Non-native lionfish are a threat to Florida’s marine environment, so I recently went diving in the Keys to kill a few.
Let’s say you’re out in a swamp shooting photos or video of wading birds and your camera battery dies; while you’re changing batteries, a Florida panther bounds in, grabs a great blue heron and is gone before you can utter your favorite curse word.
That’s missing The Shot.
So, here’s what happened July 18 while I was diving in the Keys with Jon Hazelbaker of Fort Myers Beach and his 13-year-old granddaughter Annie.
My goal was to kill lionfish with my pole spear and get video with a head-mounted GoPro (lionfish are non-natives that eat huge quantities of juvenile native fish, so killing them is a good thing; they also taste great).
On the fifth and final dive of the day, after I’d killed and videoed four lionfish, I shot the biggest lionfish I’d ever seen, a 16-incher — maximum size for lionfish is about 18 inches.
Unfortunately, I didn’t stone it (that’s when the spear instantly kills the fish), and it was thrashing like crazy, so I couldn’t get it into my lionfish containment unit (or LCU, a PVC cylinder into which you put speared lionfish so you won’t be stung by any of its 18 venomous spines).
That’s when Jon swam over to help out by killing the fish with a dive knife.During the excitement, I was thinking, “This is going to make great video: Big lionfish fighting to stay out of the LCU, Jon grabbing and stabbing it, fish blood in the water. Cool.”
Back on shore, I eagerly downloaded the individual video clips and realized that, before spearing the 16-inch lionfish, I’d somehow set my GoPro on photo mode.
Instead of exciting video of an intense underwater struggle between men and fish, I had a fuzzy still image of the reef.
I missed The Shot.
On a brighter note, I did get clear head-mounted video of me carefully aiming at a lionfish and completely missing it.