Jewfish

Why Register

This is about YOU being able to get the special Package Deals SFDJ has negotiated with the best area Hotels..to enjoy the Best Dive Resort experience possible. possible.

Examples of the benefits of logging in:

1. Much lower prices when reserving hotel rooms for divers with SFDJ log-in ID
2. All perks we are currently offering will be immediately offered to you, such as:
- a. Any "special" boat or hotel deals
- b. Better fill discounts for air, Nitrox or trimix
- Shuttle Van availability which is most likely when we have a large number of SFDJ registered Hotel guests in a given week.
- d. High likelihood of getting you diving with other divers with exactly the same diving interest you have ****Should be the most important perk..see Specific Interest Dive Group article
- e. Planning tools and Groups Calendar system to help you find the best times to find what you want on a Palm Beach Dive Trip
3. If you are a Scubaboard member, we can alert you when there are several other Scubaboard members in town diving during your trip here
5. Opportunity to be notified and involved in Free Gear Demos, free DIR Dive Experience and Training demos
6. Help us create a larger lobby for Palm Beach Diving which we can leverage with County Tourism to push for better State and local protections for the Palm Beach Reef system.

Beyond being an Underwater Adventure Magazine, SFDJ is the collaborative infrastructure of the best Dive Operators and best Hotels for diving in Palm Beach county Florida..SFDJ is the system the hotels and boats are using to connect with traveling and local divers, and if you don't login each time you visit, the boats and hotels won't be able to offer you the best deals and ideas we have come up with.

we have a recipe for a big problem. When these big fish are all over a favorite fishing spot, you have a blame game going on, where anything bad about each day's fishing , is going to get blamed on the Jewfish.

What the fisherman don't see, is what happens after they have ended their big fishing outings, as fall brings the big waves, worse weather, and less ideal fishing conditions. The Goliath Groupers have ended their spawning aggregation behaviors, and they are mostly absent on the hot fishing holes. Without the spawning aggregation, a diver may see only a couple of Jewfish, whereas it could have been 20 or 30 during the mating period. We do not want legislation enacted, based on a false sense of how many of these big fish are on favorite fishing sites during the summer spawning periods. This is an issue divers will need to be involved in, particularly in the fall and winter months when we can report on how few Jewfish are around the hot sites, after the aggregations are over. After the spawning, they return to being spread out over our entire coastline. Dispersed like this, they show themselves to be a species still in need of protection.

Perhaps even a bigger issue, would be the harm potential of allowing Goliath Grouper to be harvested during the periods of aggregation for spawning. This is what really decimated the Jewfish populations back in the 1970's and 1980's....Spearfishing Divers and Fisherman would stumble onto these spawing aggregations, and believe they had just hit the mother lode....they would be able to take huge numbers of these fish, and unknown to them at the time, in taking all these fish, they were catastrophically destroying the reproductive cycle in the Jewfish. In a very short period of time, Jewfish populations went from 10's of thousands on the reefs, to hundreds, then to a handful.. and then to none.

Today, off of Palm Beach, there are a half dozen or so known sites, where the Goliath Groupers will aggregate to spawn. Divers can visit these sites, and enjoy interactions that few ever imagined possible.

One of the first things you might want to do, is to dive on one of the Wrecks or dive sites which are known to be Goliath Grouper aggregation areas. In other words, gain some first hand knowledge of these