Wind Seas Viz Temp 5-15mph SSE 2-3 SE Swell 40-50' 86F The past couple of weekends were plagued with algea blooms and low viz thanks to the higher surf temps and a West wind that always seems to wreak havoc for us. But right around Wednesday of this...
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 bluewater fishing friends couldn't really understand why there was so much indifference (of course, why would...
and able to hang on to the rest of your gear). This past week we were fortunate to have some of the best diving and spearfishing weather that you could've asked for. Almost 7 straight days of less than 10mph winds from the SE to E and seas so slick you...
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 arrived to nary a flying...
composites and wanted to do something to keep them all from getting marred and scratched when doing the bottom spearfishing that we do so much. If you only or primarily freedive, there's no doubt these skins will still look cool, but I was looking for...
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...
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....
Legend: Mooring Special Zone NO Spearfishing NO Lobstering Sanctuary Archaeological Preserve No Fishing or Spearing D: Depth R: Relief Site ID / Reef Name Material / Description Lat & Lon D R Outbound 136' Trawler 25 13.01, -79 07.73 Ball Buoy Reef 1...
went back and purchased the Mystic which had been highly recommended by other divers as well as reviews in the spearfishing publication "Ultimate Spearfishing" in their comprehensive review of low volume masks (I don't recall the issue). The difference...
May 2, 2014 - Grouper Opening (the day after anyway). Spearfishing selfies are very hard to do especially in 4 foot seas and 20 knot winds! Still worth it. I got mine!
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 was in town for a week after getting out of Naval Boot Camp before moving on to his next station....
and take the opportunity to kickstart this blog year. I actually hadn't been in the water (for the purposes of diving or spearfishing) since Labor Day (Sept 2013), so I was understandably (at least by me) anxious to jump at an opportunity to get wet. In...
mate (my son) has taken over the helm and doing a very good job of navigating the waves and keeping a good eye on his spearfishing old man. About now, I started to feel bad (both for the catch so far and for my family) about being out in these...
the office, I headed for home around noon. What can I say? The unfortunate circumstance that is work which subsidizes my spearfishing endeavors periodically becomes an obstruction instead of a benefactor of my pastime and unfortunately for me, this was...
more than we can ever say. So during this tough holiday season on Christmas night, I get a text inquiring if I'm up for spearfishing Alligator Reef bright and early the next morning. Of course my immediate response is a resounding "Hell Yeah!" followed...
Seas: 1-3' Winds: 5-15 SSE Viz: 15-20' Temp: 86F So this was supposed to be the weekend I get back to spearfishing after lobster season started last Monday. Since we had gotten bad viz reports from some friends that had spent the last week down in the...
enough is enough and head for home. Honestly, the rest of the week was lackluster as we finally decided to focus on some spearfishing and were continuously faced with either a lack of viz or a lack of fish (or both!). We did shoot some nice mangroves on...
a way you wouldn't have thought possible. I've been having a crappy summer when it comes to my expectations and goals in spearfishing, but I feel like maybe this truly was a corner turned and fun times lie ahead (geez, I hope I'm right).
The Summer up to now has pretty much been a non-event. The wind and seas were keeping the water so dirty that diving and spearfishing was fast becoming an exercise in futility on most days. But I kept hopeful that the weather couldn't stay bad for yet...
Type:
Article
Author:
Bob Diaz
Category:
SpearBlog 2012
Results 21 - 40 of 99
Gallery Spotlight
June 10-12, 2021 - 6th Annual Pirate Trip
After Covid-19 restrictions last year, everyone was itching to get back in the water this year. As always, an amazingly fun trip with lots of meat in the freezer to show for it!
After Covid-19 restrictions last year, everyone was itching to get back in the water this year. As always, an amazingly fun trip with lots of meat in the freezer to show for it!
After Covid-19 restrictions last year, everyone was itching to get back in the water this year. As always, an amazingly fun trip with lots of meat in the freezer to show for it!
A short vid from our Summer 2019 Bahamas Pirate Trip of the quickest landing of a #50 black grouper I've ever had. Proof that it only takes one fish to make the spearinglife spearfishing trip! Thanks to the pirate crew for making every year an adventure!
March 4, 2023 - Key Largo African Pompano - Sailfish visitor
A video from a dive last week in Key Largo where my throw flasher proved to be exceptionally effective, so effective in fact that it brought in a special visitor that I never even saw until I was reviewing the video back at home! Stoked to check a fish off my bucket list with a beautiful 25lb African Pompano!
A short vid from our Summer 2019 Bahamas Pirate Trip of the quickest landing of a #50 black grouper I've ever had. Proof that it only takes one fish to make the spearinglife spearfishing trip! Thanks to the pirate crew for making every year an adventure!
March 4, 2023 - Key Largo African Pompano - Sailfish visitor
A video from a dive last week in Key Largo where my throw flasher proved to be exceptionally effective, so effective in fact that it brought in a special visitor that I never even saw until I was reviewing the video back at home! Stoked to check a fish off my bucket list with a beautiful 25lb African Pompano!
I finally bit the bullet and decided to sell my No-Ka-Oi. It had gotten next to no use in the time I had owned it and it seemed a shame to have it just sit there so I Ebay'd it. With the funds from that sale, I invested in a gun that is a little more multi-purpose (at least that is how I convinced myself to get it :). I was extremely torn among 3 choices. I was considering the Euro 120, 120x and 130. After a couple of weeks of deliberation and a lot of flip-flopping, I decided on the Euro 120....
Over the 4th of July holiday I was able to break in my hawaiian sling made by HawaiianSling.net (Ray Uppstrom). I had purchased this quite some time ago in preparation for a trip to the Bahamas and I finally got to try it out in the waters around Cat Cay, South Bimini. This isn't your normal hawaiian sling. The design is completely unique and interesting in its approach compared to traditional slings. This sling is much more akin to a bow and arrow than it is to a regular sling and it looks...
The summer had been busier than I would have liked this year and I honestly hadn't had as many opportunities to post much less given much thought to writing a new SpearView, but after having time to really reconsider, I realized that I had actually had multiple opportunities to try out new equipment this year (not all of it successfully). Further to that point, when I took the PFI Freediver course back in March I had decided to invest in a new mask and ended up deciding on the Omer Zero Cubed...
This review is actually long overdue as I've had this mask for well over a year now and I honestly don't know why I hadn't done it before now. After trying multiple masks over several years (and several hundred dollars), some were good (Mystic, Star, Nano), and some were bad (Zero Cubed). Before this, I had actually decided upon the Cressi Nano as "the one". I thoroughly enjoyed the fit and volume of the Nano, but there were a couple of VERY minor issues with the fit. I'm convinced that the...
This year at The Blue Wild I was fortunate enough to meet Mike Hickey. I know of Mike from his appearances on Speargun Hunter on the Outdoor Channel with Sheri Daye. Mike was orginally a guest on the show and in later seasons participated as an underwater videographer. Mike is the USA distributor for FreeDivers ( FreeDivers USA ) spearfishing equipment. I came across his booth and after a great conversation about spearfishing, we started discussing the rising cost of spearshafts specifically....
I realized recently that I had overlooked the fact that I had purchased and used some new SpearGear at the beginning of the Summer of 2011 and hadn't gotten around to posting about it (here or in SpearGear). This article is going to be one that definitely crosses over between SpearViews and SpearGear because of the fact that I do own it but I definitely think it's worthy of a review as well. In the end, SpearViews won the coin toss deciding where I would put the article (especially after I...
Sat 6/23 Winds: East 5-10 Seas: 1-2 ft Surf Temp: 82 F Viz: 20-25 ft Finally some weather worth diving for... The winds have laid down for about 4-5 days now and we are finally get back to business. The water is calm and a wonderful temperature too. We didn't catch a whole lot, but at least we got back in the water. Just the usual suspects today, black grouper and mangrove snapper. Still, it felt good to get back in the water after the last few weeks.
Winds: 20-30 Variable Seas: 3-5 Surf Temp: Like I went in the water... Viz: Unknown, but most likely nil Well, thanks to our first official tropical depression (later to become Tropical Storm Alberto) of the 2006 hurricane season, we did not have much fun at all this weekend. The weather was miserable to say the least. The tropical depression was sitting just below and to the west of us and kept pounding us with winds and cyclical rain (almost like bands in a tropical storm). All was not lost...
Winds: 5-10 SE Seas: 1-2ft Surf Temp: 85F Viz: 15-20 feet This weekend required a little patience. The viz would start out at about 5-10 feet until well after high tide had rolled in. Once the tide slacked off and you gave it a little time, the viz would more than double. We tried a couple of our offshore patch reef spots, but the mangroves haven't started to move offshore to spawn yet. Give it a couple of weeks and we should be pushing them off with a stick (preferrably a sharp pointy metal...
I won't even bother putting up any stats about this weekend's weather because it would only remind me how bad the past 3 weekends have been due to the fact that the Atlantic has just remembered that it's hurricane season and we have had (and will continue to have for at least the next couple of weeks) tropical storms and hurricanes wreaking havoc with the seas and weather. After having one of the best visibility summers I can remember, it has all come to a crashing halt! From what I could see,...
Winds: SE 5-10 Seas: 1-2 ft Surf Temp: 81 F Viz: 20-30 ft This weekend we found a strange phenomenon in the water (at least it was weird for us). As we rode out to some of our spots, the water appeared to be practically crystalline. But when we jumped in the water we found a rather odd themalcline. When diving in about 30 feet, we found the bottom 5-6 feet to not only be warmer, but extremely dirty. The other odd thing about this phenomenon was that the water was extremely warm by comparison....
Seas: 2-4' Winds: 10-20 ESE Viz: 45-50' Temp: 81F So we head down this weekend without too much in the expectation department since it had been raining with 20-40 mph winds almost incessantly the entire week. While at work on Thursday, I take a quick glance at the forecast to see there was still a small craft advisory in effect and a call for 2-4' seas on Sat increasing to 3-5 on Sunday. Heading home from work Friday in what seemed like my umpteenth torrential downpour this week, I'm not too...
SpearViews 
SpearViews 
SpearViews 
SpearViews 
SpearViews 
SpearViews 
