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Kelly White dives The Hyde wreck, a 215-foot hopper dredge sunk in 1988
populated with octopi.
“It’s all so different,” Ashley says. “Lobsters at one ledge, octopus
at another; then grouper, gag, hognose and other fish at different
depths.”
“Over time I’ve evolved as a freediver and a spearfisher,” Ren
explains. “At first I would dive and bag every fish I could, then I
started shooting selectively, now I take my camera and do most of
my shooting with it.”
Alex Llinas, a mechanical engineer at MCBH Engineers and
a freediver and spearfisherman, still dives for the hunt.
“I just got my first cobia,” he says proudly. “I shot it at
about 36 feet and I got lucky.” At a little more than three feet long
and weighing in around 40 pounds it was a nice fish to cap a day of
diving.
“We went out off a couple of wrecks and ledges just off of
Wrightsville Beach. At the first spot — a wreck at 50 or 60 feet
— a few of us shot grouper, then we decided to move on and go
deeper. We went to a deep ledge and dove it. We didn’t see many
by the NC Division of Marine Fisheries, 18 miles from Masonboro Inlet.
fish, but the ledge — about 100 feet deep — was beautiful. After
that we decided to hit one more spot as we came inshore.
“When we got to the artificial reef we wanted to dive, I was one
of the last people in the water. My buddy started yelling ‘Come
here, come here, shoot ‘em.’ I turned around and started swimming
toward him. Now you can’t really swim toward fish, they spook
and swim away, but these cobia were already swimming away.”
“I tried getting as close as I could. With a quick breath before I dove
after them I didn’t have much time, but when I got close enough I
saw that I had a choice — the bigger one that was further away or the
smaller one that was closer, so I went for the smaller one.”
Llinas’s shot hit home and he pulled the cobia in hand over
hand. It fought him.
“I’d seen my buddies shoot cobia and I knew they fought a lot
when they got close to the surface, so I was working to get this fish
close and brain him,” Llinas says.
Braining is killing the fish by quickly stabbing it with a thickbladed,
extremely sharp dive knife.
“It was my first cobia and I was pumped,” Llinas says.
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