Hiya
Noah, i rarely do any bottom fish hunting. In my local waters, you have to contend with dirty water and 15-20m dive's to get 'good' reef fish. Since most of our local reef fish is under 3kg's (5-6lb's) and the Great White population has grown considerabily, its simply not worth risking myself to shoot a couple of small fish!! Our bay has pretty much been decimated by overfishing from the commercial fishing boats, so slow growing reef fish takes very long to recover. Coupled to the fact that there are now even more Marine Protected Area's, we simply target our largest inshore pelagics, which is yellowtail (seriola llalandi). Pelagics grow quickly and are a sustainable species. They also fight much harder and are bigger too!!
To get decent demersal species, we have to travel at least 2-3 hours up the coast. How-ever, here is even BETTER pelagics species, with yellowtail in the 15-20kg class (30-45lb's) being quite common. So, we tend to concerntrate on them instead of the 5-10kg (10-20lb's) bottoms!!
Our method is to first go and look for pelagics. If there is no current or the water is dirty, we'll then go look for inshore reef species.
Here'some reef fish and pelagics of a trip in january:
