Great trip considering post cold front, windy conditions

Mo

Awesome! Congrats on a great trip

The grouper is the best thing I've ever put in my mouth.

It was mighty good. It was almost lunch for a barracuda ,
A giant Cuda made a pass just as we landed the grouper.
Mo

Those were some nice fish, beautiful scorpion fish. Some of the best tarpon fishing I've ever experienced between Stock Island and Boca Chica. Lived in Miami area for 25 years and one year in Key West. What a place to get away too. Thanks for posting, great pictures.

That's a lion fish and I wouldn't have my hand anywhere close to that critter.

My Captain does some diving and spearfishing , He said
it is FPWD recomendation to shoot every lion fish you see
and try to feed the groupers. they want to teach the grouper
to eat lionfish.

MO

Really? Lionfish are extremely poisonous. That doesn't seem like a good food source for grouper.

Mo

http://www.lionfishhunters.org/

Interesting read

Mo

"Groupers have joined in on the fight in the Cayman Islands:
Since venomous lionfish began invading the Cayman reefs back in 2008, divers were the only line of defense against them. However, groupers are now joining in on the fight. On Little Cayman, dive masters began feeding lionfish to groupers in hopes that the large fish would teach other groupers to do the same.

It started with the divers feeding dead lionfish to the tame Nassau groupers that interact with divers. In the beginning, they fed their friendly groupers mainly dead lionfish that they had previously caught and killed. The instructors would take the nets down with the dead lionfish and open the bags up when the groupers came to visit. Once they got used to the idea of dead lionfish, they progressed to live lionfish from the nets. Even more recently they have started to take live lionfish from the reefs, when the dive masters pointed them out. Please keep in mind that prior to teaching groupers that lionfish is a tasty snack, the dive masters had never fed the groupers anything before.

Groupers have a nuclear hunting behaviour with other creatures such as moray eels, whereas they hunt together. The groupers use the dive masters as hunting partners as they would point out the lionfish to hunt. Groupers are quick to learn and often mimic the behaviours of other groupers. However despite the fact that groupers are eating lionfish pointed out by divers, it is still unknown as to whether they are actually taking the poisonous lionfish of their own accord without the divers present.

We are currently in contact with this dive group in the Cayman Islands and are in the process of obtaining video footage of the groupers eating live lionfsh, and finding our more specific details on this subject. For further information on the continued development of these groupers eating lionfish, we are working on a 'Groupers' page and will share this infomation with you as it becomes more readily available to us"

http://www.lionfishhunters.org/Management.html

That is for all of you who don't want to search for the spot about grouper eating them. It doesn't seem wide spread yet, but definitely sounds like they are trying.

Has anyone here eaten lion fish?

Amazing pictures by the way, was that a chartered trip then? good stuff!

I fished with capt Paul D'Antonio,
Keywestfishing.com
Great giude

Mo

They are excellent on the plate. We collected them on a dive boat over several days until we had enough for a meal. They served them as fish fingers and I would like to have more.

is it a matter of cleaning them right, or is the poison only in a certain spot? Seems also like not a lot of meant, I guess that's why you collected over several days.