I recently visited a place that we found 5 years ago, 170 miles off Florida, into the Bahamas. It was a place that made you think it was 30 years ago: healthy reefs, 100 pound black grouper (not jewfish), hogfish so thick and tame that they would come right up in your face, 10 or more at a time. You could literally beat them off with a stick, my son did. All this is 20 feet of water. I watched hogfish behavior that I had not seen for many years and began to realize how much their behavior had changed as a result of spearfishing. At the end of the day, I asked one of my buddies to go down and spear one fish for dinner. He came up with a hog bigger than all 4 of us could eat, the smallest one he could find. Quite a place and far enough out in the boonies that I had hopes that it might stay that way.
We were on the way back hoping to find it like that again. When we arrived, we found not a single fish, no grouper, no hogs, nothing. Someone had found the place, probably Bahamians just trying to make a living, and beat it to death.
I wanted to cry or at least kill somebody; yet it wasn’t a park, nobody had been doing anything bad, nothing illegal, and nothing out of the ordinary. Those guys where just doing what I had done in many other places, all of us thoroughly enjoying it. The problem was just how much it was ordinary; places like that were once so common and are now vanishingly rare.
I have become a fan of sanctuaries where no harvest of any kind is allowed. There always should be places to fish, spearfish, commercial fish, recreational fish. But there also should be places where the fish are unmolested and can return to the kind of heart stopping abundance that everyone who has ever seen it loves.
Connor
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