A Good majority of my serious spear fishing buddies all have or had commercial fishing licenses. It would be a waste of time to put the boat in the water without it. It is all changing now so most of us are dropping out of spearfishing. Once you do it at the level we all did it , it is hard to go back. The price of fuel and the new rules are changing things.
If you relate it to golf it would be like playing as a pro in the PGA and then going back to putt putt golf to go out and only shoot one or two fish.
I am shooting more and more video and digital pictures in other parts of the world like Fiji, Dominica, St. Croix and other places now. On July 4th I fly out with my wife for a week on Catalina Island for some Cold water diving.. Hope to shoot some good video and digital pictures.. Diving in a 7 mil will suck.. t-shirt diving is my kind of diving.
In the morning I am driving about 60 miles North to Homossassa to dive (snorkel) for scallops with my wife, daughter and her boyfriend who I recently certified until July 3rd. IT is a LOT of fun.. I let my wife catch all of them while I do the cleaning. If ANY ONE wants to learn how and where just ask. Great for NON divers and little kids. Most of it is 4-5 feet of water.
When most of us started spearfishing years ago you did not have to have a commercial License to sell fish and their were no limits of any kind.
Because my fish were so much more fresh the market would put my fish in the display window on ice and ship the fish off the big commerical to Resturants.
Later we had to get a Salt Water Product License to sell fish and the later we had to qualify for a Restricted Species Endorsement. Then came the Federal permits which were even harder to get and qualify for. Then they started to limit the amount of fish you get even with the federal permits and then started to shut down months you could fish. This put a good portion of the commercial fisherman who did it for a living out of business.
That is when they started to bring in the "fake" grouper to Florida and the rest of the Country.
I also had a commercial lobster License which I would use mostly in Key West. On a good day with three of us diving we could get 150 to 250 lobster. That may sound like a lot of lobster for some people but I have friends who were much more serious then me and they would average closer to 500 lobster on a good day. Most of them would spent 2 week to a month in the keys spearfishing and catching lobster.
If you have your own boat and spearfish you need to go to Key West. It is a Blast. I would drop one guy off with the tanks to fill in the morning, motor over to the marnina to go fill up with gas and then pick up the man with the tanks. WE would get back about 9-10:00 P.M. Load the fish into the Van and run to the fish market or a resturant to sell the fish or lobster. Then back to the condo to shower and head to Sloppy Joes and eat our first and only meal of the day and party until they close. We would catch about 3 hours of sleep and then do it all over again.. 6 days in a row.
IF you are LUCKY enough to get to Key West make the run down to Rececca Shoals. It is about 60 miles from Key West. I have about 30 rocks down there that come straight up off the bottom to within 15-20 feet of the surface from 80 feet of water. Caves you can drive a bus thru. Each is loaded with big gag and blacks to well over 50 pounds with a few bigger ones. Lots of big mutton, snapper and hogs. Lots of sharks also which is a good sign of a healthy ledge. Danced more then once with the man in gray down there. The rocks are all flat and are 100 to 500 feet across. It is the best spear fishing you will do. The only other place as good I have been to is the middle grounds.
Sometime we would sell the lobster directly to the resturants and sometimes the fish market. For a while I had a tailing permit which allowed us to tail the lobster underwater which helped out a lot. You could put 5 times more lobster into a bag.
Now I no longer have any of my commercial lobster permits so I either take my wife to the keys or to West Palm. In fact we always do the sportsman season the end of July in West Palm. We will do a dive at midnight to about 80 feet, three dives at sunrise to about 100 feet and then two more dives in the afternoon. The same thing the second day. You are allowed 12 per person so in "theory" we could get 24 the first night, 24 in the morning and 24 in the afternoon. Another 48 more the next day.
I would never spearfish off a cattle boat or a six pack unless I ran the trip (bareboat) but diving for lobster with my wife for fun from a small cattle boat is cool. Sure a heck of a lot less work. If I come home with 50-60 lobster it will be cool. Started diving for lobster when I was 10 on a hooker rig in the Keys spending 8 hours a day underwater. Now I am in my 50's.
I am down to my last 6 lobster in my freezer so it must be time to go again.
We never anchor all day when we are spearfishing most of the time and only put one diver on a ledge at at time. If there are 3 of us I will put two divers down at a the same time but on two different ledges. ONCE you dive like this it is so much more fun you will never be able to jump in the water with 3-4 other divers to shoot fish. Plus the diver can follow the fish and go where ever he wants and has far as he wants in any directions with no back tracking. It is the ONLY way to spearfish.
Years ago we wrote the first loran programs in D-Base to sort out all our loran numbers. We would print them in a six mile grid. This showed me where all the ledges were and what directions and distance they were without putting the number into the loran. Converting to GPS is a real pain and the only way to do it right is to find the spot with the loran and then enter the location into the GPS while the bottom machine tells you that you are RIGHT over the spot. With two diver we could dive 30 spots in a day.
Before anyone gets their panties in a knot I was all for most of the changes in the new fish rules..."most" but not all. But then again I did not have to support a wife and kids from fishing.
When they shut down Red Snapper years ago we later saw them in as shallow as 40 feet where I never saw them shallower the 120 feet before. Even saw true blacks in as shallow as 35 feet.
If I go out on a Saturday to Spearfish I would take off work at noon Friday and work very hard and fast NON stop until midnight getting the boat and gear ready. That is not counting the hours I spent Monday thru Thursday. I get up 2 hours before sunrise and within 30 mins I am soaking wet from sweat from loading 100-200 pounds of ice, 10-12 tanks, fishing poles, electronics and much more.
We will run 1.5 to 3 hours off shore depending on our target species and the time of year. We will burn at least a hundred gallons or more of fuel a day. WE will dive at up to 15 spots each and do the last dive at sunset which will be 30-40 miles or more off shore. After the last dive we take a quick solar shower, change into dry cloths, make a rum and coke and make the 1-3 hour run home. We hit the Dock between 10 and midnight if we do not run into bad weather.
NO. I DO NOT do all of that and ONLY shoot one or two fish. IF I just jumped onto a cattle boat then maybe I would be happy with one or two fish.
It would be like flying from Florida to California, paying a $ 450.00 green fee to play at Pebble Beach, teeing off on the first tee and then going home after hitting the ball one time. Without a commercial License I could shoot my limit in 5 mintues on my first dive.
I have over a 1,000 ledges, spring and wrecks from 3 miles off shore to well over 150 miles offshore. I am very careful to only take a few fish from each ledge and never hit the same ledge within 3 months no matter how many fish are there. I have well over 5,000 dives into the Gulf just spearfishing. No matter what happens I will always have the happy memories of hundreds of trips I have taken into the Gulf.
I am retired but as soon as my wife retires we plan on moving on to a 54 foot sailboat and spend the next 15 years sailing around the world diving locations that have NEVER seen a diver before. She also likes to catch sailfish, marlin, dolphin and Tuna..
Yes I am a VERY lucky man.
Safe diving to all.
