I haven't been carrying my camera around with me or posting my recent dives (after all, it's just a story without pictures to back it up), but CJ wanted to go dive, and this time I remembered the camera. It was a toss-up between the PWC and his tiny dinghy, but since we were carrying a bunch of stuff for a dive-related project, we went with the dinghy this time.
We jumped in his boat, I busted out my GPS for a good ulua hole that holds about half of the time. I wanted CJ to finally snag one on a dive with me since it was always myself who picked one up in the past. I had him cut the motor upwind, we drifted about 200 feet before I dropped the anchor, positioning us perfectly just a few yards upwind of the hole.
I had CJ go down first (first person into a hole is nearly always the one who gets the ulua) and I couldn't quite see what was going on down there so I started a shallow dive to about 30 feet to watch. As I approached 30 feet, I saw CJ start tracking something that was not in the hole. He fired and I saw a small flash of silver. It turned out to be a small ulua. I decided to keep going down to see if a back-up shot or assistance was needed. As I got closer to CJ as he began to rise, I could see that he had nothing on his shaft, but I noticed a shadow swim by in a semi-circle around the shaft.
Ulua! I quickly rocketed down past CJ and intercepted the ulua. I tracked, pulled the trigger and blam! Not a stone shot, so I started wrestling it up to try to keep it from going into a hole or wrapping up. I was successful in doing so as I swam up while wrestling it via my float line. As I neared the surface, I checked on CJ who flashed the OK, and when I surfaced, I flashed the OK as well, just as I got pulled back under. After getting dunked a few times and wanting to breathe normally again, I decided to just let go and let the fish do what it wanted to do.
A shark showed up.
Then another shark showed up. The ulua went into a hole to avoid the sharks. The sharks started to circle... CJ, being the good wingman he is went down to see what was up and see if he could put in a back-up shot into it. He went down, but had mask problems and could not see anything. I think that was a good thing because the sharks took an interest in him and were circling him pretty closely - closely enough that I decided to go down to fight them off, but it wasn't necessary as he came back up right then.
He handed me his gun and started his recovery breathing process. I went down, the sharks scattered (they must know me), I followed the line and found it with a huge moray eel trying to somehow take a bite out of it. Even though it was a huge eel (8 ft?) it was rather comical due to the thickness/size of the ulua.
It reminds me of when I eat those 1 pound burgers at The Counter every week.
I poked the eel away, pulled the ulua out through another hole for a clear shot and shot it in the head, ending things.
Surfaced, instructed CJ to cut my shooting line so we could get the ulua out without dealing with the eel and wasting any more time. He went down and did that. We put it and my gun in the boat and then resumed diving to check out another hole nearby. Nobody was home, so we called it an afternoon and headed back.
-Paul
Re: Not On a PWC but.... This Afternoon's Ulua 
Linear Mode
