SpearBlog

Craig Big Doggie

Last two days has been a bit of a blur.

Lonefin’s last day was yesterday so it was his call to go to the deep reef and hope that the “hoovers” would let some of the fish come higher than 100 ft so he could get a few shots off.  The visibility wasn’t as good as it has been in the past with only 160-180 ft vis.  We had to stop ourselves from complaining and snap back in to reality.

First stop was one of the deep FAD’s (Fish Aggregate Devices) which is a buoy anchored in about 4000’ of water. For the most part they have been barren this time of year with only a few little Dolphinfish(Mahi mahi, Dorado, dodo’s) so we didn’t have very high hopes.  With four guys in the water the shafts started flying within only a few minutes and one poor lone little Weehoo was running scared from the cannons.  A lot of cursing and reloading later the guys gave up and we moved to the deep reef.

The next couple hours in slick calm conditions produced a number of small doggies, Craig with a Wahoo in the 25 lb range and some big barracudas. We explored some new areas and found the sharkiest areas as always held the best fish and both Heals and Craig landed big Barracudas that were attacked by huge swarms of sharks that we could see from the boat.

With my ear busted up I spent the majority of the day in the boat enjoying the slick calm conditions and the constant banter between the boat guys.  The highlight of the day was our boat guy Fonz pushing the knife out of the way as I was filleting a big ulua from the day before to use as chum in order to grab the eggs that were its belly.

“You are not going to eat that.”

and of course he proceeds to open it up and bite straight into it like it was a whopper with cheese.  Gnarliest thing i’ve seen in awhile.  Luckily I got it on video.

A bit later I had him show me the whole Beetle nut preparation which in itself is pretty heavy. Whoever figure that out in the first place had way too much time on their hands and was super desperate for a high.

The gist of it is:

You take a nut from the tree and crack it in half with your teeth and take out the middle part.  Once you have that out you get a bit of lime, which is actually crushed up limestone that is turned in to a paste and put in little film looking cannisters to sell, and you put a bit of that lime in the middle of the open nut.

Next you take a cigarette and break it in the middle and put the tobacco half in the middle of the nut too.

Lastly you take a piece of a pepper leaf and wrap the whole thing in that and you’re good to go.

If you ever go to anywhere in Micronesia or the south pacific and you see people (men and women) with nasty fungi looking teeth that look almost like they are made of wood, you can pretty much bank on them chewing beetle nut.

Nasty Nasty stuff.

Apparently it gets you a bit of a high but no one that i know says much about it being that hot.  The boat guys think that it makes them focus better so maybe Adrerol is on the outs and Bettle nut is moving in.

Everyone chews it. All the businesses around town have signs out front that say “No spitting of Beetlenut on premises!”

When you pull up to a stop light, usually at least the driver and the passenger doors open and they spit out their nut juice but if you get really lucky all four doors will open and the nastiness with come from each. Bad bad stuff.

So don’t pick up that habit when you come down here or your woman is going to never kiss you again.

So in between watching the guys dive crazy deep dives (a fair number of tunas were shot at 120 ft or better and the deepest of dives were… deeper than I will say because I don’t want the kids even thinking to go there on tanks) we had some shallow fun on the WWII ship and plane wrecks which were really badass.

One of the best shots of the trip was of Craig in full Kamikazee at the wheel of a flying boat that was crashed in about 40 feet. So funny we all almost drowned laughing watching it.

Today was a banner day for tunas.  in 5 hours of diving we shot 11 fish and should have had at least 3 wahoo that were too skinny for our shafts and we just could not seem to hit.   Probably the best day of Dogtooth tuna hunting I’ve ever seen and we were stoked to call it an early day and get in before the sun set for once.

Healey with another big DoggieProp of the flying boat