I have not posted for a couple of weeks because I was getting ready for the Venice Shark Tooth Festival last weekend. Everyone seemed to have fun there. I had a blast. So anyhow a couple of weeks ago I started diving a spot I try sometimes in the spring. It is right where the Intercoastal Waterway flows into the Atlantic. It causes a huge 70 foot deep hole. Most of the area is all sand and there is nothing there. Every once in awhile you hit a bone bed.
There are several problems with the area. First at 70 feet it is pretty deep for my type of diving. I need to swim around looking for a bone bed so I can not come up a line so I can not do a safety stop that is recommended at that depth. Because the water funnels through the area between two islands the current is VERY strong. We have a 6-10 foot tide change so the current is fast in my normal spots but not like this spot. Also it tends to be very windy there. That blows the boat around and the guy on the boat does not have a lot of fun. The vis is always zero so you can not anything ever. It is not unusual to swim around most of the dive looking for a bone bed which takes you away from the boat. You do not want to come up and drift away from the boat without the tender seeing you. In the winter it is too cold to go to because of the wind. In the fall large shrimp boats drag nets through the area. In the summer large sharks are caught in the hole. A charter captain hooked a 10 foot tiger shark there a few years back and shark fishermen sit over the hole all summer long. So I have a few weeks in the spring after it warms up but before the sharks move in to dive there. I dove it all last week and today was my last day there because the water is 70 and it is supposed to be windy all week. Today the boat became un-anchored because of the wind.
So last Sunday (10 days ago) I found a monster tooth. I did pretty well the rest of the week but nothing this nice. It is 6.2″ long and 4.9″ wide. It made all the bouncing around worth it. It has a crack along the non-display side but is a very solid tooth.