Invasive Fish Catch & Cook - Spear Fishing Lionfish with my Kids

Luke here with the Outdoor Boys YouTube channel. I'm here with my whole family and my sister here and we are in Isla Morada in the Florida Keys and we are going fishing for invasive lying fish. We're going to go spearfishing in fact and we're going to catch, clean, and cook up what we catch. Here we are with Forever Young Spearfishing. I've got Captain Jeff and I've got Tony Young here and they are going to take us out snorkeling and looking for lionfish. Hey Thomas you excited? I haven't been spearfishing underwater since I was a teenager and I absolutely love it so I'm excited to get a chance to do this again and I've always wanted to spear lionfish so this is this is going to be cool. Oh my goodness look how clear that is. Oh look I can see fish right there. We thought this would be the perfect spot for you guys to hop in get your gills wet. I'm about to jack up the light exposure on my lens. Time to get the lady views. And this is how you lose 1.5 million subscribers. Right now because we're in a special protected area only certain permit holders can spear invasive lionfish and that includes Mr. Young so if we see any lionfish here he's going to spear them but after we go and snorkel around here let the kids have some fun we're going to go try some other places where I can get a chance to spear some lionfish. Yeah this is how we this is how we catch the fish we stick your diaper down in the reef and all the fish float to the top. All right guys you ready? You guys see a cleaner fish cleaning a barracuda? Like six of them. Whoa. Did you have fun? Yeah I swam with them I literally got close to them and they didn't attack me they were like hello. Hey Jacob did you have fun? Yeah. Say click subscribe. Nathan do you need to pee? Yeah. You know how you pee in a wetsuit? How? You just pee your pants. You ain't cool. You pee your pants. You guys need to go pee? Come on. Everyone who's peed their pants raise your hand. I think it's time to go look for some lionfish. I want to go poke a fish. Tommy you like the feedback? So we had fun doing a little bit of snorkeling now it's time to knuckle down and do some serious lionfish hunting. Now lionfish are an invasive species from the Indian Pacific Ocean area so they're all over from southern Japan to Australia to the Philippines. They've been let loose here and they're just all over. They're an invasive species here in the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico area and over in the Mediterranean. So we're going to hunt the lionfish using these three-prong Hawaiian spears and they're really simple easy to use so even I might be able to spear one. Awesome. Are you sad to be leaving this spot? Yeah. We'll go to a new spot okay? That's so cool. Well I missed my first lionfish. All right we're just gonna go try another spot go try to poke another fish. Oh my goodness. Okay I dove down there and I nicked him and he took off to a separate coral head and we're gonna see if we can't find him over there. Luckily these things don't run very far. I got him again. I shot him again. Now we're gonna try to get him. Okay I shot him a third time. We got him on the prong but you need to really work him out of that hole and it's just too hard. So Mr. Young is gonna go down there try to get him out of that hole. He's got about six bullet holes in him. His spine's right there. Oh yeah yeah yeah. Nice shot. Oh what a great trip. Even though we only got two fish I'm super jazzed because normally they do this with scuba gear. It's a real challenge to get this snorkeling but we did it. Oh I appreciate that. Thank you so much. That was such a great time. What was your favorite thing you saw? Fish. I gotta tell you the bottom looks really far away when you're up there at 30 feet of water. You look down you're like oh wow. You've never seen a cayenne before. We caught the lionfish now we're going to show you how to clean them. These are a venomous fish. If you get stung by their venomous spines it hurts like a bee on steroids from what I hear. It doesn't feel good. So not there yeah so there's no spines here. No spines there. Do you have one you can see right there? They've got oh I see they got right like a catfish right there. And then a couple on the anal fin. Okay. And then everything up on their dorsal. All the dorsal fin. When you get stuck and that flesh gets pulled back the grooves are exposed and the venom is able to leave the spine. So the longer the spine and the farther it goes in the more venom can get into your system. You ever been spined? I have been stuck a couple times. How bad was it? For me it's usually not too bad. I might have built up a tolerance over time but for most people you know if you get in your finger the whole hand will swell up about twice the size. Look there's a manatee. Oh hey manatee. That's our buddy Steve. Hi Steve. He now eats lionfish carcasses. It's a flesh-eating manatee. Oh that's so hardcore Steve. Oh and there's a nurse shark right there. So they all know our boat. They're ready for their dinner. To fillet these what I do is I just pull their pectoral fin back. Make a cut there and then I'll hold the entire body of the fish using just the tip of the knife going very slow and careful. So you can see that whole time I'm just basically keeping my hand in the same position. Yeah. Try not to move very much. Oh that looks gorgeous. That's the prize meat. That's why lionfish is so delicious. And the skin's not too bad. Looks like you can probably just fry it up and eat the skin. You can yeah. Hold on. Look at that. Oh there he goes. There he goes. Oh he just ate. He just ate it. That manatee just ate fish flesh. So he'll eat its spines and all? Like um you know they kind of it just seems like they kind of chew on. I don't know if they're getting like the moisture out of the fish or what they are but they seem to play with it for quite a while. Nice and tight. Okay. All right now drop it right for right in front of Steve. Bless eating manatee. Oh he's just totally sucking that down. Steve you're my favorite manatee ever man. Thank you very much. You're welcome. You're welcome. Thank you. It ate a ton of meat but there you go. Some little teeny tiny lionfish fillets and we're gonna take these home and cook them up. Is this a surf? Yeah. You like that? It says Forever Young Spearfishing. Yeah. We had such a blast. This is one of the best trips I've had in a long time. I really appreciate it. Yeah it was an amazing trip. Thank you so much for coming out with us. Listen if you guys are in the Florida Keys and you want to do spearfishing, snorkeling, scuba diving, rod and reel fishing, whatever. Check out Forever Young Charters with Tony and Jeff here and they will hook you up. Guys I'm going to put links down the video description below their website and social media accounts so check that out. Thank you. Thank you. Great having you guys on board. Oh we had such a great time. After swimming in the salt water and all the hot sun, ice cream sounded like the perfect thing. Becca got key lime sorbet and then Melanie got a slice of key lime pie dipped in chocolate frozen on a stick. That hit the spot. Way down to go come on. Hey good morning guys. I am walking gently. I am walking gingerly but I am walking. I'm gonna get some stuff to cook up that lion fish and I'm gonna get a little extra seafood to go with it and we are gonna have a wonderful seafood lunch today. All right we got Island Seafood Market near Pine Island here and it really backs up right to the marina. Oh good fresh seafood. Hey Becca I've got something for you. Who's got two thumbs and loves key lime pie? This lady. All right while the kids are doing online school I'm gonna cook up some lion fish and some jumbo shrimp and some lane snapper and conch fritters. It's we're gonna have a great lunch from here. I'm gonna show you some cool recipes. We got some naked mango juice. This stuff's nice and thick and we're gonna reduce it in a pot till it becomes a wicked awesome mango sauce. All right we'll just cool that sauce down. It'll be ready in just a few minutes. There's the lane snapper, coconut crusted lion fish and some prawns. Looking nice good. It's a lion fish here, mango sauce here and we're just gonna go and drizzle that on the coconut crusted fish and shrimp. With the lane snapper I fried it on the bottom then finished it off in the oven and it gives it that nice crunchy texture on the bottom without making it too heavy and greasy if you fry the whole thing. It's good. They're really good. Oh the conch fritters with mango chutney is good. Would you rather try some of the lion fish? Melanie what do you think of the lion fish? Oh it's really good. It's all good. Thanks for watching guys. We hope you enjoyed this video as much as we enjoyed filming it. If you want to see more videos from the Outdoor Boys YouTube channel don't forget to click subscribe. We put out new videos every Saturday morning and don't forget to check out our many playlists whether it's camping, travel and adventure or catch and cook videos. Thanks for watching. If you like this video don't forget to check out the Outdoor Boys YouTube channel where we have hundreds of videos just like this and don't forget to click subscribe so you can see other great videos every Saturday morning. Hit that bell button and you'll get notifications. Thanks for watching. Becca's living her best life here. Really good.