Before you spearfish — this comes first
- Get proper instruction before you spearfish. A recognised freediving or spearfishing course teaches the things that actually kill people in this sport, and reading about them is not the same as being taught them.
- Dive with a buddy, and dive one up, one down — one diver in the water, one on the surface watching them, every dive. A breath-hold blackout is silent and gives no warning; a watching buddy is the difference between an incident and a fatality.
- Stay inside your own training and experience. Depth and breath-hold times are personal, they change day to day, and nobody else's numbers apply to you.
- Understand the conditions before you enter the water: visibility, current, swell, tide, boat traffic and your exit. Conditions decide whether a dive is reasonable far more often than skill does.
- Use equipment you have been shown how to use, check it before every session, and be visible — a marked float and line are how boat traffic knows you are there.
- Never extend a dive for a fish. No catch is worth pushing a breath-hold, and the urge to take one more second is exactly what a blackout feels like from the inside — which is to say, like nothing at all.
How to start spearfishing
Explainer · Last reviewed 2026-08-19
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.
Safety
Shallow water blackout and breath-hold loss of consciousness — Can cause serious injury or death
Beginners who start without training and without a buddy have no measured knowledge of their own limits, no correct weighting and nobody able to recover them.
What reduces it: A freediving course with a recognised body before starting, a competent buddy every session, shallow familiar water, and short sessions.
The honest sequence is not the one most people follow, and the difference is the whole of this page.
FIRST, TRAINING. A freediving course teaches breathing, equalisation, correct weighting, and — most importantly — rescue. It also tells a diver what their actual limits are, measured under supervision rather than guessed at alone. This is the single recommendation FishingHQ makes without qualification anywhere in the discipline.
SECOND, PEOPLE. Spearfishing alone is the common factor in a large share of fatalities. Finding a club, a course cohort or experienced divers to go with is not a social nicety; it is the safety system. It is also by far the fastest way to learn where fish are and how conditions behave locally.
THIRD, EQUIPMENT, and in a specific order — mask and snorkel, fins, exposure protection, weights and a quick-release belt, float and line, knife, and only then a gun. Every item before the gun is either a prerequisite for being in the water or a piece of safety equipment.
FOURTH, WATER TIME WITHOUT A GUN. Snorkelling the ground you intend to dive, learning the entries and exits, watching what fish do when a person appears. Divers who do this are better hunters within a season than divers who started shooting immediately, because approach is the skill and it is learned by watching.
And throughout: shallow, familiar, sheltered water. Depth adds nothing to a beginner except risk.
What a freediving course actually gives you
The content is more practical than the name suggests, and three parts of it matter immediately.
EQUALISATION taught properly, by somebody who can see what you are doing. This is the technique most self-taught divers get wrong and the cause of most beginner ear injuries.
CORRECT WEIGHTING, checked in the water with supervision. Overweighting is a documented contributor to freediving deaths and it is invisible to somebody who has never been shown what correct feels like.
RESCUE. Recovering an unconscious diver, managing an airway in water, and getting a limp adult to safety are physical skills that cannot be learned from text. A buddy who has not practised them is a witness rather than a safety system — and being that buddy for somebody else is the reason to learn it even if you trust your own limits.
The courses are widely available through recognised bodies, are typically two to three days, and are the cheapest risk reduction available in this activity by a very large margin.
Authoritative guidance
Stated by a fisheries authority, scientific institute or recognised angling body. Authoritative, but summarising rather than demonstrating.
- AIDA International freediving education and safety standards — AIDA International (Water-safety or diver-training authority)Relied on for: Freediving education standards covering equalisation, weighting, buddy procedure and rescue skills.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
- DAN guidance on freediving safety, hypoxia and shallow-water blackout — Divers Alert Network (Water-safety or diver-training authority)Relied on for: Guidance identifying training, correct weighting and buddy practice as primary mitigations in breath-hold diving.States this directlyPassage read and verified
What a first season should look like
Shallow water, familiar ground, short sessions, and a buddy every time.
Most fish taken by beginners are taken in under five metres, and most of what a beginner needs to learn happens there: how to move without alarming things, how fish behave when a diver holds still, how the ground looks from above and from within, and how quickly cold arrives.
Expect to catch very little at first. That is normal and it is not an equipment problem — the commonest beginner reaction is to buy a more powerful gun, and the actual constraint is approach.
And expect the first few sessions to be uncomfortable rather than exciting. Cold, a leaking mask, difficulty equalising and breathlessness are the ordinary early experience, and each has an answer on the troubleshooting pages in this family.
The milestone that matters is not depth or a fish. It is being able to assess conditions honestly, dive within yourself, and come out when something is wrong.
Where to go next
Where it matters
What these connections rest on (1)
Authoritative guidance — 1 connection
Stated by a fisheries authority, scientific institute or recognised angling body. Authoritative, but summarising rather than demonstrating.
Spearfishing
A membership assertion rather than a topical one: this record teaches the discipline or its equipment, so the discipline's mandatory safety posture applies to it.
- CMAS technical and sporting standards for underwater activities — Confédération Mondiale des Activités Subaquatiques (Standards body)Relied on for: Breath-hold spearfishing as a defined discipline with its own technical, equipment and safety standards, set out by the international underwater federation.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
- DAN guidance on freediving safety, hypoxia and shallow-water blackout — Divers Alert Network (Water-safety or diver-training authority)Relied on for: That the safety requirements of breath-hold diving apply across the discipline rather than to particular equipment or techniques within it.States this directlyPassage read and verified
The sequence a beginner should follow.
- AIDA International freediving education and safety standards — AIDA International (Water-safety or diver-training authority)Relied on for: Freediving education standards covering equalisation, weighting, buddy procedure and rescue skills.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
How this compares
- The spearfishing buddy systemFinding people to dive with is the safety system rather than a social nicety.
- Training and coursesA freediving course teaches equalisation, correct weighting and rescue, which is why it comes before any equipment.
What these connections rest on (2)
Authoritative guidance — 2 connections
Stated by a fisheries authority, scientific institute or recognised angling body. Authoritative, but summarising rather than demonstrating.
The spearfishing buddy system
The second step, and the one that makes the rest survivable.
- AIDA International freediving education and safety standards — AIDA International (Water-safety or diver-training authority)Relied on for: Freediving education standards covering equalisation, weighting, buddy procedure and rescue skills.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
Training and courses
The training requirement stated as a first step.
- AIDA International freediving education and safety standards — AIDA International (Water-safety or diver-training authority)Relied on for: Freediving education standards covering equalisation, weighting, buddy procedure and rescue skills.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
More explainer
Not related to this page — just the rest of the section, because this record connects to very little and a short page should still lead somewhere.
Sources for this page
- AIDA International freediving education and safety standards — AIDA International (Water-safety or diver-training authority)Relied on for: Freediving training standards and progression appropriate to beginners.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
How FishingHQ labels evidence is explained in the evidence policy.