Spearfishing the 280Cutoff, Data Buoy, Virgo, and Spirit - Oct 10, 2015© Photos Posted by Mark Miller © Hi-Res Source
Omar's Father recently passed away and I put this trip together to take his mind off of it and remind him that life is grand. We wanted to goto his favorite platform, the Beer Can Neptune (Spar Rig), but the wind started to kick up right after we got out there so we stayed about 10 miles closer in. On the way we stopped for some chum on the Master Mike Shrimp Boat. Interestingly, we made the same stop a year ago and dove with a larger school of Sharks on this same Shrimp Boat. But this time we also had Dolphins in the mix and we had better visibility. The comical thing was that we wanted Sharks but Omar said the Sharks disappeared and then Glenn showed us his new contraption, the Shark Shield. It was very funny because we didn't know he was diving with that and we wanted the Sharks (kinda like having bananas on the boat). Anyway, I was using air below them so I still got to check them out.
After this we stopped in Block VK280 checking some numbers out just before hitting the Data Buoy. One of them turned out to be a cutoff we had never dove before. It came up to about 80 feet from the Surface and we shot 2 Scamps on it. It had a good population of Spanish Hogs on it too. After that, we went to the 42040 Weather Data Buoy in 541 feet of water, and chummed in vain for tuna and wahoo. From there we went to the VK823 Virgo Platform in 1139 feet of water. After that, the VK780 Spirit Platform in 722 feet of water. From there we headed north and the winds increased to 26 knots as we made our way back making the ride miserable and very slow. We left out at 4pm finally got back around 2:30am! We could only make about 5 knots during much of the 80 mile journey in order to be safe. The trip encompassed 191 miles, 123 gallons of fuel, and 20.2 hours.
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