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.
Spearfishing equipment, and what each item is for
Explainer · Last reviewed 2026-08-18
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.
Safety
Drowning and immersion — Can cause serious injury or death
Half of this equipment list catches fish and half of it keeps a person alive, and a reader who treats it as one list buys in the wrong order. A weight belt without a working quick release, or a session without a float and a reachable cutting tool, removes the margin that keeps an unconscious or entangled diver at the surface.
What reduces it: Treat the weight belt and its quick release, the marked float and line, and the cutting tool as the non-negotiable core, and the hunting equipment as what comes after. Operate the quick release before every entry rather than assuming it.
Precautions that always apply here
- Never spearfish or freedive alone.
- Dive one up, one down: one diver down, one on the surface actively watching, every single dive.
- Carry a charged phone in a waterproof case, or another means of calling for help.
Spearfishing kit divides into three groups, and the division matters more than any individual item.
WHAT LETS YOU BE IN THE WATER. A mask to see, a snorkel to breathe at the surface, fins to move, and exposure protection to stay warm long enough to be useful. Without these there is no dive at all, and the last of them is the one beginners underestimate.
WHAT KEEPS YOU SAFE. Weights and a quick-release belt, so you can descend and can stop descending. A float and line, so boats can see you and you have something to hold. A knife, so line can be cut. These are not optional and they are not accessories: each exists because of a specific way people have died.
WHAT CATCHES THE FISH. A speargun or pole spear, a shaft, a tip, and a means of staying connected to a fish — a reel, a float line, or a breakaway system. This is the group the press is interested in and the smallest part of the problem.
The useful insight for somebody assembling kit is that the third group is the only one where the choice is genuinely personal. The first two have close to right answers for a given water, and getting them wrong makes a dive uncomfortable, cold, short or dangerous regardless of what is in your hands.
Why the system matters more than the items
Spearfishing kit interacts, and the interactions are where beginners come unstuck.
A thicker wetsuit is more buoyant, so it needs more weight. More weight needs a belt that releases reliably. Deeper diving compresses the suit, so the weighting that felt right in the shallows is wrong at depth — which is why the weighting page is a safety page rather than an equipment one.
A longer gun is more accurate at range and unusable in a hole. A reel keeps the line with you and can tangle around you; a float line keeps it away and drags. Each of those is a trade rather than an upgrade, and the water decides.
Even the mask participates: a low-volume mask needs less air to equalise, which is why freediving masks look different from scuba ones.
The practical consequence is that buying the cheapest version of each item independently produces a worse system than buying a coherent one, and that the coherence is decided by where you are diving rather than by what is on offer.
What differs by region and by water
Cold-water and warm-water spearfishing are almost different sports at the equipment level.
A diver in British, Irish or Scandinavian water is in 5–7 mm of neoprene with hood, gloves and socks, carrying substantially more weight to compensate, in visibility that is frequently a few metres. A diver on a Mediterranean summer coast may be in 3 mm or less. A Caribbean or Indo-Pacific diver may be in a thin suit or a rash vest.
That single variable cascades: suit thickness sets weighting, weighting sets belt requirements, cold sets session length, and visibility sets useful gun length.
Terminology diverges too. The gun is a fucile in Italy, an arbalète in France, and simply a gun through most of the English-speaking world. Pole spears are widespread in the Pacific and Caribbean and comparatively rare in northern Europe. None of that changes the mechanics, and all of it changes what a reader will encounter when they look for more.
Where to go next
Where it matters
- SpearfishingThe entry point to the equipment system, half of which is safety equipment rather than fishing equipment.
- Shore divingCold-water shore diving sets the thickest exposure requirement and therefore the whole weighting chain.
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.
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 discipline record is where somebody assembling a first kit begins.
- BSAC diving safety guidance and annual incident report — British Sub-Aqua Club (Water-safety or diver-training authority)Relied on for: Diving equipment and safety guidance including exposure protection and surface marking.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
Shore diving
Environment decides most of the kit.
- BSAC diving safety guidance and annual incident report — British Sub-Aqua Club (Water-safety or diver-training authority)Relied on for: Diving equipment and safety guidance including exposure protection and surface marking.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
How this compares
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.
Wetsuits, fins and masks for spearfishing
The two equipment sets overlap almost entirely below the gun.
- BSAC diving safety guidance and annual incident report — British Sub-Aqua Club (Water-safety or diver-training authority)Relied on for: Diving equipment and safety guidance including exposure protection and surface marking.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
- BSAC diving safety guidance and annual incident report — British Sub-Aqua Club (Water-safety or diver-training authority)Relied on for: Diving equipment and safety guidance including exposure protection and surface marking.Background and mechanism onlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
- AIDA International freediving education and safety standards — AIDA International (Water-safety or diver-training authority)Relied on for: Freediving equipment standards including mask, fins and weighting.Background and mechanism onlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
How FishingHQ labels evidence is explained in the evidence policy.