A fish that comes off, and what you owe it

Everything that can be done AFTER a fish comes off is worse than what could have been decided before the trigger, which makes this a record about declining rather than about recovering.

THE RANGE DECISION. A shaft loses energy across the water, and the range at which a gun will pass a shaft cleanly through a fish is much shorter than the range at which it will reach one. A shot at the edge of a gun's reach is a shot with a high chance of a shallow wound and a torn exit. Closing the distance is what the technique — waiting or stalking — exists to do, and taking the long shot instead is skipping the discipline.

THE ANGLE DECISION. A fish square-on to the diver, at ninety degrees to the shaft's path, gives the tip the best chance of passing through and deploying behind bone and muscle rather than tearing out of a flank. A fish angling away, or head-on, presents an oblique path where the shaft skates or enters shallowly. Waiting for the fish to turn is free. Taking the angle is not.

THE PLACEMENT DECISION. Aiming for the area of the head, gill plate and shoulder — the spine and the mass around it — kills quickly and holds the fish on the shaft. A shot through the soft rear body will not stop a fish and gives it a large amount of tissue to tear against. This is the same welfare principle that runs through the whole catalogue: a fish should be killed quickly rather than subdued slowly.

THE TIP DECISION, WHICH IS MADE ON LAND. A flopper adequate for reef fish, used on a fish large enough to lever against a rigid shaft, produces exactly the enlarging wound and the pull-out this record is about. Matching the tip to the quarry is an obligation rather than an optimisation, and it is decided when the diver packs the bag rather than when they see the fish.

AND THE GROUND DECISION. A fish that reaches a hole or a kelp stand will use it, and the diver's options then are to pull hard — which tears — or to lose it. Shooting a fish that is already alongside structure, when it could be taken as it comes past, is a choice about where the fight will happen.

WHICH IS WHY DECLINING IS THE SKILL. A diver who takes only the shots they are confident of loses fewer fish, wounds fewer fish, and catches nearly as many — because a fish declined at a bad angle is very often the same fish, twenty seconds later, at a good one. `deciding-not-to-shoot` is the record that makes this an active decision rather than an absence of one, and it is the more important half of this pair.

A diver who has hit a fish has an obligation to end its suffering promptly if that is achievable. The obligation is real, and it has a boundary, and pretending it has no boundary is how a welfare rule becomes a drowning.

THE OBLIGATION FIRST. A fish that is landed, on the spear or on the stringer, is dispatched immediately by a method that renders it insensible at once — an iki-style spike into the brain is the standard practice and is covered in the catch-dispatch record. A fish left to die on a stringer is a fish suffering for the diver's convenience, and 'it was going to die anyway' is not a welfare argument.

A WOUNDED FISH STILL IN THE WATER is the harder case. If it is reachable on the dive you are already on, without extending anything, take it and dispatch it. If it has gone into a hole and can be reached without putting a hand or a head somewhere it should not go, take it. If reaching it means another dive on a short interval, a deeper dive than planned, a reach into structure you cannot see into, or any extension of a breath-hold — LET IT GO.

THAT IS THE BOUNDARY AND IT IS NOT NEGOTIABLE, because the alternative is a welfare rule that instructs a hypoxic diver to chase an injured animal. Blackout gives no warning, and the urge to stay down 'just to finish this' is the specific mechanism that kills freedivers. A page that told a reader otherwise would be doing harm in the name of doing good.

WHAT IS OWED INSTEAD IS AT THE SURFACE. Tell your buddy what happened and where. Note the shot that produced it. And if the same shot is producing the same outcome, change the equipment or change the shots, because a pattern of wounded fish is a pattern of decisions rather than bad luck.

AND THE CONSERVATION POINT SITS ALONGSIDE THE WELFARE ONE. Unrecovered fish are invisible to every count that manages a fishery. Bag limits, size limits and seasonal closures are all computed on what is landed, and a diver losing fish is taking more than they report while believing they are inside the rules. That is a reason to shoot less rather than a reason to feel worse.

Spearfishing is regulated differently in every jurisdiction and frequently differently within one — on equipment, on areas, on seasons, on species, on minimum sizes, on the use of any breathing apparatus and on who may do it at all. Those rules change. Check the current rules with the authority for the water you are diving before you go.