Learn
The explainers: how fish detect prey, what a breaking strain actually tells you, what happens to a released fish, and how to read water. If you are starting out, take a path below rather than the list — the list is alphabetical, and knowing which word to look up is most of the problem.
Starting out? Start here.
Five paths through the explainers, in the order they make sense in. Nothing to sign up for, and nothing that records what you have read — each one just says what comes first, and then what comes after that.
- Sea fishing
20 steps, 3 of them you should not skip.
Starts with What you actually need to start fishing.
- Freshwater fishing
18 steps.
Starts with What you actually need to start fishing.
- Spearfishing
19 steps, 9 of them you should not skip.
Starts with What spearfishing is, and what it demands.
- Kayak fishing
16 steps, 5 of them you should not skip.
Starts with Kayak fishing.
- Fly fishing
15 steps.
Starts with Fly fishing.
Not a beginner, and just wondering whether to go this morning? Reading the conditions takes the tide, the wind, the water colour and the light one at a time and says what each actually changes — and what to do about it.
A
Accessible fishing
Fishing is one of the more accessible outdoor activities and the information about it is one of the least reliable, which is the actual barrier for most people most of the time.Air exposure, and the clock that starts when a fish leaves the water
Time out of water is the single most controllable variable in fish handling and one of the best-supported predictors of whether a released fish survives. The clock starts the moment the gills leave the water.Algae and biofilm as food
The thin living film of algae, diatoms and bacteria coating every submerged surface — an abundant, continuously renewing food source that a fish has to be built to exploit.Amphipods and mysids as prey
Small shrimp-like crustaceans of the sediment, weed and shallows — individually negligible, collectively a large part of what small and juvenile fish live on.Aquatic insect larvae as prey
The larval stages of midges, mayflies, caddisflies, stoneflies and their relatives — the foundation of the diet of most freshwater fish for most of their lives.Aquatic plants as food
Submerged and emergent higher plants — the food of the small number of genuinely herbivorous fish, and the reason a few of them can reshape a water.At anchor or on the drift
Anchoring fishes one position thoroughly and commits you to it; drifting covers ground and gives up precision — and the tide usually decides which is possible before preference does.Attaching line to a hook, swivel or lure
The commonest knot anybody ties, and the one where the difference between a fixed connection and a loose one changes how the object at the other end behaves.Attaching line to a reel spool
The knot nobody thinks about until a fish empties the spool, and the layer of tape or backing beneath it that stops slick line spinning on the arbor without ever taking up.
B
Bait scent, and what is actually known
That fish detect dissolved chemicals at extraordinarily low concentrations is well established. That any particular bottled attractant improves catches is not, and the distance between those two statements is where the entire flavouring industry sits.Bait size, and what it selects for
Bait size is the most direct control an angler has over what they catch, because it sets a floor on the mouth that can take it and a ceiling on the fish that will bother.Bands, wishbones and when to replace them
The two components carrying the entire load of a band gun are also the two that degrade invisibly with age rather than with use — which is why they are replaced on a calendar as well as on inspection.Barbed and barbless hooks
The evidence says hooking location and handling matter more than the barb, that barbless hooks come out more easily, and that whether they cost you fish is not settled — so this page gives you the findings rather than a verdict.Barometric pressure and fishing
The angling literature is confident that it does; the scientific evidence is thin, inconsistent and confounded by the weather that accompanies pressure changes.Bass: the same word for unrelated fish
Bass names at least four unrelated groups of fish on three continents, and the word carries no taxonomic meaning at all — which matters because advice written for one is regularly read by somebody holding another.Being seen from a kayak
A kayak sits a hand's width above the water and is invisible on radar and nearly invisible in a chop. Everything about visibility rests on one assumption: that nobody has seen you.Birds' nests and braid wind knots
Two different tangles with two different causes — one is the spool outrunning the line on a multiplier, the other is slack braid twisting on itself on a fixed spool — and neither is fixed by the other's remedy.Bite detection on a beach
The core skill of shore fishing and the one least often written down: separating a fish from the tide, the weed, the surf and a lead that has started to move, at a hundred metres in the dark.Bivalve and gastropod molluscs as prey
Mussels, cockles, clams, limpets and snails — shelled molluscs eaten whole and crushed by fish with the dentition to do it.Bleeding a fish, and what it actually does
Bleeding removes blood from the muscle while the heart is still moving it. It matters most in strongly-muscled, dark-fleshed fish and least in small lean ones, and it is a quality measure rather than a safety one.Boat traffic, and being seen from the surface
A diver at the surface is almost invisible from a boat at any distance, and propeller strike is a recognised cause of death — which is why the float is safety equipment before it is fishing equipment.Bottom type, and what lives on it
Sand, rubble, reef, kelp, seagrass and wreck each hold a different fish community for structural reasons — which makes bottom type the most transferable habitat knowledge in the discipline.Breaking strain, and what it does not tell you
The number on the spool is what unknotted line withstands in a slow straight pull under laboratory conditions. It is not what your line will hold, and the gap between the two is where most break-offs live.Breath-hold physiology for spearfishers
The urge to breathe is driven by carbon dioxide while unconsciousness is driven by lack of oxygen — two separate signals, which is why breath-hold diving can fail without warning.Buoyancy that feels wrong
Struggling to descend and sinking too readily are the same problem in opposite directions, and one of them is dangerous — which is why the fix is a buoyancy check in the water rather than a number from a table.
C
Calling for help from a kayak
Being seen and being able to summon are two different problems with two different sets of equipment, and a paddler in the water has already lost access to anything that was not on their body.Casting into wind
Wind does not defeat a cast by being strong; it defeats it by exposing a slow, wide loop. The fix is line speed and loop shape, and the second fix is standing somewhere else.Casting weight and test curve explained
Two conventions describing the same underlying property — how much load a rod is built to work against — expressed in different units by different traditions, which is why the same rod can be described two ways.Catadromy, anadromy, and crossing the salinity line
Two opposite life histories built on the same physiological feat: rebuilding the body's water and salt machinery to run backwards, at a specific point in life, in a matter of days.Catch handling and dispatch in spearfishing
A speared fish should be dispatched immediately rather than carried alive, which is both the welfare position and the reason spearfished fish can be exceptional on the table.Catching only what you did not want
Being unable to get past the small and abundant is a selectivity problem, and the levers are bait size, hook size, position and timing — in roughly that order of usefulness.Cephalopods as prey
Squid, cuttlefish and octopus — soft-bodied, fast-growing molluscs that are the main prey of a large share of the ocean's big predatory fish.Characiform fishes as prey
The tetras and their relatives — the dominant small shoaling freshwater fish of South America and Africa, and the forage base of the predators in both.Choosing a fly line, a leader and a fly for the water in front of you
Four questions in a fixed order — where in the water, how fast is it moving, what is being eaten, and what is the wind doing — which between them decide the line, the leader and the fly. The order matters more than any single answer.Choosing a fly size, and what the numbers mean
Fly size is hook size, the scale runs backwards, and it is not standardised between patterns or manufacturers. Size matters more than colour and is chosen from what the fish are eating.Choosing a knot for the line you are using
A knot is a material problem before it is a shape problem. A knot that holds beautifully in nylon can slip out of braid without deforming, and the property that decides it is friction rather than cleverness.Choosing a lure for the water you are looking at
A procedure rather than a recommendation: work from depth, flow, clarity and prey to a lure, in that order, and the tackle box becomes a set of answers rather than a set of objects.Choosing a rig for the conditions
The decision procedure that named rigs do not supply: work from the ground, the flow, the bait and the fish to the arrangement, rather than from a rig you know to a situation you hope suits it.Choosing line and leader for the sea
Two constraints dominate and neither exists in most freshwater fishing: abrasion against rock, shingle and shell, and shock loading from casting heavy leads and from surf. Everything else is secondary.Ciguatera and reef fish poisoning
A toxin that starts in a single-celled alga on a reef, accumulates upward through the food web, cannot be tasted, smelled, seen or cooked out — and for which the only reliable guide is local knowledge of which fish from which reef are eaten.Circle hooks or J hooks: where the fish gets hooked
One of the few tackle comparisons with a real evidence base, because hook geometry bears on hooking location and hooking location is the strongest predictor of whether a released fish survives.Cloud cover and light penetration
Cloud is an optical variable rather than a mood: it changes how much light reaches a given depth, how exposed a fish in shallow water feels, and therefore where in the water column it is willing to be.Coarse fish: a category that does not travel
A British classification with no biological content, invented socially rather than scientifically, and meaningless in most of the world — including to readers who will nonetheless encounter it constantly in British writing.Cold hands, feet and cramp
Cold extremities and cramp are the same underlying problem arriving in two forms, and both are warnings — cramp in a fin at depth is a genuine emergency and cold hands are the loss of the ability to solve one.Cold water, and how quickly it degrades judgement
Cold takes capability away in a specific order — dexterity, then thinking, then shivering — which means a diver loses the ability to make good decisions while still feeling capable of making them.Cold-water fishing: what actually changes
Cold does not stop fish feeding; it slows everything down. Digestion, movement, reaction distance and the willingness to chase all fall together, and every practical adjustment follows from that one fact.Competition spearfishing
Organised competition exists, has done since the 1950s, and is the most contested part of the sport — worth understanding whether or not you would ever enter one.Contaminants, and what accumulates in a fish
The catch-to-table layer covers the hazards that make somebody ill this week. This is the one that accumulates over years, is invisible, and is the reason official advice is expressed as a frequency rather than as a yes or no.Controlling a fish after the shot
The seconds after a shot are the most dangerous in the dive and the most likely to lose the fish — and the two problems have the same solution, which is line management rather than strength.Corrosion, maintenance and pre-dive inspection
Salt water destroys everything in this kit, and the components it destroys are the ones under load — so maintenance is a safety practice rather than a housekeeping one.Crabbing from a quayside
By participation one of the largest recreational fishing activities there is, done overwhelmingly by families with children, on deep unguarded water, and with almost no reliable guidance attached to it.Crabbing with children, safely and without harming the crabs
The activity that introduces more people to fishing than any other, and the two things it routinely gets wrong: the drop into deep water beside a child, and the bucket that cooks the catch.Crabs taking the bait, and what to do about it
Bait stripped within minutes, no bites, and no idea it is happening. Crabs are the commonest reason a shore session produces nothing, and every one of the answers is about timing, height or hardness.Crack-offs, and why they happen
A lead leaving the rod at casting speed with nothing attached to it is the most dangerous thing that happens in shore fishing — and almost every cause is a preparation failure rather than bad luck.Crankbait or jerkbait: continuous action against imparted action
One lure works when you wind it and the other works when you move the rod. That is the whole distinction, it is not obvious from looking at them, and it decides which conditions each suits.Crustacean imitation in saltwater fly fishing
Baitfish patterns are what saltwater fly fishing is known for, and shrimp, prawn and crab are what a very large share of the fish are actually eating.Currents, eddies and where fish hold
Fish in current sit where the food arrives without the effort of holding in it, which makes eddies, seams and obstructions predictable rather than lucky.
D
Dawn and dusk: what changes at the light edges
A genuine and mechanistic effect rather than folklore: at low light a predator that sees better than its prey has an advantage it does not have at either extreme, and the window is short.Day length, and what it does to fish
Day length is the one seasonal cue that never lies, which is why fish use it to time spawning and migration — and why a fishing model built at temperate latitudes quietly assumes a day with edges.Decapod crustaceans as prey
Crabs, shrimps, prawns and their relatives — ten-legged crustaceans that make up a large share of the diet of inshore and reef fish worldwide.Deciding not to shoot
Spearfishing is the most selective fishing method there is, which means every fish taken was chosen. The decision not to shoot is the skill that follows from that, and it is the one least often taught.Depth and length: fathoms, metres and feet
A fathom is exactly six feet, which makes fathoms, feet and metres interconvertible without error — and makes this one of the very few things in fishing that can be calculated rather than estimated.Depth as an environmental variable
What changes as you go down — light, gas volume, temperature, buoyancy and the time available — treated as conditions to understand, not as a target to reach.Dispatching a fish: doing it properly, or not doing it at all
The standard a dispatch has to meet is immediate insensibility that lasts until death. Leaving a fish to die in air or on ice meets neither half of it, and it is what most kept fish still die of.Dissolved oxygen and fish
Warm water holds less oxygen while fish need more of it, which is why summer is when still waters kill fish and bait buckets fail.Diving for scallops
Gathering a bivalve off the seabed by hand on a breath-hold. Almost nothing about it resembles spearfishing except the breathing, and the food-safety question is one that cannot be answered by looking at the animal.Do fish feel pain
One of the most contested questions in animal biology. Nociception in fish is established; whether that amounts to the conscious experience of pain is genuinely disputed by qualified people, and this page represents the dispute rather than settling it.Do fish remember
The three-second memory is folklore. Fish learn, retain what they learn for long periods, and adjust their behaviour to fishing pressure specifically — which is measurable and has direct consequences for anybody fishing hard-fished water.Do fish sleep
Most fish have a rest state with reduced activity, reduced responsiveness and a characteristic posture or place — which is sleep by any behavioural definition, even though it looks nothing like a mammal's.Dry fly, nymph, wet fly and streamer: the four approaches
Four fly types are four ways of fishing, each with its own depth, its own take detection and its own failure mode. Choosing between them is a reading of the water, not a preference.The double haul, and casting a fly in wind
The technique that decides whether coastal fly fishing is possible at all in the conditions it is usually done in — and the one that beginners are told about long before they are shown why it works.
E
An equipment maintenance checklist
A schedule rather than a routine — what to do after every dive, every few sessions, and once a season, because the components that fail are the ones under load and they fail on age as much as on use.Eating freshwater fish you have caught
Most British freshwater fish are protected from being taken and assumed to be inedible. Neither is quite true, and the real considerations are contaminants, parasites and a rule framework unlike sea fishing's.Eel and elver fisheries
One of the oldest fisheries in Europe, conducted on a critically endangered species whose recruitment collapsed by more than ninety per cent, and now among the most tightly restricted activities in fresh water.Electronics on a fishing kayak
A wet, tipping, single-battery platform with no spare of anything. Electronics here are a rigging problem and a power problem before they are a fishing one, and the safety-critical device is the one that summons help rather than the one that finds fish.Entanglement, and the knife that is not a weapon
A breath-hold diver held underwater by line has minutes at most, and the entanglement sources are mostly the diver's own equipment — which makes line management a safety discipline rather than a tidiness one.Equalisation and pressure
Descending compresses the air spaces in the ears and sinuses, and equalisation restores the pressure balance — a technique that must never be forced through pain.Equalisation, and the injuries that follow forcing it
Pressure rises fastest in the first few metres, and the injuries come almost entirely from continuing to descend when equalisation has failed — which makes stopping the whole of the technique that matters.Estuary fishing: tide, salinity and the moving front
An estuary is a salinity gradient that moves with every tide, and the fish move with it — which is why the same spot fishes like three different places over a tidal cycle.Etiquette on charter boats and crowded shore marks
Sea fishing puts people close together with hooks, leads and lines in a moving environment, so the conventions that keep it workable are safety practice with good manners attached.The eel life cycle
One of the most extraordinary life histories in the animal kingdom, and one of the least understood: a transparent leaf drifting across an ocean, a glass eel entering a river, decades in fresh water, and a one-way return nobody has observed.
F
A fish that comes off, and what you owe it
Spearfishing's claim to be the most selective way of taking a fish rests on recovering what it hits — so the honest treatment of the shot that fails is not an aside, it is where the claim is tested.Feeding windows
Light level, temperature, prey availability and digestion state explain most of what anglers call feeding windows — and they explain it better than the calendar-based systems that claim to predict it.Fenland drains and lowland waterways
Straight, engineered, shallow waterways built to move water off farmland rather than to hold fish — which makes them a fishery with no natural features and a completely different reading problem.Filleting: the principles, not the recipe
Every filleting method is the same three cuts adapted to a skeleton. Understanding the skeleton is what transfers between species; memorising a sequence for one fish does not.Fish growth, age and what a big fish represents
Fish grow throughout life at rates that vary enormously with species and conditions, and in many species a large individual represents decades that cannot be replaced quickly.Fishing at night: what is different
Darkness changes which sense the fish is using, how close it will come, and every single thing about the angler's own safety — and the third of those is the one that decides whether a night session is a good idea.Fishing rock marks
Rock marks put an angler beside deep water with no gradual shelf to retreat up, which is why they hold fish and why they kill more shore anglers than any other ground.Fishing rough ground, and what it costs
Rock, reef and kelp hold the most fish and take the most tackle. The technique is entirely organised around losing gear cheaply and deliberately, and the environmental cost of doing it badly is real.Fishing terminology
A plain-English guide to the words anglers use without explaining — many of which mean different things in different traditions.Fishing the surf
Surf stirs food out of the sand, colours the water and gives fish cover to feed in the shallows — and the features that make it productive are the same ones that make it dangerous.Fitness to dive: health, medication and when not to
Whether somebody is fit to breath-hold dive is a medical assessment made by a doctor for an individual — and the categories of condition that require one are worth knowing before a course, not after a problem.Fixed spool or multiplier: what each layout can do
One layout keeps the spool still and peels line off the front; the other spins the spool. That single mechanical difference decides what each can cast, how hard each can pull, and how each one fails.Flashers, and what attracting a fish actually changes
A hung array of reflective blades used in blue water to bring curious pelagic fish to a diver who cannot go and find them — and a technique that changes the encounter, the shot and the risk picture all at once.Float, bobber and quill
One object, four vocabularies, and a genuine difference underneath the words — between something that only signals a bite and something that also controls where the bait sits.Floating, sinking and intermediate fly lines
Density decides depth, and depth decides whether the fly is where the fish are. It is the single most consequential line choice and the one beginners change last.Floating, suspending and sinking lures
Whether a lure rises, hangs or sinks when you stop reeling decides what happens during every pause — and the pause is when a large share of takes occur.Floppers, slip tips, and holding a fish
The tip decides whether a shot fish stays on the shaft, which makes it a welfare question before it is a recovery one — a fish that tears off is a wounded animal that is not recovered.Fly fishing for bass in surf, estuary and over rock
One species and three genuinely different fisheries. Surf, estuary and rock demand different lines, different retrieves and different reading, and the fish behaves differently in each.Fly fishing for pollack over rough ground and kelp
A fish that hangs above structure, rises to intercept, takes hard and then dives straight back into the kelp — which makes the first three seconds the whole problem.Fly fishing for predators: pike, bass and beyond
Large flies, heavy lines, short strong leaders and a bite trace where teeth demand one. The presentation problem is movement rather than drift.Fly fishing for warm-water and tropical species
Sight fishing in clear shallow water, where the whole encounter is visible and the constraint is the angler's ability to deliver a fly quickly, accurately and once.Fly line weights, tapers and what they do
The number is a mass, measured over a defined length, and the taper is how that mass is distributed. Between them they decide what size of fly can be delivered and how far.Fly tying concepts, without the pattern catalogue
A handful of principles — proportion, movement, silhouette, weight and durability — explain almost every fly ever tied, and they are more useful than any list of patterns.Freezing and thawing bait without ruining it
Freezing damages bait by growing ice crystals inside the tissue. How fast it freezes, how cold it stays and how many times it thaws decide how much structure survives — and refreezing is the fault that ruins more bait than anything else.Freshwater crayfish as prey
Freshwater decapods found on every inhabited continent except Africa, and a disproportionately important food for the large predatory fish that share their habitat.Freshwater spearfishing
A small, regionally concentrated practice in an environment that is colder, murkier and more variable than the sea — and one whose legal position differs from marine spearfishing almost everywhere.The fishing year: what each season changes
One treatment of the seasonal round rather than four near-identical pages, written from the two things that actually change — temperature and day length — so that it works in either hemisphere.The four fly types, and what each imitates
Dry, wet, nymph and streamer describe where in the water a fly works and what it pretends to be — and in salt water the same four categories imitate crustaceans and baitfish instead of insects.
G
Gathering shellfish, and the hazard that cooking does not remove
Bivalves filter the water they live in, including toxins that are invisible, odourless, tasteless and unaffected by cooking — which makes gathering them the one activity on FishingHQ where the regulatory answer is the safety answer.Gathering your own bait
The oldest part of fishing, the cheapest way to get the best bait, and the part most heavily regulated — because it happens on ground that other things depend on.Gear ratio and retrieve rate
Gear ratio counts spool turns per handle turn, but what you actually feel is line recovered per turn — and that depends on how much line is on the spool, which is why the ratio alone tells you less than it looks.Getting bait where you want it
FishingHQ holds eighteen baits and, until now, nothing on how any of them gets to the fish — which is the question that decides whether the bait choice mattered at all.Grip leads, plain leads and holding bottom
Holding ground is a grip problem rather than a weight problem, which is why a light gripped lead holds water that rolls a much heavier plain one — and why the answer changes twice within a single tide.Gutting a fish, and why it usually comes first
The gut is where the enzymes and much of the bacterial load are. Removing it early slows what happens next — but done carelessly it spreads the problem into the flesh instead.
H
Hair rigs, and presenting a bait off the hook
One of the few genuine inventions in modern angling: separating the bait from the hook so the hook is free to turn and take hold as the fish ejects the bait it has decided against.Handling a large fish for the table
A large fish is not a big version of a small one. Its centre stays warm for hours, it cannot be chilled from the outside, and every handling decision has to account for a body the ice cannot reach.Handling crabs and lobsters: alive, and then not
Decapods are legally sentient animals in the UK, they spoil extremely fast once dead, and they are handled alive — which makes welfare, food safety and self-preservation the same conversation.Handling fish from a kayak
A kayak lands fish at water level, alone, on an unstable platform with nowhere to put anything — which is better for the fish and considerably more demanding for the angler.Handling squid, cuttlefish and octopus
Cephalopods die fast, spoil fast, ink comprehensively and are cleaned rather than filleted. Almost everything that determines quality happens in the first minute after they come over the rail.Handling temperature, and when not to fish at all
Above a certain water temperature the arithmetic of catch and release stops working, because the fish needs more oxygen to recover and there is less of it available. The honest response is to stop, and it is rarely said.Hard lures or soft plastics: action, feel and durability
Two lure families with different action mechanisms and different failure modes. The decisive difference is what happens in the fraction of a second after a fish takes hold.Holding position: anchoring and drifting from a kayak
Anchoring a kayak in current is the most dangerous ordinary thing a kayak angler does, and the equipment that makes it survivable is a trolley and a knife rather than a better anchor.Hook points, patterns and penetration
A hook has to rotate before it can penetrate, which is why point shape, bend geometry and the angle the line pulls from matter more than sharpness alone.Hook sizing
Hook sizes run on two scales that meet in the middle and neither is standardised between makers, which is why the same number can arrive as two different hooks.Hooks pulling out
A hook that pulls has usually never been properly set, and the cause is more often the hook, the angle or the drag than anything the angler did at the moment the fish came off.How a band speargun works
Stretched rubber stores energy and releases it into a shaft, and every design decision — band length, band diameter, shaft mass, gun length — is a way of trading how much energy is stored against how fast it can be delivered.How a fishing reel works
A reel stores line, releases it under control when a fish pulls, and recovers it. The three common layouts solve those problems in mechanically different ways, and the difference decides what each can cast and how each fails.How a fishing rod works
A rod is a spring that stores the energy you put into it and gives it back. Almost every casting problem a beginner has follows from not knowing that, and from trying to throw the weight instead of loading the rod.How a jerkbait's action is produced
A jerkbait does not swim; it is thrown sideways by a sharp pull and then coasts, and the slack line between pulls is what lets it do so.How a reel drag works
A drag is a friction clutch that lets the spool give line at a set resistance, and what anglers call smoothness is the gap between the force needed to start it moving and the force needed to keep it moving.How deep a lure runs, and what controls it
Depth is the variable that decides whether a lure is in front of the fish at all, and almost everything that controls it is under the angler's hand rather than printed on the packet.How fish behave towards a diver
A diver reads as a large predator, which is why stillness works, direct approach does not, and heavily dived ground behaves differently.How fish breathe
Gills extract oxygen from water using a counter-current arrangement of extraordinary efficiency — and they collapse into a useless mass the moment they leave the water, which is why air exposure is the thing that matters most in handling.How fish detect prey
Sight, the lateral line, smell, taste and hearing — and which one dominates decides what you should be manipulating.How fish hear
Fish hear well, sense pressure waves through otoliths and swim bladders, and sound travels far faster and further in water than in air — which makes hull noise a real variable and footsteps a smaller one.How fish respond to a diver
Fish treat an approaching diver as a potential predator, and the distance at which they leave is measurable, species-specific and — importantly — learned from how heavily they have been hunted.How fish see
Water removes colour with depth in a predictable order, and fish eyes are adapted to the light where they live — which constrains what a lure can possibly look like to them.How fish smell and taste
Fish smell in water rather than air, at concentrations far below human thresholds, and many taste with structures spread across the body rather than only in the mouth.How fishing works: the whole thing in one page
Every kind of fishing is the same four decisions in a different order: what you are trying to catch, where it is, what will make it take, and how you get it back.How floats work
A float is a bite indicator, a depth setter and a delivery system at once. Buoyancy, shotting and bite registration are one mechanical system, and the float is only the visible part of it.How fly casting works
The rod is a spring loaded by the line's mass; the loop is the evidence that the load was applied and released properly.How histamine forms in a fish, and why the enzyme is the problem
Bacteria make an enzyme; the enzyme makes histamine; and the enzyme outlives the bacteria, survives freezing and restarts on thawing. That is why chilling late does not undo an early mistake.How hooks are sized, and what the numbers mean
Hook numbering runs in two directions from a point in the middle, and it is not standardised between manufacturers. Understanding both facts is what stops somebody buying a hook ten times the size they wanted.How salmon find their way home
Two mechanisms working at two scales: something magnetic and celestial to cross an ocean, and an imprinted memory of a river's smell to find the last few kilometres. The second is far better established than the first.How sea tackle differs from freshwater tackle
Salt water is corrosive, abrasive, deeper, faster-moving and holds larger fish, and every real difference in sea tackle is a response to one of those five things rather than to tradition.How to handle a fish you have caught
Wet hands, support the weight, keep it in the water where you can, get the hook out with a tool, and decide before you catch it whether it is going back.How to hook a bait so it behaves naturally
Hooking position decides three things at once: how the bait moves, how long it stays on, and whether the hook point is available when a fish takes. Those three pull against each other, and the bait type decides which wins.How to start spearfishing
The order matters more than the equipment: learn to freedive with an instructor, find people to dive with, then buy kit — because the first two decide whether the third is survivable.How visibility changes everything
Visibility decides the range at which fish are seen, the confidence with which they are identified, and — the part that matters most — whether a buddy can watch you at all.How weights and sinkers work
A weight does three different jobs — carrying the cast, sinking the bait, and holding it in place against moving water — and the shape is chosen for whichever of the three dominates.
I
Icing and chilling a catch: the only variable that matters much
Nearly everything that decides whether a fish is good to eat is temperature and time. Cold slows every spoilage process at once, and no later step recovers what warmth has already done.Identifying fish by shape when colour is gone
Outline, proportion, fin placement and swimming action survive depth, distance and turbidity when pattern and colour do not — which is why the character hierarchy a diver uses is not the one a species page publishes.Identifying fish underwater
The one skill spearfishing genuinely requires that angling does not — because the decision to take a fish is made before it is caught, not after.Inshore and offshore: what actually changes
The words describe distance from shore, but everything that matters about the difference — depth, structure, water clarity, self-reliance and consequence — changes with it rather than because of it.Invasive species, and where spearfishing genuinely helps
Targeted removal of an invasive predator is the one situation where spearfishing is used as a management tool with evidence behind it — and the evidence is also clear that the effect is local and needs sustained effort.The insects fly fishing imitates
Four groups of insect account for most of what a river trout eats, and knowing their life stages tells you what depth to fish at more reliably than any fly box does.
J
Jig weight and fall rate
How fast a jig sinks decides how much of the water column it fishes, how long a fish has to intercept it, and whether it reaches the bottom at all in current — and it is set by weight, shape and drag together.Jigging: a word covering several different techniques
Jigging names at least four techniques that share only a vertical component, and they use different tackle, different lures and different physical effort — so the word alone tells a reader almost nothing.Joining two lines: what the join has to survive
A line-to-line join is the hardest connection in fishing. It sits under the most load, it has to pass through the rod rings on every cast, and the two lines it joins are usually different materials of different diameters.
K
Kayak conditions: wind, tide, swell, and the decision not to launch
There is no wind speed that is safe and no wave height that is not. What decides a kayak day is how wind, tide, swell, temperature, daylight and your own range combine — and the most useful answer this subject has is often that today is not the day.Kayak fishing in fresh water
Inland, the binding question is almost never conditions — it is permission, and access to water, to launch and to fish are three separate permissions that are routinely assumed to be one.Kayak seating, and why it is a safety decision
A seat is sold as comfort and behaves as a stability setting and a fatigue setting, both of which decide what a paddler can still do at the end of a long day.Kayak stability, and what a hull trades away
Stability is two different properties that trade against each other, and against speed. The hull that feels safest sitting still is not always the one that behaves best when something unexpected happens.Keeping a catch cool and safe to eat
Cooling a speared fish quickly is a food-safety instruction rather than a matter of quality — because in the species spearfishers most often take, the toxin that forms in warm muscle is not destroyed by cooking.Keeping a catch safe to eat
Everything that decides whether a fish is good to eat happens in the hour after it is caught, and almost all of it is temperature.Krill and planktonic crustaceans as prey
Krill, copepods and the other small drifting crustaceans that convert plankton into fish food, and that many shoaling predators feed on directly.The kinds of bait, and what each is for
A map of the bait categories for somebody who does not yet know the categories exist: what each one is, what it is imitating or offering, and what each demands of you before it reaches the water.The kinds of fishing line, and when each is used
Three materials in common use — monofilament, braid and fluorocarbon — with genuinely different mechanical properties. The choice changes what the tackle can do rather than merely how well it does it.The kinds of fishing, and how they differ
The divisions that matter are water type, what the fish is offered, and how the offering is delivered — and almost every named discipline is one combination of those three.The kinds of hook, and what each is shaped for
Hook geometry is functional rather than decorative. Point shape, gape, shank length, eye type and wire gauge each change where a fish is hooked and whether the hook holds, and those are different questions.The kinds of lure, and what each imitates
Lure categories are defined by what they do in the water — action, depth and how they are worked — rather than by what they look like on a tackle wall, which is why the shelf is organised in a way that teaches nobody anything.
L
Landing net or hand landing: what each costs the fish
A welfare decision most anglers make without noticing they made it, and the evidence points at the net material rather than at the choice between net and hand.Launching and landing a fishing kayak
The launch and the landing are where a kayak is least controllable and the angler most committed, and the landing is harder because it is done tired, loaded and with the sea behind you.Leaders and tippet in fly fishing
The leader transfers the energy of a thick line down to something a fly can be tied to. Its length and taper are a presentation decision, not a formality.Leaders and traces
A leader is a different length of line at the business end, added for a reason — abrasion, teeth, casting shock, stealth or presentation — and the reason decides the material, not the other way round.Leashes on a fishing kayak
Every leash prevents a loss and creates an entanglement, which makes them the clearest safety trade-off in the discipline and one that has to be decided deliberately rather than by default.Ledgering, bottom fishing and legering: one idea, three words
Fishing a bait on or near the bottom with the weight resting rather than suspended — the most widely practised approach in the world, and the one with the least consistent name.Line and float-line tangles
A tangle around a diver is an entanglement hazard rather than an inconvenience, which changes both how it is prevented and what to do when it happens.Line class and breaking strain ratings
A breaking strain figure is a manufacturer's claim about a wet, knotless straight pull, expressed in pounds or kilograms — and a rated line class is a tested guarantee that it will break BELOW a stated figure, which is the opposite promise.Line memory, stretch and bite detection
Memory is line holding the shape of the spool and stretch is line absorbing movement, and both sit between the fish and the angler's hand deciding how much of a bite arrives.Line strength, diameter and knots
A stated breaking strain is a claim about a straight pull on undamaged line — which is not the situation any knot is ever in.Line twist, and where it comes from
Twist is put into line by something rotating, and almost nothing removes it — so the answer is nearly always to find the rotating thing rather than to treat the symptom.Live bait or artificial lures: what each is good at
The oldest argument in fishing, and it has a mechanical answer about detection distance, rejection time and how much water you can cover — rather than an answer about which is more sporting.Live or dead: what changes for the fish
Live bait supplies movement, which is detected at distance by a sense that scent cannot reach. Dead bait supplies scent, which travels where movement cannot be seen. And the choice carries a welfare question that an honest treatment does not leave out.Loaded speargun handling
A loaded speargun is the only thing in fishing that behaves like a firearm, and the handling rules are the firearm rules for the same reason: the injuries are penetrating and they happen to companions.Long fins, and what blade stiffness does
A long blade moves more water per kick at a lower cadence, which uses less oxygen for the same distance — making fins one of the few pieces of equipment that directly extends how safely a diver can operate.Lookalike species, and why uncertainty means do not shoot
Confusable species routinely differ in protection status, size rules, seasons and ecological role — so a misidentification underwater is not an embarrassment to correct later but a decision that cannot be taken back.Loop knots, and when a loose connection helps
A loop knot deliberately leaves the lure or hook free to move at the eye. Where a lure's action depends on it being able to swing, a tight knot damps exactly the movement the lure was designed to produce.Loss of motor control, and what it is warning of
Involuntary shaking or twitching at or after the surface is a hypoxia symptom one stage short of blackout — and treating it as a curiosity rather than as an emergency signal is a recognised route into a serious incident.Lost gear, and what a shaft leaves behind
Spearfishing loses very little gear compared with most methods, and what it does lose is different in kind — a shaft and a length of line rather than something that goes on fishing without anybody holding it.Low-volume masks, and why volume matters
Air spent equalising the space inside a mask is air taken from a single breath, which is why freediving masks are built small — and why a scuba mask is the wrong tool even though it looks the same.Lure colour, water clarity and depth
Water removes colours in a fixed order with depth, so a lure's colour changes as it sinks — and that physics does not add up to a ranking of which colour to tie on, however much anglers would like it to.Lure hooks, and why they are the weak point
The hooks a lure arrives with are frequently the limiting component, and changing them changes three things at once: whether the fish stays on, what the lure does in the water, and how much damage is done to fish you did not want.Lure size, and what it is selecting
Size decides which fish can take the lure, how far away it can be detected, and how much of the water column it can be worked through. Those three are frequently in conflict.
M
Margins, features, and why fish use edges
Fish concentrate at boundaries — between deep and shallow, weed and open water, current and slack, light and shade — and the reason is that an edge supplies food and cover at the same place.Marine-life hazards for divers, in proportion
The animals that actually injure divers are mostly small, stationary and stepped on or grabbed — and the one everybody asks about is genuinely worth managing and is not the thing most likely to hurt you.Mask fogging, leaking and squeeze
Three different problems with three different causes, routinely treated as one — and only the third has a safety consequence.Matching a lure to the prey that is there
The link between what a fish is eating and what you tie on. It is the one piece of lure intelligence a tackle catalogue cannot supply, because it comes from the diet of the fish rather than from the properties of the lure.Matching the hatch: what it means and when it is wrong
Identify what the fish are eating and offer something that behaves like it. The idea is sound, the phrase is over-extended, and it is wrong whenever nothing is hatching.Mending line, and what it is for
A mend repositions the line on the water so the current stops dragging the fly. It is the technique that makes a dead drift possible, and it is what separates casting from fishing.Mini species and species hunting
The branch of shore fishing whose object is the number of species rather than the size of anything — and a form of angling that any species-by-species guide is poorly shaped to describe.Missed bites, and what they usually mean
Missing bites is usually a hook problem rather than a timing problem — and on most sea rigs the fish hooks itself, so striking is more often the cause than the cure.Monofilament, fluorocarbon and braid
Three materials with genuinely different stretch, density, abrasion behaviour and visibility, none of which is better than the others in general and each of which is clearly better for particular jobs.Moon phase and fishing
The moon has a strong, well-evidenced effect through tides and a real one on some spawning cycles — and a much weaker case as a general predictor of feeding.Motors and electric drives on a fishing kayak
Adding power changes three things at once: what the craft can do, what it weighs, and — in a great many places — what it legally is.
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Night fishing with lures
After dark vision stops being the dominant sense for both the fish and the angler, and lure choice changes for a reason rather than by convention: what the fish is detecting is displacement and silhouette rather than detail.Night spearfishing: what changes
Darkness changes the hazard profile, the buddy system and the fish — and it changes the fish in a way that is the main reason night spearfishing is restricted in many places.
O
Octopus and cuttlefish on breath-hold
Hunting an animal that can see you thinking. Cephalopods are found rather than chased, and the practice raises a welfare question the rest of FishingHQ does not have to answer.Organic detritus as food
Decomposing organic matter in and on sediment, together with the bacteria breaking it down — the base of a great many food webs and the direct diet of a few fish.Osmoregulation and diadromous fish
Freshwater fish continuously take on water and must excrete it; marine fish continuously lose it and must drink — and species that cross between them rebuild that machinery during the transition.
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A pre-dive safety checklist
A structured run through the things whose failure is discovered at the worst possible moment — built from the safety family rather than invented, and short enough to actually be used.Paddle or pedal, and what a drive costs
A pedal drive frees both hands, which changes the fishing more than any other single item. It also draws water in the shallows a kayak exists to reach, and it is one more thing that can fail.Parasites in fish, and what freezing actually does about them
Parasites in wild fish are normal, usually harmless once the fish is cooked, and the reason raw fish is frozen first. The conditions that reliably kill them are specific, published, and mostly beyond a domestic freezer.Paternoster rigs and standing hooklengths
A family rather than a single rig: hooklengths standing out from a main body line above a weight, used everywhere from a beach to a boat to a stillwater, under at least four regional names.Pier and harbour fishing
A structure built into the sea gives shore anglers depth, shelter and artificial reef all at once, which is why it is the most accessible sea fishing anywhere and the most crowded.Planning a dive session
Almost every decision that keeps a diver safe is made before they get wet — and the ones made in the water, cold and task-focused, are the ones that go wrong.Pneumatic spearguns, and what they trade
Compressed air rather than stretched rubber, which buys a great deal of power in a short gun and costs noise, servicing complexity and a failure mode a band gun does not have.Pollock and pollack
Two spellings, at least three fish and a set of commercial names that cross over each other — and the fish a reader means depends on which side of the Atlantic they are standing.Polychaete worms as prey
Segmented marine bristle worms living in sediment and tubes, and the single largest food source for flatfish and other bottom-feeding sea fish.Preparing and toughening bait
Whether a bait survives the cast, the current and the attention of small fish is a mechanical problem with mechanical answers — and every one of them costs something in movement, scent or naturalness.Presentation and drag
A drifting fly must travel at exactly the speed of the water carrying it. Everything a fly angler does on the water is in service of that.Presenting bait in strong tide
In a running tide the problem is not finding fish but keeping a bait where you put it, and every part of the solution — lead, line, rig and timing — trades holding power against presentation.Purging and preparing shellfish you have gathered
What to do between the shore and the pan, why purging works for some shellfish and not others, and the one test that decides whether an animal is safe to cook.
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Rain and fishing: before, during and after
Three different situations that are routinely collapsed into one question, with different mechanisms behind each — and in fresh water the largest effect of rain has nothing to do with the rain itself.Rattles, vibration and the lateral line
Fish sense water movement close in through the lateral line and pressure waves further out through hearing, and lure marketing routinely credits rattles with a range the near-field sense does not have.Reading a coast for the fly
A fly angler covers a fraction of the water a bait angler does, so where they stand matters more. The whole problem is putting a short cast where moving water is delivering food.Reading a river for fish
A river is a repeating sequence of the same few features, and each one holds fish for a different reason. Learning the sequence means arriving at an unfamiliar river already knowing where to look.Reading a shingle beach
Steep shingle behaves nothing like flat sand: deep water within a rod's length, a powerful undertow, a strong lateral drift, and a species mix that follows from all three. It is the most transferable piece of shore-reading there is.Reading a tide for fishing
Not how tides work, and not how to read a table — which state of the tide fishes, and why the answer is a property of the mark rather than of the tide.Reading the tide
The single most important variable in sea fishing: what moves the water, when it moves fastest, and why the same mark is a different place at every hour.Reading underwater conditions
Visibility, current, swell and thermoclines decide whether a dive happens and what it can achieve — far more reliably than skill does.Reading water
Fish are not distributed evenly, and the single largest variable in fishing is being in the right place — which is a skill of observation rather than of tackle.Redds, spawning, and what happens after
A redd is a nest cut in river gravel by the female's tail, and everything about whether the next generation survives depends on water continuing to flow through that gravel for months afterwards.Reef and kelp diving compared
Two structurally complex environments that hold fish for the same reason and present opposite problems: reef is a maze you can see through, and kelp is a forest you cannot.Reef fish territory, and where a species holds
Fish occupy predictable positions relative to structure, flow and light, and the position is a consequence of how the species feeds and what eats it — which makes it one of the most transferable pieces of knowledge in fishing.Reel jams, clips and the rigging that fails quietly
The small hardware between a diver, a gun and a float — clips, swivels, reels, crimps and line stops — fails more often than anything expensive on the rig, and its failures are the ones that put loose line around a person.Reels, float lines and breakaway systems
Three ways of staying connected to a shot fish, and what actually separates them is what happens when something goes wrong — which is why the choice is a safety decision as much as a fishing one.Rescue principles for a blacked-out diver
The buddy system only works if the person watching knows what to do in the seconds after they see it — and this is the one subject in the discipline where reading is explicitly not enough.Reservoir fishing and depth
A deep engineered water hides its features under the surface and stratifies in summer, which turns 'where are the fish' into a vertical question before it is a horizontal one.Retrieve speed and the pause
Speed sets what the lure does and how much water it covers; the pause sets what a following fish is offered — and the two are the variables an angler controls directly rather than buys.Reviving a fish before release
A fish that will not swim away has not recovered, and letting go of it is not releasing it. Reviving means restoring water flow over the gills and waiting — and one widely repeated technique makes things worse.Rig components, and what each one is for
Swivels, beads, clips, booms, crimps, links and sleeves. Each is answering a specific problem, and a rig carrying components whose purpose the builder cannot state is a rig with unnecessary failure points.Rig safety: what happens if the line breaks
Every rig should be designed so that a fish which breaks free is genuinely free. A fish towing a fixed lead or a length of line is not lost — it is condemned, and the design choice that decides this is made before the cast.Rigging a fishing kayak
Everything is either secured, leashed or expendable, because the kayak will eventually be upside down. Beyond that, the constraint that shapes kayak tackle is that nothing can be fetched.River levels, and what a flood changes
A river coming up, at its peak, and falling are three different fisheries. Most of what is said about high water is true of exactly one of them, and knowing which is the whole skill.Rod action and power
Action is where a rod bends and power is how much force it takes to bend it, and treating the two words as synonyms is the commonest tackle misunderstanding there is.Rod length and casting distance
A longer rod increases the arc the lead is accelerated through, which is why beach rods are long — but length costs control, accuracy and comfort, and past a point it costs distance too.Roller and inverted-roller spearguns
A band routed over a pulley at the muzzle so that it pulls along the whole length of the gun rather than only the back half — a mechanical arrangement with real advantages and real complications.Running and fixed rigs: where the resistance is
The most consequential structural choice in terminal tackle. Whether a fish meets the weight when it moves the bait decides how the bite registers, how the hook is set, and what the fish does next.The River Spey and Atlantic salmon
A fast, clean, powerful Scottish river that gave its name to a casting technique used worldwide — and a case study in how a river's physical character produces both its fishery and its tackle.
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Salt, corrosion and what it does to tackle
The constraint that shapes every piece of sea tackle: salt water attacks metal continuously, and the failures it causes arrive without warning at load.Saltwater fly fishing: what changes
The casting is the same and almost nothing else is: heavier and more aggressive lines, shorter and stronger leaders, a reel that has to work, flies that imitate baitfish and crustaceans, and salt that destroys whatever is not rinsed.Schooling behaviour, seen from inside
A school is an anti-predator system with documented functions, and a diver swimming into one is inside a structure that exists specifically to defeat what they are trying to do.Scombroid poisoning, and why some fish must be chilled immediately
In mackerel, tuna and their relatives, bacteria convert a natural muscle compound into histamine as soon as the fish warms — and no amount of cooking removes it. Rapid chilling is the entire control.Scuba spearfishing, and why it is treated separately
Using compressed air removes the constraint that limits what breath-hold spearfishing can take — which is why it is regulated separately almost everywhere and why the two are treated as different activities rather than as one with better equipment.Sea fishing baits, and what lives locally
Sea baits are overwhelmingly the marine invertebrates that live on the ground you are standing on, which ties bait choice to the shore itself rather than to a shop — and makes the answer local by nature.Seasickness and boat days
Ordinary, under-covered, and a genuine safety matter rather than only a misery — a seasick diver is dehydrated, exhausted and inattentive, which is three of the things that reduce the margin.Seasonal rivers, and water that is not always there
Across most of the world's land area a river is a seasonal event rather than a permanent feature, and the fish that live in one are adapted to surviving in disconnected pools until the water returns.Shafts, threads and shaft diameter
The shaft is the part that actually reaches the fish, and its diameter, stiffness and tip attachment decide whether the gun's energy becomes penetration or becomes a bent piece of steel.Shallow-water blackout: what it is, and why it gives no warning
Loss of consciousness from low blood oxygen, occurring most often at or just below the surface on ascent — and the reason it gives no warning is that the sensation people rely on is driven by carbon dioxide rather than by oxygen.Shellfish biotoxins, algal blooms and the closure system
Filter feeders concentrate toxins produced by algae. The toxins are invisible, tasteless and survive cooking, and the only usable answer to 'is this bed safe' is the competent authority's current determination.Shock leaders, and why they are not optional
A heavy length of line taking the casting load, so that the main line is never asked to accelerate a lead it cannot hold. This is a safety requirement rather than a refinement, and the reason is what a released lead does downrange.Shooting heads and what a saltwater fly line is for
In fresh water the line is chosen for presentation. On a coast it is chosen for distance into wind, and that single change of priority reshapes the whole outfit.Shooting line: monofilament or Dyneema
The line connecting shaft to gun has to survive shock loading and abrasion against rock, and the choice between the two materials is also a choice about how the line behaves when it is around a diver.Shore diving and boat diving compared
The same activity with a different escape plan. A shore dive is limited by what you can swim back from; a boat dive is limited by whether the boat is still there and whether anybody on it is watching.Sight fishing and blind searching
Two ways of finding a fish with a fly, requiring different equipment, different water and different temperaments — and the choice between them is made by the light and the ground rather than by preference.Sinker, weight and lead: regional vocabulary
Three words for the same object across three traditions — and one of them, lead, names a material that a growing number of jurisdictions restrict, which turns a vocabulary question into a compliance one.Sit-on-top and why the hull is a safety decision
The difference between a sit-on-top and a sit-inside is not comfort or preference. One can be climbed back onto in deep water and the other generally cannot, and that is the whole argument.Slack water, and why it is different
The period when the tidal stream stops before reversing. It behaves like neither the flood nor the ebb, it is frequently the worst fishing of the cycle, and on some ground it is the only fishable window there is.Smoltification, and the change that makes the sea possible
A full metamorphosis rather than a growth stage: over weeks a river fish rebuilds its physiology, its appearance and its behaviour into a sea fish, and the window in which it can make the crossing is narrow.Snorkels, gloves, socks and hoods
The small items, each solving one specific problem — and the snorkel carries a safety rule most self-taught divers have never been told.Soft plastic rigging
The same soft plastic body can be fished weedless, weighted, or with no weight at all, and the rigging decides its depth, its fall and whether it can be fished where the fish are.Sound, vibration and the lateral line
Fish detect water movement with a sense people do not have, and it works in the dark, round corners and behind them — which is why a diver is often detected before being seen.Spawning aggregations, and why they are vulnerable
A spawning aggregation concentrates a large share of a population's reproduction into one place at one time, in fish that are approachable and large — which makes it the easiest fishing there is and the most consequential.Spawning triggers
Day length sets the calendar and temperature sets the date, with flow, tide and lunar cues fine-tuning the timing for particular species.Spearfishing equipment, and what each item is for
Six things make spearfishing possible and three of them are safety equipment — which is why the kit is best understood as a system with a gun attached rather than as a gun with accessories.Spearfishing in Asia and the Indo-Pacific
The region where spearfishing is least likely to be recreation — subsistence fisheries, the Japanese ama diving tradition, and the richest reef fish communities on earth under substantial pressure.Spearfishing in Australia and New Zealand
Among the largest and best-organised spearfishing communities anywhere, spanning tropical reef to cold temperate kelp, with a safety culture built around two hazards that dominate everything else.Spearfishing in North American waters
Three unrelated environments — Pacific kelp forest, Florida and Gulf reef, and the cold Pacific Northwest — under one heading, with a regulatory structure that varies by state and by jurisdictional zone.Spearfishing in northern European waters
Cold water that is frequently very clear, a brackish sea with a fish community found almost nowhere else, and a season shaped by ice and daylight rather than by swell.Spearfishing in southern and eastern Africa
Two oceans meeting at one country's coast — cold Atlantic upwelling on one side, warm Indian Ocean on the other — and a blue-water tradition that has produced some of the discipline's most demanding diving.Spearfishing in the Canary Islands and Macaronesia
Oceanic volcanoes with almost no shelf, so the deep water starts at the beach — and a catch record showing that ninety per cent of the divers cannot reach it. The archipelago's diving is defined by the gap between the depth available and the depth a breath-hold can use.Spearfishing in the Caribbean and Central America
Warm clear reef, a living subsistence tradition, heavy visitor pressure, and the one place where removal by divers is treated as a conservation measure rather than tolerated as a hobby.Spearfishing in UK and Irish waters
Cold, tidal, kelp-dominated water with visibility measured in single metres — an environment that makes almost all internationally produced spearfishing material inapplicable, and that rewards a completely different set of skills.Spearfishing myths, and what is actually known
Six claims that recur, set against what evidence establishes and what it does not — chosen because each one has a consequence, not because any of them is easy to knock down.Spearfishing on Atlantic Europe's coasts
The same countries as the Mediterranean tradition, facing an ocean instead of a sea — and the swell, tidal range and cold that come with it change the diving completely.Spearfishing terminology
The vocabulary of this discipline is Italian, French, Hawaiian and English at once, because the equipment and the techniques came from different places — and knowing which word belongs to which tradition explains more than a definition does.Spearfishing wetsuits: open cell and closed cell
A spearfishing suit is warmth equipment, and warmth is dive time — which makes it the item that most decides how long a session can safely last, and the one beginners most often buy last.Speargun length, and what it decides
Length trades reach and accuracy against manoeuvrability, and the water decides which matters — a hole hunter and a blue-water diver need opposite answers, which is why there is no beginner's number.Speargun or pole spear to start with
A pole spear demands a better approach and forgives less; a gun is more capable and more to manage. The choice depends on the water and, in several places, on what is permitted there.Spearguns and slings
Band guns, pneumatic guns and pole spears differ in range, power, noise and simplicity, and the right choice follows from the water being dived rather than from the specification.Spey and two-handed casting concepts
A family of casts that change direction using the water's grip on the line instead of a back cast, developed for big rivers with no room behind the angler.Spinner blade shape
A blade's outline decides the angle it spins at, and that angle decides how much drag and vibration it makes and therefore how deep it can be fished and how far away it can be sensed.Spinner or spoon: two different ways of making flash
Both produce flash and vibration and they produce them by different mechanisms, with different depth behaviour and one of them putting a great deal more twist into your line.Spinning, casting and retrieving
Three words that anglers use interchangeably and practitioners do not — and one of them names a reel, a technique and a lure category simultaneously, which is where most of the confusion starts.Squid at night, and what lights actually do
Squid fishing concentrates after dark not because squid prefer darkness, but because light creates a food chain in the water and the squid arrive at the end of it.Squid fishing from the shore
A shore fishery for an animal that lives about a year, comes inshore to breed and die, and is caught on a barbed jig it grabs rather than swallows — which changes almost everything about how it is fished.Storing, freezing and thawing a catch
Freezing stops bacterial growth and does not undo anything. What comes out is limited by what went in, and the two failure modes — texture damage and slow oxidation — have different causes and different fixes.Strike indicators, and when they help
A visible marker on the leader that shows a take the angler cannot feel. It solves a real problem, imposes real costs, and is regulated as a float on some water.Stringers, catch bags, and keeping fish away from you
Where the catch is carried is a genuine safety decision in water holding sharks, and it is almost never presented as one.Suit tears, fin straps and personal kit that fails mid-session
The kit that keeps a diver warm, mobile and floating is the kit most exposed to rock, and its failures shift from inconvenient to serious as the water gets colder and the exit gets further away.Surface intervals and recovery breathing
Risk in a spearfishing session accumulates between dives rather than within any one of them, and the surface interval is the only control — which is why it is treated here as recovery rather than as a route to more time down.Surge, and how it behaves around structure
Swell arriving at the coast becomes back-and-forth water movement that amplifies near the bottom, in gullies and against rock — and it is surge rather than the swell itself that puts divers into the ground.Swim bladders, buoyancy and barotrauma
A swim bladder is a gas-filled organ that expands as pressure falls, and a fish hauled up quickly from depth cannot deflate it fast enough to swim back down.Swivels, links and connectors
Small components that solve two specific problems — line twist and quick changes — and that add a failure point and a visible object to a rig every time they are used.The strip retrieve and the strip strike
In salt water the line is retrieved by hand, so the hand — not the rod — sets the hook. Lifting the rod is correct for a trout and is how a first saltwater fish is lost.
T
Tackle management on a kayak
A kayak is a small moving platform with no spare surface, and the difference between a tidy deck and a cluttered one is a difference in what happens during a capsize rather than in convenience.Taking crustaceans on breath-hold
Hand-gathering crustaceans on a breath-hold is a different activity from spearfishing that happens to share the equipment: the animal is in a hole, both hands are needed, and the diver's attention is entirely on the rock rather than on the water.Telling juveniles from adults underwater
Juveniles frequently differ from adults in colour, pattern, proportion and habitat — sometimes enough to look like another species entirely — and they are exactly the fish a size limit exists to protect.Thermoclines and stratification
A summer lake separates into a warm surface layer and a cold deep one with a sharp boundary between them, and the deep layer often runs out of oxygen — which puts fish in a narrower band than the depth chart suggests.Thermoclines, and where they put the fish
A sharp boundary between warmer water above and colder below, visible as a shimmering layer, which concentrates life at the interface and reminds a diver that their suit was chosen for the surface.Tide and current for divers
Tide decides where food is delivered and whether a diver can get back — and the second consideration outranks the first every time.Tippet size, and when to go finer
Finer tippet buys better presentation and costs breaking strain and fish-welfare margin. The decision is a trade, and it is usually made in the wrong direction.Towing and assisting another kayak
Self-rescue is the half of the problem a paddler can practise alone. The other half arrives when somebody else is the one in trouble, and it is the reason paddling in company is a technique rather than a preference.Transporting and storing a fishing kayak
The part of kayak fishing that happens on land, damages more kayaks than the sea does, and carries a biosecurity consequence nobody associates with a boat.Travelling with spearfishing equipment
The durable parts of travelling to dive are the research done before booking and the assumptions worth abandoning — not the baggage rules, which change and which this platform does not maintain.Trout, char and salmon: what the words actually mean
Three words covering one family and three genera, applied so inconsistently that two of the most familiar trout in the world are not trout at all.Turbidity and visibility
Turbidity shortens the distance at which anything can be seen, which shifts the balance from sight-hunting to vibration and scent for fish and anglers alike.
U
Upwelling, and the coasts it makes
Wind pushes surface water away from a coast, deep water rises to replace it, and because deep water carries the nutrients that sunlight cannot reach, a handful of coasts become the most productive fishing grounds on earth.Urban and canal fishing
The most accessible fishing in the country, on water most anglers drive past, with a structure-reading problem quite unlike anything on a river or a lake.Using a kayak as a dive platform
Two disciplines whose hazards multiply rather than add: a diver away from the craft, a craft that drifts, and — unless it is deliberately arranged otherwise — nobody on the surface watching.
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Warm-water fishing, and the oxygen problem
Warm water holds less oxygen while the fish needs more of it, and that squeeze explains where fish go in a heatwave, why they stop feeding, and why released fish die.Water temperature and fish activity
Fish are ectothermic, so water temperature sets their metabolic rate — and therefore how much they need to eat and how hard they will work for it.Water temperature and what it does to a fish
A fish's body temperature is the water's temperature, so temperature sets its metabolic rate, its oxygen demand, its digestion speed and therefore how much and how often it needs to eat.Weak links and rotten bottoms
A deliberately weaker connection above the lead, so that a snag costs a weight rather than a whole trace — the single cheapest change that reduces both the tackle bill and what is left in the water.Weather fronts, and what can honestly be said
Anglers are certain that pressure affects fishing and the controlled evidence is thin. What is well supported is that fronts change light, wind, temperature and water — and those are enough to explain most of it.Weather windows in sea fishing
A weather window is a period in which conditions are workable rather than merely forecast, and reading one means understanding wind, swell, tide and their interactions rather than a single number.Weed, and what to do when it is running
Weed makes some marks unfishable and it is substantially predictable from wind, swell and the state of the tide — which turns a wasted journey into a decision made at home.Weighting and buoyancy in spearfishing
Weighting offsets the buoyancy of a wetsuit, and getting it wrong is the difference between an unconscious diver floating to the surface and one that does not.Weighting, and the margin that keeps you at the surface
A wetsuit compresses with depth, so a diver weighted to feel comfortable at ten metres is dangerously heavy at the surface — and being positively buoyant at the surface is what keeps an unconscious diver's face out of the water.Weights and sinkers: converting ounces, grams and swan shot
Two of the three systems British anglers use for weight convert exactly. The third — the traditional shot sizes — does not, and this page exists mainly to say so rather than to publish a table that would look authoritative and would not be.Wetsuits, fins and masks for spearfishing
Freediving equipment is built for a single breath: low-volume masks that waste less air to equalise, long fins that move water efficiently, and suits that trade convenience for warmth and camouflage.Wetting, seating and tag ends: the three things that decide whether a knot holds
Three habits, none of which appear in a knot diagram, and which between them account for most knot failures. The diagram shows the shape; these decide whether the shape survives contact with a fish.What a bait imitates, and why that matters
Most baits work because they resemble something the fish already eats. A few work for the opposite reason — they resemble nothing at all and have been learned as food — and the two mechanisms need completely different thinking.What a drag is, and how to set one
The drag decides the maximum force that can ever reach your knot, your hook hold and the fish. It is the most consequential setting on a reel and the one most beginners never deliberately touch.What a fish can see of you underwater
A fish sees contrast, movement and silhouette long before it sees colour — and from below, a diver against the bright surface is the most conspicuous thing in the water regardless of what they are wearing.What a leader is, and when you need one
A leader is a different length of line joined to the end of your main line. It solves four quite different problems, and a beginner who has been told to use one usually has not been told which of the four applies to them.What a rig does, and how to read one
A skill rather than a definition: given a diagram of an unfamiliar rig, work out what it is for by tracing where the load goes, where the resistance sits and what happens when it snags.What a rig is
A rig is the arrangement of everything between the end of your main line and the hook. The word appears on almost every page of this platform, and this is where it is defined for somebody meeting it for the first time.What a saltwater fly imitates
There are no insects in the sea. A saltwater fly imitates a baitfish, a shrimp or a crab, and the three behave so differently that choosing between them is a decision about movement rather than about colour.What a tide table is telling you
A literacy page rather than a mechanism page: what the numbers in a tide table mean, what they are measured from, what they do not tell you, and why the height matters as much as the time.What actually happens to a released fish
Releasing a fish is not the same as the fish surviving, and the difference is decided almost entirely by things the angler controls.What lure action means
Action is the pattern of movement a lure makes when water flows past it, produced by shape and mass distribution, and it is the property that separates a lure from a piece of metal on a hook.What order to buy equipment in
Mask, fins, suit, weights, float and knife before the gun — and the reason is not budgeting. Every item before the gun is either a prerequisite for being in the water or a piece of safety equipment.What rod action and rod power actually mean
Action is WHERE a rod bends. Power is HOW MUCH force it takes to bend it. They are independent properties, routinely used as if they were the same one, and the confusion costs people the rod they wanted.What salmon eat at each stage of life
Four diets in one life: gravel invertebrates as a juvenile, an enormous marine diet that produces almost all the growth, and then — on the return — no feeding at all, which is the central strangeness of salmon angling.What salt water does to fly tackle
A trout reel stores line and a saltwater reel fights fish, which is why the drag is sealed — and why the single habit that decides how long an outfit lasts takes two minutes at the end of a session.What spearfishing is, and what it demands
Hunting fish underwater on a single breath, at close range, with a weapon — three constraints that between them explain every technique, every piece of equipment and every rule in the discipline.What squid fishing actually is
Squid are not caught on hooks and they are not caught on bait. They are caught because they attack a lure and hold it — and understanding that changes everything about the tackle.What stress does to a fish
A caught fish undergoes a measurable physiological cascade — hormonal, metabolic and chemical — and the recovery from it takes hours. Most of what an angler can do to improve survival is about limiting how far that cascade goes.What to do with bait you did not use
Tipping leftover bait into the water at the end of a session is one of the principal routes by which non-native species, pathogens and parasites are introduced. It is also almost universally done with good intentions.What to expect on a first dive
Cold, breathless, unable to equalise, unable to see much, and no fish — described honestly, because a beginner who expects this stops when they should and a beginner who expects otherwise pushes through.What you actually need to start fishing
A rod, a reel, line, hooks, weights, something to cut with and permission. Everything else is a preference, and most of what is sold to beginners is a preference.When and where squid come inshore
The inshore squid season is a spawning migration by an animal that will die at the end of it, which is why it is short, why it moves between years, and why the numbers swing so hard.When conditions turn during a session
Conditions deteriorate faster than divers notice, because the diver is absorbed, cold and progressively less capable of judging — which is why the decision is agreed on land before anybody has anything invested.When fish feed, and why timing is not a rule
Fish feed when the balance between how easily they can catch food and how easily something can catch them tips in their favour, which is why dawn and dusk are good and why that is not a law.When to call a dive off
The most valuable decision in the discipline and the least taught — and the reason it is hard is that every factor pushing towards getting in is immediate while every factor pushing against it is hypothetical.When topwater lures work
A surface lure asks a fish to come up and commit in the open, so the conditions that suit it are the ones that make that a reasonable thing for a fish to do.Where a kayak changes the fishing
A kayak changes access, silence and positioning. It does not change what a fish eats, and the difference between those two statements is the whole of this subject.Where bait comes from, and the rules that apply
Bait is bought, collected or bred, and each route carries a different set of obligations — to the ground it comes from, to the water it is going to, and to whatever rules apply where you are standing.Where eels spawn, and why nobody has watched
The spawning ground was inferred from the sizes of larvae rather than seen, and more than a century after that inference nobody has observed a European eel spawning in the wild.Where fly fishing goes beyond trout
Fly fishing is a casting system, not a water type or a species. Anything that eats something a fly can imitate can be caught on one, and most of them are not trout.Where squid are found inshore
Squid come inshore for two reasons — to feed and to spawn — and the ground they use is decided by clean water, weed or sand to lay eggs on, and something concentrating bait.Which equipment failures end a dive, and which end a session
The same catalogue describes a torn glove and a jammed quick release, and a reader has no way to tell which one means get out of the water — this page is the ladder that separates them.Why a fish has a slime coat
The mucus layer is a fish's skin, immune barrier and hydrodynamic surface at once, and it is removed by dry hands, dry surfaces and knotted nets — which is why handling advice is about the surface as much as the time.Why a lead will not hold bottom
Weight is one of eight causes and rarely the first one worth changing — the usual culprit is the line, not the lead, because the tide is pulling on far more of it than most anglers picture.Why a reel drag sticks or judders
A drag that grabs and releases is one whose start-up friction has risen above its running friction, and the three causes — salt, compression and the wrong lubricant — are all things done to the reel rather than faults in it.Why bait comes off the hook
Three different problems wearing one complaint — bait lost on the cast, bait stripped in the water, and bait that has washed out and is still there but no longer working.Why bait dies quickly
Almost all live bait dies of one of four things — heat, oxygen, its own waste, or handling damage — and three of them are the same problem seen from different angles.Why bites stop suddenly
Bites stopping is usually one of three things — the fish left, the fish stopped feeding, or something the angler changed — and the third is far more common than anglers assume and the easiest to test.Why braid digs into the spool
Braid has no stretch and a small bearing area, so line wound on slackly is pulled down between the turns beneath it under load — a purely mechanical problem with a purely mechanical fix.Why casts fall short or tangle
A cast that falls short and a cast that tangles usually have the same root cause — the rod is not loading, or the terminal tackle is not travelling straight — and both are diagnosable rather than a matter of strength.Why colour disappears with depth
Water absorbs light unevenly by wavelength, so red is effectively gone within the first few metres and every colour follows it — which means the character most people would name first is the one least available when it is needed.Why European eel populations collapsed
Recruitment of young eels to European rivers fell by around two orders of magnitude within a few decades. Several causes are established, their relative weight is not, and that combination is what makes the collapse so hard to reverse.Why fish are hooked deeply, and how to reduce it
Deep hooking is the single largest controllable influence on whether a released fish survives, and the factors that drive it — bait type, hook pattern, and how long a bite is allowed to develop — are all decisions the angler makes before the fish arrives.Why fish come off during the fight
A fish lost mid-fight has usually failed in one of four ways, and they are distinguishable — the hook never went in, the hold tore, the hook opened, or something in the tackle gave.Why fish follow a lure and turn away
A follow is a fish that has committed to investigating and then found something wrong at close range — and the honest position is that the mechanism is well understood while the remedy is practitioner consensus rather than evidence.Why fish look bigger underwater
A flat mask faceplate bends light at the water–air boundary, so everything looks larger and closer than it is — an error that runs in the direction most likely to make a diver shoot an undersized fish.Why fish migrate
Migration is an energetic bet: a fish moves because the pay-off from feeding, breeding or surviving somewhere else exceeds the very large cost of getting there. Every migration pattern is a different version of that calculation.Why fish shoal
Shoaling reduces each individual's chance of being eaten and improves the odds of finding food, which is why prey species shoal tightly and predators exploit the edges.Why fly tackle is built the way it is
Every unusual feature of a fly outfit follows from one inversion: the line is the weight, so the rod, the reel and the line ratings all exist to serve a heavy line and a weightless hook.Why hooks straighten or open
A hook opens when the load through it exceeds what its wire can carry, and since the angler sets the load through drag, rod and line choice, an opened hook is usually a statement about the tackle rather than about the fish.Why hyperventilation before a dive is dangerous
Rapid deep breathing before a breath-hold lowers carbon dioxide without meaningfully raising oxygen — so it delays the urge to breathe while leaving the oxygen supply unchanged, which is precisely the combination that produces blackout without warning.Why knot strength tables disagree
Published knot strength percentages contradict each other because the tests behind them differ in almost every variable that matters. FishingHQ does not publish a table, and this is the record explaining why.Why knots slip or break
A knot fails in one of three distinguishable ways, and the way it failed is written into what is left on the line — which makes knot failure one of the few angling problems that can be diagnosed after the fact.Why line twists, and how to stop it
Line twist is rotation stored along the line's own axis, and almost all of it is put there by four identifiable mechanisms — every one of which can be removed rather than managed.Why rigs snag, and how to reduce it
Five different snags with five different answers — the lead, the hook, the line, the retrieve angle and the weed — and the fix that works for one makes another worse.Why rigs tangle, and the principles that stop it
A rig tangles in flight, not in the water — and almost every fix is about making the hook end travel behind the lead rather than beside it.Why spearfishing is never a solo activity
A blackout is survivable if somebody competent is watching and is close enough to reach you, and is otherwise almost always fatal — which makes the buddy the single load-bearing component of the entire safety system.Why the fish are not where they were last week
Fish move for reasons that are largely documented, and the honest answer separates three tiers — what is established, what correlates without an established mechanism, and what is repeated until it sounds like knowledge.Wind, and where it puts the food
Wind moves the surface layer downwind, and everything floating in it goes too — which is why the uncomfortable bank is usually the productive one.Working through no bites at all
A structured way through the commonest question in fishing, ordered so that the things you can change come before the things you cannot — and ending with the answer nobody wants, which is that some sessions are blank.Wreck fishing
A wreck is a large piece of hard structure standing in otherwise featureless ground, so it concentrates life vertically — and holding a bait beside it without losing tackle in it is the whole craft.
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