Catherine is back from NY and she and I went out yesterday afternoon. Vis on the main reef was kind of stirred up with maybe 20 feet of visibility. We just drove past it and hit the bar which was bathed in beautiful blue water with vis from around 60-80 feet.
On the edge of the main reef there was a weed line with tons of bait swirling around. We jumped in, the only fish other then the bait was small horse eye jacks, thousands of them. It was pretty cool swimming totally surrounded by small bait fish and then having the horse eye jacks charge in attacking them.
Catherine shot a little video, then her camera batteries died.
My girlfriend loves her Rabitech Hunter. It shoots good, loads good , trigger mech seemed good for awhile but we have have had issues with it. According to Rabitech the Hunter is susceptible to getting sand in it. Now we don’t shore dive so our exposure to sand is very limited but we still experience the “sand effect”. The shaft won’t lock into place when the gun is dry. Fortunately we tend to use spear guns wet so this isn’t that big of deal but its still in issue. It’s like magic, the shaft won’t lock into place, then I spray some water in the trigger and it locks in like butter.
The Rabitech Apex trigger and handle are in the same league with the Aimrite in my opinion and both are superior to the Rob Allen and Rabitech Hunter trigger, also in my opinion. Of course you pay a lot more for the Apex or the Aimrite, so it is relative. The handle on the Apex is sort of odd shaped and from what I hear isn’t supposed to be as comfortable if you have large hands. I don’t have large hands and it feels fine to me. There is a new style handle coming out for the Apex that supposedly addresses some of these issues. The trigger mech has plenty of room to rig the gun with heavy mono and the rail on the barrel is deep and holds the shaft in place well. This is kind of important to me because I am often loading the gun while trying to keep my eye on fleeing fish. I currently have the Rabitech Apex with an open muzzle. There is some debate on muzzles but I feel that the closed muzzle will always add a little drag to shaft. Although people disagree with that I don’t see how pulling the loop of mono through the hole can not add a little drag.
Everybody loves Rob Allen spear guns, all over the place you see awesome spearos with Rob Allen guns etc. I think they are probably the best deal for the money. Although for the price I think they are around the same price as the Rabitech Hunter guns, not sure which would be the better deal. Anyways my experience with the Rob Allens is they shoot great but I didn’t like the trigger mech that much. I had issues with the spear not locking into place sometimes. They also have no loading butt on the handle. I thought that a butt would make it more comfortable to load without a wetsuit, but it was the opposite. The Rob Allen was actually more comfortable without any padding. But the downside was when just wearing a lycra the gun would sometimes twist, or slide down my chest while loading.
Also the Rob Allen shafts rust in pretty short period of time, even if you rinse them a lot. They still work fine they just don’t look at nice. Probably a quick scrubbing with steel wool would sharpen it up.
The aimrite was my second gun after the biller, and it was a world of difference. It took a second to learn to chest load the gun and also loading and rigging the open muzzle took a bit getting used to, but once I was used to it, it was awesome. It could penetrate fish at such a longer distance then biller, I loved it. But then the handle broke, so I sent it back to Hawaii to be fixed. Aimrite has a <i>no questions asked</i> lifetime warrantee which is awesome.
Shortly later I was sent back a brand new aimrite venom: the new handle is awesome, solid and comfortable for loading. But two things were different: the rail on the barrel was shallower and instead of using a shark fin tabbed shaft where the line connects on top of the shaft outside of the trigger mech, this gun took a Rob Allen shaft. Now I think personally having the line connect on top of the shaft outside the trigger mech has a lot of advantages, such as it’s impossible to misload the gun with the line in the wrong place. When the line connects to the rear of the gun, it is very possible to accidentally get the line under the shaft while loading. I don’t care how awesome a spearo you are, in the heat of action it’s still possible to not pay attention and load the shaft with the line underneath.
Now the other issue I have with line attaching to the rear of the spear and entering the handle is this. If the line is too thick or not rigged “right” it will bounce the shaft out of the trigger when loading. I have seen this issue to varying degrees in the Rob Allen, Aimrite and Rabitech guns. When you first crimp a shooting line to a shaft, it wants to make a circle, given time the mono kinks into a more tear dropped shape. If this circle is too big, the shaft won’t enter the trigger properly, the shaft will slide down the rail and then bounce out of alignment. You can’t crimp the shot line in a tiny circle to avoid this because then it won’t fit into the the trigger at all.
I’ll try to post a photo of this.
Anyways the aimrite is an awesome gun, but I think it would be better with a shaft where the line doesn’t connect to the rear of the shaft. Or maybe really light shooting line would make the difference. Most others who use the gun don’t seem to have this problem, so it could just be user error.
I also had a problem with the Rob Allen finned shaft tearing up the rail on the venom. I had purchased the finned shaft assuming it was similar to the Riffe and original Aimrite shaft but it’s not. The line still connects to the rear of the shaft. In my case my bands weren’t totally even so the shaft would spin throwing the tiny fins into the rail on the stock. In time this chewed up the rail. It’s pretty much all my fault this happened and aimrite sent me a BRAND new super venom gun to replace it .
I got that AB Biller on suggestion of my neighbor as good a beginner spear gun. My girlfriend refers to the AB biller style spear gun as the AK-47 of spearguns, cheap , reliable, plentiful, powerful but not that accurate (at long ranges). I would agree to some degree with her. The Biller style guns are popular with scuba divers, because they are hip loaders, and are excellent for free shafting and they are “old school”. A lot of scuba divers are “old school’ too, and have probably been using these style guns for years with great success, so for them I think “if it aint broke, don’t fix it” would apply. This gun and trigger style has been around for many years, and its is rare to hear of them breaking or not functioning properly. Another good thing about these guns is they are cheap and it’s easy to change the size. All you need is a shaft and piece of wood to replace the stock, both of which are sold relatively inexpensively by Ray Odor.
For free diving though I don’t think these guns are ideal, for one the out of the box rigging for line shafting these guns involves a slide ring on the shaft. So essentially as the spear is fired it must slide through this ring which eats up its forward motion. This slide ring coupled with the heavy shaft billers shoot and the wood track the spear slides on make for not a lot of range. You can use a lot of rubber to offset this but its still inefficient. Try shooting a biller with one 5/8 band compared to a rail gun with one 5/8 band and there is world of difference. Of course on the upside with the heavy shaft if something is in range, it demolishes it.
It’s also not really cheap, I mean it is cheap compared to riffe or a custom wood gun, but you can actually get a euro or railgun for the same or less then a biller gun.
