posted by admin on Sep 29
Catherine , Cal and I went out spearfishing and lobstering yesterday. The wind has finally died down after a week or so. We hoped to go out ot some deeper rocks and chum up some fish, but when we got to drop off the vis was not looking so good. It was about 20 feet tops around sand key, and the bar might have been a bit better but not much. So we headed back in to look for lobsters and try some shallower spots.
posted by admin on Sep 20
Anyone know about Barbados holidays. ? Catherine and I have planning a trip to the Caribbean to check out other islands for fun and to look for perspective places to live. Key West is nice and all but its pretty expensive. For the time being most of our work is done online so it would totally be possible to live in another country and keep our jobs. We were thinking about going to Belize but I was reading on one of the spear fishing forums that Barbados Holiday is worth checking out. Apparently the fishing is good there and spear fishing is allowed. There are bunch of charter boats advertising online. There is also 20 miles of barrier reef ranging for 40 to 60 feet of depth, which is perfect for free diving. A Holiday Barbados. seems like it would be pretty good for both fishing and diving, there are bunch of scuba diving sites also advertising scuba trips to wrecks their off the coast. It also looks like just glancing at one website that you are allowed to harvest fish there on scuba which is different then most of Caribbean where spearing on scuba is banned. But definitely check out those regulations before planning a trip there.
posted by admin on Sep 17
I went out spear fishing with Brad and Cal yesterday, it was flat calm and visibility ranged from 65 to about 20 feet, depending on the tide and proximity to the drop off. Catherine had to work so no underwater pics.
posted by admin on Sep 8
Went out on spearfishing Saturday with Brad, Andrew and Catherine, weather was great, the water visibility on the reef was total crap maybe 10 feet of vis. We headed offshore and there was green water all the way out to 400 fsw. We found a rip there a weed line, jumped in but didn’t see anything. We went out a bit further and it got a bit more blue and hit another weed line found tons of bait fish but the only fish bigger then the bait was a remora. We found a piece of drift wood with baby trigger fish schooling under it .
posted by admin on Sep 7
Spearfishing Pictures
posted by admin on Sep 2
Floats lines are great, don’t let anyone tell you different. I learned about float lines by reading about them on spearboard. No one I met in real life used a float line, so it I had to learn about it on my own.
Anyways something I noticed pretty early on is that if you shoot a fish and don’t kill it, it tries to run away pulling your spear with it. This isn’t much of problem when you are in shallow water and the fish are not that big. It becomes a problem when you farther underwater and the fish is larger, because the fish will take your gun.
To offset this you can use a reel or a float line. I haven’t used a reel so I can’t really comment on them that much, except that they look cool and it’s probably a lot nicer than swimming around with 80 feet of rope and float pulling behind you. Yes it does it seemed kind of crazy to me to tie a whole bunch of rope to my spear gun and then swim around with the rope and a float dragging behind me. But it does work and it’s pretty standard for many of the better spearos to use some sort of float line set up.
Both the Reel and the float line allow you to control bigger fish without losing your gun, and both will allow you to give more play to fish that might rip off if you put full pressure on them. In most cases whenever I shoot a mackerel I let go of my gun and let it swim, I hold the float line in my hand and let it slide through my fingers as necessary as the fish runs.
A plus for the float line is that other people can see right where you are. This is very helpful when its is choppy because it easy to lose track of diver in these conditions.
Being one of the cheapest people on earth, when I reached the point where I knew I needed either a float or a reel, I went with float line. Reels cost a few bucks and I was able to make a ghetto float line for like $20. My first float line was a bunch of poly rope and a used boat bumper. Although it worked for my purposes initially I quickly upgraded.
The poly rope works ok, but I found I prefer the float line Florida Free divers sells. The boat bumper compresses as it gets pulled underwater, once I saw a jack, not even a big one like 15#, pull the bumper under water and start swimming away with an expensive spear gun in tow, I knew the boat bumper had to go.
So now I am using spongex buoys floats, I got them at Cudjoe Sales, a commercial fishing store. They will ship stuff if you want to buy a set of these floats, they are around $8-$12 each. Here is there website http://www.cudjoesales.com/. These won’t compress and seem to be perfect for not huge fish, which is mostly what I shoot.
There are a bunch of manufacturers that make way more tech and way more buoyant float systems, of course they cost a lot more.
Last time I was out , I saw some large pelagic fish and I have been kind of thinking that getting a more substantial float might be a good idea. I know it would be overkill 99% of the time but that 1% is what will count.
Read about these places online that sell foam filled float lines
http://www.memphisnet.net/product/3799/rope_braided_foamcore
http://www.nylonnet.com/merchandise/?top_cat=96&cat_nav=120&sub_cat=135&cat=135
They are used for making nets, and they sell them for cheap like $30-$40 for 300 feet. Thats like $10 a float line. I think they would be totally effective unless you are shooting something like large tuna.
I actually ordered 300′ of polyfoam line from this website http://www.wallacecordage.com/polyfoam_floatline.htm it was shipped quickly and with shipping it was a little over $30. I comes in black only though. It shipped really fast and looks good but I haven’t tested it in the water so I guess we will see.
