Lionfish and the nurse shark. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a lionfish and proceed to spear it. Within a millisecond of the spearing of the lionfish, the nurse shark flew passed my side and ripped the lionfish off the tip of the spear. I was so giddy! That was one of the coolest things I had ever encountered scubaing.

LT hammered out about 5 hogfish. Lane speared two hogfish but was on a half-empty tank. While Lane was done, he got his second regulator caught on the reef and it started to blow out air. Unable to get the regulator unstuck for a while it dropped his oxygen level to near empty. Luckily he was able to free it and managed to get back up with an empty tank. With all the parties back in the boat, we headed back to the house to refill the tanks.

While we were out on the water, Darcy and Jake arrived at the house. They drove down from Tennessee. We said our hellos and then Darryl, Tobi and I headed to Hall’s dive center to get scuba gear for Lane, Tobi, and Olivia, along with six scuba tanks. They wanted to make sure we had plenty of air and enough to go out for several dives each. Gear rented and we were off.

We had a boatful today, but the water was calm and had plenty of daylight to make the best of the afternoon. Again, we headed out towards Sombrero Lighthouse and anchored off about a half-mile out near one of the ledges. It was hard to see the bottom from up top, but once you got about 20 feet from the bottom you could see all the structure. It was pretty rocky with coral beds and clusters all over. I attempted to go for Lionfish and managed to get six, along with one Hogfish. I saw plenty of Hogfish while I was down, but opted not to spear them. Not sure why, but wanted to really get at least 8 of the Lionfish. Didn’t make eight, but was sure close.

After the deep dive, we headed over to Sombrero National Sanctuary by the lighthouse and the girls get in and snorkel. Olivia was a bit snockered and didn’t take to the whole snorkeling thing well. We could not get her to put the mask or snorkel on and she had a really hard time putting on her fins. Tobi finally jumped in and helped her. The current was super strong so it drifted them quite a way out and it took them quite some time to get back.

We ended up heading back in around 7:30pm and pretty much called it a day. At least some of us did. Darryl took Anna out on the boat for a bit and then the boys ended up going back out on it after 9pm or so hoping to get one last bite of the day.