‘Put a shaft in him.’ Georgia man wins Gulf of Mexico spearfishing tournament with son

Billed as the “world’s largest spearfishing tournament”, the St. Pete Open has been drawing anglers from around the world since 1965.

The allure of competing against the best has enticed Georgian Brett Booth to come down for a day diving deep into the Gulf of Mexico for nearly 10 years.

“When we do the St. Pete Open, we usually run out of St. Pete and head toward the Elbow area,” said Booth, who often dives out of the Florida Panhandle. “We’ve probably got 15,000 spots from different people over the years but it’s the stumble-over spots, the in-between ones we find, that have the tournament fish on them. Basically, all I look for is a little bait ball for black grouper.”

Booth and Team Killer B’s left around 3 a.m. for the Saturday tournament and stopped first in 160 feet at a spring. On the first drop, they wanted to get amberjack. Josh Reynolds came up with a 68.75-pound amberjack, while Matt Haight came up with a 14.7-pound hogfish.

“The sun was getting up pretty good and we made a run to 180 feet and started looking for bait balls. We checked about 10 spots just running them over, reading the bottom machine before we chose one to dive. We ran over a stumble spot about 2 miles away from anything I had and saw two big marks on it.”

Booth and his son Hudson readied up for their turn to dive.

“I told him, ‘If you see a black (grouper), you know what to do, put a shaft in him.’ On the way down, the visibility was only about 20 feet and he was just below me. We ended up about 20 feet from the cave, and he saw a fish he thought was a goliath grouper,” Booth recalled.

“I saw it was a black and had a better shot. I put a shaft in him, reloaded and then put another shaft in him. There was about an 8-inch wide opening in a 10-foot horseshoe that opened up he was trying to get into. I got him, wrestled out before he was able to squeeze in and I put a knife in his head.”

The fight, which took about 3 minutes, was all the bottom time the father and son had. When they surfaced a little while later the team saw just how large the black grouper was.

“I thought it might be around 100 pounds!” Booth said. “We have to gut them for the tournament so that took about 10 pounds out of it.”

With the large grouper on ice, the teammates rotated and Reynolds prepared himself for another dive 5 miles away.

“He was down probably 5 or 6 minutes, and we see his gun come up, and it doesn’t have any of the three shafts,” said Booth. “We looked at each other and said, ‘If he ain’t got no shafts, something happened.’ After his safety stop, he came up with a 17-pound hogfish and said there was a black grouper down there with three shafts in it.”

Haight and Booth went on a recovery dive to secure the black grouper, but what they found was heartbreaking.

“There was a big dust cloud and three sandbar sharks tore it up. The head was probably 50 pounds and we grabbed his three shafts off the bottom. The sharks this year are worse than I’ve ever seen them before, even up in the Panhandle.”

Heading to the scale with one of the two big grouper later that evening, Booth’s would stretch the scale to 87.25 pounds, bringing home first place. Second in the black grouper division would go to Peter Hamburg at 82.7 pounds.

In the cumulative division, Albert Sloan would bring home first place, helped with his first-place snapper with a mutton at 15.15 pounds. The heaviest scamp grouper went to Chad Campbell at 18.7 pounds, while Killer B’s teammate Matthew Haight weighed in a 16.5-pound scamp for second place that he shot on the last dive of the day.

Reynolds’ 68.75-pound amberjack took second in that division, while Josh McCann took first with an 89.5-pounder. Reynolds’ 17-pound hogfish would take second as well to Chad Herreld with a 17.3-pound hogfish.

Female overall went to Stephenie Sloan, who also won the junior division.

The freediver and triggerfish/sheepshead division went to Ritchie Zacker.

In total, 180 participants weighed in.