Hardcore fishing team makes quite a discovery

Jon Chapman -

Have you ever been curious as to what lies below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico?

When moving from spot to spot, how many secrets could possibly be passed below, resting at the bottom of the Gulf floor?

I wonder this every time I run west from Bean Point or Longboat Pass, with the GPS set on one of my go-to spots I’ve fished countless times. I know what those spots hold -- but there is a seemingly infinite amount of secrets that have yet to be discovered.

Now, most of the time I find myself fishing inside 30 miles. There are few secrets, and nearly every wreck, reef and large piece of structure will have boats on it when the weather allows. Finding a new fishing spot that no one knows about seems harder than finding a needle in a haystack.

So what happens when you go, say, 120 miles or more into the Gulf of Mexico, where fishing boats rarely venture. For anglers Justin Hey, Danny Pool, Brian Beukema and Jay Travis, who comprise the hardcore fishing team Seaveeche, a needle in a haystack was found resting in 412 feet of water -- but the anglers were unaware of the extent of their discovery.

“We found a spot while trolling a few years ago,” Hey said. “We had two numbers in the general area that we fished. On one trip we were trolling when our depth finder alarmed us of something very large on the bottom. We knew it was a wreck of some type. We had fished it three or four times, catching amberjack to 90 pounds, Warsaw and gag grouper, and large red snapper.”

Keeping such a discovery a secret is hard to do, especially with undiscovered shipwrecks still haunting the Gulf of Mexico. So, when curiosity built within the anglers about the possibilities of their discovery, they made contact with Michael C. Barnette, an accomplished diver, author and photographer. Barnette has helped in identifying more than 30 unknown shipwrecks in the past 20 years.

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