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.

Update

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.

Update 2

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.

posted by admin on Sep 2

Hurricane Gustav just went past, and there are possibly 2 other hurricanes on their way into my area. Although it doesn’t look like we will be hit directly with any of the current storms, we have been having winds up to 40 knots. I really don’t think there will be much spear fishing for awhile, you probably can’t see your hand in front of your face on the reef. Starting to get a bit stir crazy, so I am going to take a break from working and mess with this blog a bit. Read the rest of this entry »

posted by admin on Aug 27

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.

posted by admin on Aug 27

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.

posted by admin on Aug 27

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.

posted by admin on Aug 27

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 .