Posted on 09/11/2006 10:23:04 PM PDT by stainlessbanner
MIAMI (Reuters) - A Florida diver shot a large grouper with a spear gun then apparently drowned when the fish sped into a hole, entangling the man in the line attached to the spear, investigators said on Monday.
The 42-year-old man, whose name was withheld, was free-diving in about 25 feet (7.5 metres) of water off the lower Florida Keys on Saturday and speared a Goliath Grouper, Monroe County Sheriff's Detective Mark Coleman said.
"It looks like the fish wrapped the line attached to the spear around the victim's wrist. The fish then went into a hole in a coral rock, effectively pinning the man to the bottom of the ocean," Coleman said in a news release.
Police divers found the speared fish tightly wedged into the hole, with the man's body still tangled in the line, a sheriff's spokeswoman said.
Goliath Grouper are the largest members of the sea bass family and can weigh hundreds of pounds.
Frickin wierd how these things seem to happen in clusters....
Isn't this the sort of situation for whiich diving knives are made?
Poor fellow. Not too many can say they went out in that fashion.
Which one's "Goliath"?
"Isn't this the sort of situation for whiich diving knives are made?"
This kind of stuff always baffles us knife guys.
by free diving, I assume they mean snorkeling instead of scuba diving, which would have given him only a few secons time to do whatever he needed to do to get loose.
Poor guy. Such deaths should be reserved for characters from "The Far Side."
Some days the fish wins.
I wouldn't spear that sucker with a 50ft pole.
back in the 60s I knew a guy that got a black sea bass freediving that was 504# at Catalina. He speared it right through the spine and the fish stopped dead in his tracks.
Couple years back the common name was changed from "Jewfish" to "Goliath Grouper" out of political correctness (I'm uncertain of the origin of the earlier term.)
I'm pretty sure all harvest of them is banned...so what the guy did was illegal I suspect.
I never go diving without a knife strapped to my leg. Too much fishing line, rope, etc, underwater to get tangled up in. Of course, I don't think I'd ever try to spear something that big in the first place!
Harvest might depend on state. In Florida I believe they must be over 20".
Nope, just checked, all harvest of Goliath Grouper of any size is banned in Florida. Got really overfished for a while and they don't reproduce that great, but I understand they've really come back well and there's quite a lot of catch and release fishing for them, I have an in-law that caught one once.
That the guy who died speared one is an indication he probably wasn't the brightest guy on the block in several ways.
Sounds fair to me.
"Goliath Grouper are the largest members of the sea bass family and can weigh hundreds of pounds." Not knowing what they are, it is as tonishing to come over a reef and come face to face with one of the big ones. I spit my mouthpiece out when it happen the first time.
Thing is, once these fish get this big they are hardly fit to eat anyway. I have no problem with hunting or fishing, have done it all my life, but just going out set on killing something is a thing normal folks should outgrow early. The big Grouper usually won't even make an effort to escape, you can just swim up and stick them, but your balls won't get bigger because you did.
This has diddlysquat to do with Steve Irwin's death, no "cluster" here!
I have done a lot of killing in my life, because it needed doing, but, never in my adult life, just because I could. It isn't hard to kill, but it is a permanent thing, best taken seriously.
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