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.
Planning a dive session
Explainer · Last reviewed 2026-08-27
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.
Safety
Fishing alone — Can cause serious injury or death
A session without a competent buddy, without an agreed protocol, or without anybody ashore knowing where the diver is removes the mitigations that make a blackout or an injury survivable.
What reduces it: A buddy who is present, trained and briefed; an agreed signal to end the session that either person may give; somebody ashore who knows the location and expected return time; and a plan whose limits are set before entering the water.
There is a pre-dive equipment checklist elsewhere in this family. This is the other half: the decisions about where, when, how long and with whom, all of which are made badly once a diver is already committed.
WHY PLANNING IS A SAFETY SUBJECT RATHER THAN AN ORGANISATIONAL ONE. Everything that degrades judgement in this discipline — cold, fatigue, hypoxia, the pull of a fish that is nearly landed — happens during the session. A plan made beforehand is made by the version of the diver best able to make it, and it exists to be obeyed by the version who is least able.
WHAT A PLAN ACTUALLY CONTAINS.
WHO. A buddy who is present, competent, and who has agreed the protocol — including who watches when, and what the signal to end the session is. "Somebody else who is also diving" is not a buddy.
WHERE, AND SPECIFICALLY THE EXIT. Entry, planned exit, and an alternative exit. The exit is checked first because it is the part that becomes impossible.
WHEN. State of tide and when it turns; slack water if the site needs it; light, and how much of it is left. The commonest planning failure is not allowing for the exit to happen in daylight.
HOW LONG, decided in advance and treated as a limit rather than a target. Cold and fatigue accumulate across the session, so the session length is a safety parameter.
CONDITIONS, AND THE THRESHOLD AT WHICH YOU DO NOT GET IN. Written down in your own head before you are standing at the water looking at it, because everything at that moment argues for getting in.
WHO KNOWS. Somebody ashore who knows where you are and when you will be back, and who will do something if you are not.
AND WHAT HAPPENS IF. Separation, an injury, a diver who does not surface, no phone signal. The time to work out who calls what is not while it is happening.
The decisions that must be made on land
Some judgements simply cannot be made competently in the water, and it is worth knowing which.
WHETHER TO GET IN AT ALL. Every factor present at the water's edge pushes towards yes: the drive, the day off, the buddy who came, the forecast that was worse yesterday. A threshold set in advance is the only counterweight, and the discipline is in honouring it rather than in setting it.
HOW LONG THE SESSION RUNS. A cold diver decides to do one more dive; a warm one on the beach an hour earlier would not have.
WHAT DEPTH AND WHAT KIND OF DIVING. Decided against how this diver is today rather than against what they managed last month — sleep, illness, alcohol the night before, how recently they have been in the water. Fitness to dive is a session-level question as well as a medical one.
WHAT ENDS THE SESSION. Agreed with the buddy, and worth stating out loud: falling visibility, building swell, cold, a shark whose behaviour changes, an equipment failure, either person feeling wrong. Any one of them, either person's call, no discussion.
AND THE ONE PEOPLE SKIP: WHAT HAPPENS AFTER. Getting warm, getting fed, and whether the drive home is being done by somebody who has been cold and hypoxic for three hours. Fatigue after a long session is real and it does not end at the car park.
Authoritative guidance
Stated by a fisheries authority, scientific institute or recognised angling body. Authoritative, but summarising rather than demonstrating.
- BSAC diving safety guidance and annual incident report — British Sub-Aqua Club (Water-safety or diver-training authority)Relied on for: Dive planning practice including buddy briefing, conditions assessment, exit planning and surface cover.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
- RNLI water safety guidance: cold water shock and Float to Live — Royal National Lifeboat Institution (Water-safety or diver-training authority)Relied on for: Water safety guidance on telling somebody ashore where you are going and when you will return.States this directlyPassage read and verified
Planning somewhere unfamiliar
A plan made for a home mark is built on knowledge the diver has stopped noticing they have. Somewhere new, that knowledge is absent and its absence is invisible.
WHAT TO ESTABLISH BEFORE DIVING AN UNFAMILIAR PLACE.
THE WATER. Temperature, typical visibility, tidal range and stream, prevailing swell, and what the ground is. These change the equipment as well as the plan.
THE EXITS, and how they behave in the conditions forecast rather than the conditions now.
LOCAL HAZARDS a visitor would not predict: boat traffic and its routes, commercial activity, currents at particular states, animals whose behaviour is locally specific.
THE FISH, so that identification is not being attempted for the first time with a loaded gun. This is the travel case of the identification rule, and it is why an unfamiliar fish community means shooting less rather than shooting cautiously.
THE RULES, which vary by country, region, site and species and which are not FishingHQ's to state. The responsible fisheries or marine authority and a local club are the sources.
AND THE PEOPLE. A local diver, club or guide will tell you in ten minutes what a week of reading will not, including which of the above they consider so obvious that nobody writes it down. Asking is the single highest-value thing a visiting diver does.
Authoritative guidance
Stated by a fisheries authority, scientific institute or recognised angling body. Authoritative, but summarising rather than demonstrating.
- BSAC diving safety guidance and annual incident report — British Sub-Aqua Club (Water-safety or diver-training authority)Relied on for: Guidance on diving unfamiliar sites and obtaining local knowledge.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
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 decisions the pre-dive equipment checklist does not cover.
- BSAC diving safety guidance and annual incident report — British Sub-Aqua Club (Water-safety or diver-training authority)Relied on for: Diving safety guidance on planning, conditions assessment, buddy protocol, entanglement and equipment handling.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
Related reading
- Tide and current for diversState of tide, when it turns, and planning so that any drift carries the diver towards the exit rather than away from it.
- When to call a dive offThe threshold for not getting in has to be set before standing at the water's edge, where everything argues for getting in.
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.
Tide and current for divers
The condition the plan is mostly built around.
- BSAC diving safety guidance and annual incident report — British Sub-Aqua Club (Water-safety or diver-training authority)Relied on for: Diving safety guidance on planning, conditions assessment, buddy protocol, entanglement and equipment handling.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
When to call a dive off
The decision this record exists to move earlier in the day.
- BSAC diving safety guidance and annual incident report — British Sub-Aqua Club (Water-safety or diver-training authority)Relied on for: Diving safety guidance on planning, conditions assessment, buddy protocol, entanglement and equipment handling.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
How this compares
- A pre-dive safety checklistOne covers the equipment in the ten minutes before entry; the other covers where, when, how long and with whom.
- Travelling with spearfishing equipmentPlanning an unfamiliar site is the same activity with none of the knowledge a home mark supplies invisibly.
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.
A pre-dive safety checklist
Two halves of preparation that are frequently confused for each other.
- BSAC diving safety guidance and annual incident report — British Sub-Aqua Club (Water-safety or diver-training authority)Relied on for: Diving safety guidance on planning, conditions assessment, buddy protocol, entanglement and equipment handling.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
Travelling with spearfishing equipment
The general case and the case where its assumptions fail.
- BSAC diving safety guidance and annual incident report — British Sub-Aqua Club (Water-safety or diver-training authority)Relied on for: Diving safety guidance on planning, conditions assessment, buddy protocol, entanglement and equipment handling.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
Check the rules before you fish
Fishing laws, bylaws, access rules, seasons, bait restrictions and permitted methods vary by location and can change. Check the current rules from the relevant authority and the water you intend to fish before fishing.
Check with:
- Current national or regional law for where you are fishing
- Current local bylaws
- The relevant fisheries authority
- The landowner, club or fishery whose water it is
- Any restrictions specific to the species or the method you intend to use
Sources for this page
- BSAC diving safety guidance and annual incident report — British Sub-Aqua Club (Water-safety or diver-training authority)Relied on for: Dive planning, buddy briefing and surface cover practice.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
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