One of the few usable clips from our outing for the opening of the Atlantic Grouper season 2017. Definitely demonstrates why you should always be checking your surroundings. Enjoy!
More things for you to see...
One of the few usable clips from our outing for the opening of the Atlantic Grouper season 2017. Definitely demonstrates why you should always be checking your surroundings. Enjoy!
This past weekend, I finally got to go to The Blue Wild dive expo. After 3 years of everybody telling me about it and not being around to get to go to it, the stars finally aligned and I was able to check it out. Unfortunately, it meant missing out on 5-10mph winds and less than 1' seas inside the reef, but there were other reasons I couldn't get out this weekend, so I figured I would take advantage to check it out and possibly win something from the raffle to boot (I won't keep you in...
Believe it or not my latest addition to my spearguns is not one for shooting fish (well at least not shooting to kill them). But it hopefully will help others watch online what I love to do underwater. I have made a camera mount for my Riffe Euro guns. This mount will fit on any Euro that has the reel inserts (basically all of them). It was terribly simple to make. The only fairly tricky part was putting together the actual mount screw for the camera tripod mount itself.
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...
Throughout my relatively short history in spearfishing (as of this writing), I have only used a few different spearguns. Now obviously, my opinion in this matter is not one of extreme trial and error. Mostly it consists of recommendations made to me by those I spearfish with along with some of my own common sense. In the beginning (early 1990's), I used one of my brother-in-law's extra guns. Specifically, a 38" Arbalette. Now this gun had already seen finer days by the time I started using it....
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...
Over the winter I looked into and purchased a couple of sets of Reef Runner Gear's fin skins. I had contemplated having my own manufactured but when I came accross these, it just didn't seem worth the hassle. You can create your own custom design for a few bucks more and although you can run into some small snags when doing so (I'll elaborate later on), Jon from Reef Runner Gear is an awesome guy to work with and he will do everything he can to make things right.
Seas: 2-4 feet Winds: 5-15 ESE Temp: 80 F Viz: 25-30 feet After missing out last weekend, this weekend had me pulling an all nighter at work on Friday, so I didn't pull into the keys until almost 10a Saturday morning on no sleep for 27 hours (but I wasn't going to miss out on another weekend). Luckily, I am pretty accustomed to the drive, so I probably only dozed off 2 or 3 times... tops :). About 5 minutes out of the campground, I got a call asking if I wanted my gear put on the boat in case...
It's not often that my blogs deviate from my favorite hobby, but my thoughts lately have been with friends and family that have been dealing with loss of one kind or another during the holiday season. This holiday season in particular seems to have been especially laden with loss for many that I care about. A few years ago, I lost my dad close to the holidays so I feel like I can relate to my friends and loved ones that lose people close to their hearts during the time of year when pretty much...
Seas: 1-2 feet Winds: 5-10 SSW Temp: 85 F Viz: 10 feet We took off this morning a little early to see if we could jump in the water a little before actual high slack tide just to see if we could take advantage of some cleaner water. To our joy and surprise, we were able to jump in an hour before the slack tide and make way through a couple of spots with a little better clarity than we had for the past couple of days. I was able to shoot a few nice sized hogfish and a couple of decent mangroves...
Winds were 2-5 out of the East. Seas were for all intents and purposes flat. Unfortunately, in the area of Marathon and Big Pine Keys, the water was extremely dirty. Actually, it looked to me like an algae bloom. The temperatures have been inordinately high lately and with a little bit of rain, these things can happen. In depths as shallow as 25 feet, the bottom was nearly unidentifiable. You could still spearfish, you just had to use a lot more bottom time just in the hunt. You also had to...
Winds: 5-10 SW Seas: 1-2 feet Surf Temp: +/- 80F Viz: 25-60 feet After pulling my 4th all-nighter in as many weeks, I decided to take a day off and take the family down to the keys a day early and hopefully take advantage of a long weekend (little did I know that TS Fay would have something different in store for us). We put the boat in around 9:30a with the expectation of an 11:30a slack high tide. By the time we fueled up and got everyone on the boat we headed out just about 11:00a so I...
So for the third year in a row, we begin to plan our annual guys spearfishing trip to the Bahamas in April via What's App. The group is put together and the messages start to fly with talk about the great trip we had last year and how everyone can't wait for this one. There's talk about new gear and new training tools and regimes, but the one thing that we knew wasn't going to be different was the destination. It was an immediate and unanimous decision to re-visit Grand Cay near Walker's Cay...