What's more fun than throwing me into the ocean?

Throwing me into the ocean armed, of course!

So this weekend's excursion spearfishing off the coast of Hollywood Beach yielded some seriously nice results. For the first time we kayaked out to the reefs, which is the highest level of luxury. Getting to your destination that quickly and with that little effort almost takes something away from the experience. Almost. Then again, getting there (and more importantly, getting back) without real effort is fantastic.

I met Gibran and Brian out on the ocean (I was running late, as usual) and they'd been diving for a bit before I got there. I missed one hogfish completely, but Gibran and I both came up with a pair of foot-and-change long hogs pretty soon after. Stoked by this progress, we headed out along a really sweet shelf of reef, looking for more. I'm really bad at identifying fish, so I was just poking around for hogs (they're the only fish I can definitely identify), but there some small grouper and some yellowtail rolling around too.

I floated around until I saw movement, swam down to investigate, and saw a really big fish. It was camouflaged, and I thought it might be a parrot or angel or something equally inedible, but then saw the telltale spines over the head... and realized it was a honkin' big hogfish. I floated the rest of the way down slowly, took aim, and scored a perfect killshot - there wasn't even a fight. Anyway, as you can see from the picture, he's a beaut.

After kayaking back and cleaning stuff off, we took the photos. Some weird crazy guy in tighty whities came strolling up asking to be in the picture. I wasn't terribly amused (as you can tell from this photo) at being next to some strange guy in his underwear.