Trophy Sheephead

Written by Cameron Robinson and Eric Keener
May 16, 2020

On May 16th I went spear fishing with a couple of buddies down in Monterey. It was a new spot to me, but we met up with a friend who had dived there a couple of times. My initial impression of the spot was positive. The entry wasn’t the cleanest but as I was paddling out, there was a lot of life and good structure in the shallows. About 50 yards out, I passed Nic Ta, who was hauling in a 14 pound CA sheephead that Rebekah Phillips had shot just a few minutes prior. It was the first sheephead I’ve seen in Northern California so I stopped to take a look and ask him where she found it. I swam out with my friends Tom and Eric. We took a couple drops and eventually made our way out to a depth of about 40 feet. We started to hunt not too far from a good school of blue rock fish next to a kelp bed.

It was probably my third drop down when I found a large rock shelf and went in to explore the crevice. When I put my light into the hole I saw a good sized Cabezon tail.  I went to raise my gun and spooked it deeper into the hole. I decided to go back up to the surface, breathe back up, and go back to the same hole. This time I dove down at a different angle on the rock and used my negative buoyancy to lay fully prone on the rock structure to get a better approach into the narrow crack. On this dive there was no Cabezon. When I looked back into the hole I saw a streak of red and a white jaw. There was also a red eye looking back at me. I identified the fish as a clearly legal sheephead. At this point I knew that this fish was large; however, I didn’t realize quite how big it actually was. Sheephead are really curious and the fish didn’t move as I adjusted my aim to the fish’s vitals. I took a shot through the hole and got him almost directly in the eye. What followed was a flash of sand and red flailing around in the hole. I dropped my gun and tried to get my arm into the hole deep enough to secure the spear and pull the goat out. I was careful not to get my hand in the fishes mouth because of its large teeth. Once I got a good grip on both the fish’s gill and spear I tried to pull him out of the hole. There was no progress when I tried to pull and that’s when I realized how massive this fish was—it seemed to be twice as big as the hole I was trying to pull it out of. This is also when I realized how tough it was going to be to retrieve the monster. At this point I was under water for roughly a minute and decided to come back up. I left my gun floating, float line attached and surfaced. Knowing the battle that was about to ensue, I asked Eric to put a second shot in the fish to ensure it did not wiggle off my spear. Eric swam down, placed a second shot on the fish and confirmed that the sheephead was massive and that it was lodged in the cave.

We hadn’t fully sized up the hole yet either. All we could see was a deep crack with the fish laying behind the crack. There were other large rocks surrounding the crack which made it so you had to stick your whole arm down to even touch the fish. I cannot exaggerate how tight of a working area we were in. We didn’t know it at the time, but the hole was part of a big cave system under the rock. What else we didn’t know, was how much of a struggle this was about to turn into. The fish obviously didn’t enter the cave through this crack and most likely entered in another part in the cave system that was entirely inaccessible to us. On the other side of the massive rock which created the roof of the cave was a good sized hole where the fish most likely entered from; however, this access point was maybe four or five feet away from the fish itself and was totally out of reach to us. You could barely stick your head in and at one point Eric said he could see the end of the fishes tail but it was totally incapable of grabbing it with any of our resources through the back entry.

The Long Struggle: Lets rewind back to after Eric took the second shot on the fish. We debriefed on the surface multiple times and talked about how we were going to get the fish out. Initially we tried the obvious which was to try and yank it out of the hole we shot it from. Between the two of us we took over 50 drops in the next two hours trying to assess the cave, the fish, the shots, the angles, the spears, the urchins, the rocks and how to get the fish out. We tried to push the spears through the fish in the hopes that it might make the fish more maneuverable to wiggle it out. This didn’t work because the cave was too tight and we couldn't get our spears through the fish. We tried pushing the fish as far back from the hole as we could so that maybe we could make better access on the other side of the rock. Still no luck. We considered how to use Eric’s back-up gun or my pole spear to help us get the fish out. The thought was that maybe we could take a third gun and shoot the fish from the back side and pull it out, which was impossible given the structure of the hole. We entertained ridiculous notions of trying to dead lift the 600-pound rock that created the roof while holding our breath 40 feet underwater. Probably not the best idea. We even talked about going to get a car jack (which might have been a good thing in hindsight).

We were exhausted. Eric had been in the water for an hour and a half before we even got there, it was close to noon, we were thirsty and hungry, and our energy levels were low. Our last resort was to just grab the fish by its gill (you could only get one hand on a gill due to the tightness of the hole) and pull as hard as we could. We tried this over and over. At this point we were diving on the fish for about two hours and we were getting ridiculously fatigued and our bottom times were suffering because of it. At this point we had exhausted all ideas and the fish had made no progress out of the hole. It was in the same spot we shot him in. After two hours we knew that we would not be able to get this fish out by freediving. Neither of us are a fan of scuba diving to spear fish; however, at this point if we wanted to get the fish out we would need more time on the bottom. We talked about getting tanks for the last 30 minutes of us diving on the fish, but it was such a long surface swim and that made us hesitant given our states of energy.

Throughout the struggle, Eric repeatedly chanted, “We’re not leaving this fish, it’s amazing and we can’t come back empty handed.” So finally, we detached our guns from the spears, attached the floatline to the shooting line of the spears, connected Eric’s dive board to the float line and marked  the fish so we could easily get back to it. We swam about 300 yards back into shore to regroup. We knew Scuba would be the only way. Getting back to shore was such a relief. We guzzled water, and rested on the rocks. Eric called in a favor to his friend to drop off scuba gear and within 15 minutes we were gearing up to go back out and get the sheep head, this time with Eric on a scuba tank.

We brought out a pole spear and some other tools we thought could be helpful. The fish was where we left it and before Eric decended on scuba, we discussed hand signals for if he wanted me to push, pull or move the fish. Eric gave the OK sign and started to head down. I breathed up at the top and periodically dove down to see Eric’s progress and see if there was anything that I could do to help. It seemed like it was taking him a long time as I watched him move from the front of the cave, then to the back, then to the front, then back again - each time pulling, pushing, prodding, yanking and assessing. At one point, I saw him place his knees on each side of the front of the cave, grabbing the fish by the gills and pulling as hard as he can. Approaching the 15-minute mark, I began to lose hope that we were not going to get this fish. I glanced back at the shore and began preparing myself for the long, foggy swim back in, without the trophy sheephead. The current had pushed me a few feet off the spot so when I looked back down to find Eric, I saw something I was not ready for. My eyes focused on something large, red, black and white. There was Eric, audibly hooping and hollering under water through his regulator. I saw the red and black scales floating around him as he held it up to show me from 3 stories below.

To put this into perspective it took Eric—an experienced diver and spearfisherman—21 minutes on scuba to finally pull the fish out of the hole. After his decompression stop, he finally made it to the surface and regaled me with just how difficult it was to get the fish out. After giving up on all other options of pulling it out of the back of the cave, he resorted to yanking on the spears until they came out of the fish. He set them aside in the pile of guns, pole spears and other tools he took down to try and use to free the fish. Finally, he pushed the fish deep back in the hole, turned it so that the face was directly pointing at him, put his thumbs in the mouth toward the lower jaw, and his fingers inside the gills. Then, with all the strength he could muster, he pulled as hard as he could while wiggling back and forth. He tried this three times until finally—FINALLY—he felt the shoulders of the fish give and start to slide out. He retold the immense wave of relief as the fish finally made its way out…

I had mentally let go of this fish probably five separate times during the duration of the retrieval because of how hopeless it was starting to look. Even with Eric on Scuba he told me later that he almost had to abandon the fish there. For the first time, I could see the size of the monster. By first impression it looked to be well over 20 pounds with a ridiculously thick body. We freed the goat and couldn’t stop celebrating at the top when Eric finally surfaced. Even people back at shore, 300 yards away said they could hear our celebration. We measured the fish at 34 inches long and out of the water it was 24 pounds.

This was by far the hardest fish retrieval I’ve ever been a part of and there is no way I would have been able to do it without Eric. I learned a lot from the retrieval. This was a two man mission and showed me how essential it is to have another set of eyes during problems like this in the water. The pay off was incredible almost three hours later.

Knowing this was a trophy, I wanted to treat it as such. Eric encouraged me to make a sculpture out of the jaw bones (How To Guide Here) and mentioned some methods for how to age and eat the fish. I made ceviche (recipe here), prosciutto wrapped fillets (recipe here).

NOTE FROM ERIC:

This is exactly why Fin + Forage is what it is. A community of people that love adventure, working together and food. Cameron is a stud freediver and there is no way this story would exist without him. It’s definitely not about the size of the fish that makes this a wonderful memory, it’s about the effort we put in and the reward of excellent food and a rad trophy. Great job, Cameron.