Casper's Hunt for a 50lb Grouper

This fish was one of my favorites I've landed on a polespear to date and it had a cool story to go a long with it. We had been diving all day and I was in search of landing a massive black grouper. We had already shot a few nice hogfish, some other groupers including small blacks and some big Nassaus, but I was really still in search of getting that one over 50 pounds.

I jumped in on one final spot with my Headhunter Nomad Polespear and was greeted by a very large Nassau grouper. As I began my descent to shoot this fish, I could hear my brother constantly grunting at me, so I decided to take my focus away from the Nassau and look around to see what he was making a fuss about. As I turned, I saw a grouper, that in my mind, I knew was well over the 50 pound mark. I made my way back up to the surface and watched this fish slowly go into this little crack.

From this point forward, I don’t know why, but my brother didn’t make a dive on the fish and seemed to want me to do it- which I wasn’t complaining about at all. I did a quick breathe up and made my dive to try to locate this fish. As I got about 30 feet down, diving in 60 feet of water, I noticed the fish’s tail hanging out of the same crack he went into.

At this point I knew that the crack he was in must not be very big and that I wasn’t going to have much room to work with this fish. As I got down to the tail of the fish I took a quick look to see how I should take my shot, and I opted for a tail shot to be able to drag him out of this tighter area straight. I took my shot and the fish went wild, kicking up dust everywhere. In order to not let him get too far into the crack, I shoved my injector rod up on the outside of the crack to not allow the fish any more movement forward

I did a couple dives with the help of two friends working this fish out. We were having to deal with about seven reef sharks circling the little area the whole time. We were making progress but as I was coming up, I looked down and saw the fish come out and make its way to another hole. I quickly took one of my friend’s polespears and darted down to make sure no sharks would get to the fish. I saw how big the new hole he was in was, and decided to finally put a good shot into the fish’s head

From here on out it was quite simple, all I had to do was drag one polespear through this massive hole and pull the fish out- which is exactly how it went. I got the fish up to the boat without having a shark touch it and even though we didn’t get a weight, it’s pretty clear to tell from the photo how massive this fish was.