Wind	Seas	Viz	Temp
5-10 WSW	1-2'	15'	88F

This past weekend the weather was still beautiful (beautifully HOT) as it has been for weeks now with mild winds and calm seas. But this week we were met with green, dirty water in almost every direction. In looking back at the weather, one thing had changed over the prior week that seems to support a theory I've been fostering for a while now about when and where we're able to find clean water depending on wind direction (hence the "cardinal"), the tide and surf temperature that I have dubbed my "Cardinal" rule. You see, we used to struggle with which direction to head in almost every time we would head out to the reef for spearfishing. All our blu...

Wind	Seas	Viz	Temp
5-10 SSE	1-3'	25-55'	85F

Many times I get asked the question, "How many fish have you lost to sharks?" and I always find it interesting how people that don't dive or spearfish frequently automatically associate what we do with sharks and attacks and how they typically believe that these are some kind of single threat. The truth is that although I have been buzzed by sharks and even surrrounded by sharks, historically, I have lost countless fish to barracuda while losses to sharks had always remained a distant second place (with none, thankfully). However, this past week sharks were surpassed by another denizen of the deep that many (not typically spearfishermen) overlook as a true threat to divers and spearfishermen with their brazen and sudden at...

Wind	Seas	Viz	Temp
ESE 5mph	1'	40'	85F

After almost another week of typical Florida Summer weather with afternoon thunder storms a possibilty on any given day, the wind started to lay down around Wednesday and the forecast really started to shape up for the weekend with calls for 5-8mph winds out of the SE and less than 1 foot seas. Of course my typical cynicism kept me thinking that at any minute (most likely on Friday afternoon) the forecast would flip from optimal to abysmal and we would be fighting wind and seas in our efforts to get back out on and under the water for some spearfishing action this weekend. Luckily for me, it was all in my head and the forecast stayed true as we a...

Wind	Seas	Viz	Temp
ESE 5mph	1-2'	40'	81F

 This past week started out looking very bleak. Storms rolled through the middle keys pretty much all day Monday and Tuesday with torrential downpours and winds in excess of 30mph. It was so bad in fact that people that had intended to stay the week decided to head for home and see how the week progressed from a distance. Between the wind that had picked up last weekend and the horrible weather at the opening of the week we pretty much thought that the clean water we had been able to enjoy for the past couple of weeks had come to an end.  But being ever the optimist (not me, someone else) checking the forecast on Wednesday, a...

Wind	Seas	Viz	Temp
NW 12-18mph	2-4'	25-45'	79F

This week was a "Boys Weekend" as all the girls and kids decided to stay home and we were hoping to get out for some offshore trolling for dolphin and maybe even get a chance to jump in and shoot a couple. So we woke up bright and early Saturday morning to see who else in the campground was ready and willing to head out into the deep blue yonder. Much to our surprise, we were the only mice stirring that morning so we decided to drop in the big boat and head out on our own. As I'm motoring to park the boat, our dolphin specialist neighbor Rob is up and about so I stop by to share our plans and we decide to head out on his boat instead (he's totally setup for this stuff). So I park, we load up our gear and off ...

Wind	Seas	Viz	Temp
NW 5-10mph	1-2'	20-25'	75F

The winds had been incessant all through April and as May came around there was no end in sight. Throughout the month, everyone was landlocked and cabin fever was setting in with the fishermen I knew (and liquor stores were running low). So as the forecast for Memorial Day kept looking so good, there were 3 factions: 1) those that didn't believe it (Memorial Day historically has bad weather), 2) those that would sell their Grandmothers to get out that weekend and 3) those that didn't believe, but had their Grandmothers on standby. As the weekend drew closer, more and more Grandmothers feared for their lives...

After trying and being disappointed by the Omer Zero Cubed mask last year, I picked up a couple of other masks (Mares Star and Sporasub Mystic) that fit fairly well and did not disappoint, but were not the perfect fit I've been looking for in a low volume freediving mask so I didn't feel overly compelled to write a spearview about them. In defense of these masks, they are both low volume masks that are relatively inexpensive so for the money they are great purchases. Of these two, the Sporasub Myst...

Wind	Seas	Viz	Temp
NW 5-10mph	1-2'	20-25'	75F

It seems like once you break the ice of making it out the first time, all your subsequent attempts at getting out on the water just seem to come a little easier. So with another good weather forecast on the horizon this week, I started the calls on Wednesday to see who might be interested in another outing this weekend. After connecting with the usual suspects, my brother in law and I decided to go out on Sunday as the forecast was just a little better for that day. We had a couple of extra hands on the boat this week as a friend of my brother in law's was joining us for his first exposure to free diving and spearfishing and my nephew Danny wa...