unior Angler Team

By Christopher Sprague

Hello anglers!

As per usual, the winter has given us a lot of sloppy, murky seas...BUT there were a few good days that were beautiful. Sadly, it’s usually on weekdays when we can’t go out, but being our senior year, my friend, his family, and I decided to take a couple of days off from school and head to the Bahamas. We flew over to Great Harbor Cay and stayed at their house. This had to be one of the most beautiful islands that I’ve been to with beautiful beaches, nice people, and even better fish, which is all that really matters. We were going to stay one night, so the second we got there, we got straight on a boat and went diving. We looked for lobster, but it was not our lucky day, so we moved a little deeper. Thankfully, I brought my good pole spear on this dive. I jumped in the water and only a few minutes in I was looking under a ledge and turned around to see a nice 23” mutton snapper staring at me. I remained calm, slowly loaded my pole spear, then boom... got ‘em! I swam and grabbed the fish quickly and brought it to the boat. This was the highlight of the first day and was an amazing dinner that night. The next day we went out early in the morning and tried for lobster again. We dove into many different lobster condos, but none had anything good. We were about to give up and then suddenly, I checked out a different one and all I could see were lobster antennae. We had a blast and maxed out on lobster; the whole family was in the water spearing them too! After that, we went for some hogfish. We hit up a spot, I didn’t even get time to breathe up and the first thing I saw was a nice male hog. I dove down and shot it once but unfortunately it ripped out. We tracked it to a nearby coral head where I got another shot and this time, I got it! We ended up getting 3 hogfish total and a bunch of lobsters before heading home that night. This was one of the quickest but most memorable Bahamas runs I’ve done. We were successful and I had a great time with some of the greatest friends I could ever wish for.