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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.

Suit tears, fin straps and personal kit that fails mid-session

Explainer · Last reviewed 2026-08-17

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.

Safety

Hypothermia — Can cause serious injury or death

A torn suit, split hood or lost glove in cold water flushes continuously and accelerates heat loss. Cold degrades judgement — including the decision about when to surface and when to stop — before it produces symptoms a diver recognises, so the impairment arrives ahead of the discomfort.

What reduces it: Treat suit damage in cold water as an immediate end to the session rather than as discomfort. End on the first shiver. Repair at home with the right materials rather than improvising at the water.

Worse when:

  • Late in a session, when core temperature is already down
  • On long swims back to an exit
  • When the diver is stationary, as in waiting technique, and generating no heat

Drowning and immersion — Can cause serious injury or death

A lost fin, a broken strap or a failed blade removes a large part of a diver's ability to swim against moving water, and a weight belt whose quick release has corroded or jammed removes the ability to become buoyant instantly. Both attack the diver's capacity to get to and stay on the surface.

What reduces it: Operate the quick release before every entry rather than assuming it. Replace perished rubber on age. Carry a spare fin strap. Know where the nearest exit is before entering, and abort towards it early rather than late.

Slips, trips and falls — Can cause injury needing treatment

Most of this damage happens on entry and exit over rock, weed and swell — which is also where divers are injured. A failure discovered at the exit is a failure discovered in the worst place for it.

What reduces it: Choose entries and exits for the state of the sea rather than for convenience, carry fins rather than walking in them, and inspect kit before the entry rather than after the exit.

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.
  • Tell somebody where you are going and when you expect to be back.

A speargun lives on a boat or in a hand. A suit, a pair of fins and a weight belt are dragged over rock on every entry and exit, and they are what actually gets damaged.

OPEN-CELL SUITS TEAR EASILY AND THAT IS THE PRICE OF THEM. The interior surface that seals against skin and makes the suit warm is also unlined neoprene, which tears under a fingernail and splits at seams that have been stretched wrong on the way in. Lubricating properly and taking the suit on slowly is not fussiness; it is the difference between a suit that lasts a season and one that is repaired after every trip.

WHAT A TEAR ACTUALLY COSTS depends entirely on water temperature. In warm water it is cosmetic. In cold water a suit that flushes continuously is a suit that is no longer doing the one thing it was chosen for, and the consequence is not discomfort but degraded judgement — cold impairs decision-making before a diver notices being cold, and every decision a breath-hold diver makes is safety-critical.

FIN STRAPS AND FOOT POCKETS. Rubber straps perish with age and ultraviolet, and they part at the buckle where they have been bent thousands of times. Full-foot freediving pockets split at the heel. A fin lost from a diver in calm water beside their entry point is an inconvenience; the same loss on a rock coast with swell running is a diver who cannot swim against water that is moving them.

BLADES BREAK AND USUALLY AT THE FOOT POCKET JOINT, and carbon and fibreglass blades break more suddenly and more completely than plastic ones. A cracked blade will finish a dive and should not start another session.

AND THE WEIGHT BELT BUCKLE IS THE ONE ITEM ON THIS LIST THAT IS ALWAYS SERIOUS. A rubber belt perishes, a buckle corrodes, a quick release that has been packed under a weight will not release, and the belt is the component that has to come off instantly when a diver is in trouble. It is the cheapest thing in the bag and the only one whose failure has no workaround.

Temperature and distance decide how bad each of these is

None of these items has a fixed severity, which is why a list of failures is less useful than the two variables that scale them.

THE FIRST VARIABLE IS WATER TEMPERATURE. A suit tear, a lost glove, a split hood and a flooded boot are all heat-loss failures, and heat loss is a graded problem rather than a binary one. In warm water they cost comfort. Around and below the temperatures at which a suit is the reason a diver can be in the water at all, they cost thinking — and the diver whose judgement is degrading is the same diver deciding when to surface.

THE SECOND IS DISTANCE FROM AN EXIT. A mobility failure — a fin, a strap, a blade — is measured in how far you now have to swim and against what. Beside a beach with no swell it is a nuisance. Two hundred metres along a rock coast with a swell setting onto it, having lost half your propulsion, is a different problem entirely, and it is the one that produces call-outs.

PUT THOSE TOGETHER AND THE RULE FALLS OUT. Cold water or a long exit turns every item on this page into a dive-ending failure. Warm water and a short swim turns most of them into an annoyance. The mistake is applying yesterday's severity to today's conditions.

WHAT TO CARRY, WHICH IS SHORT. A spare fin strap and buckle for a strapped fin, because it is the commonest field failure and the cheapest to fix. Neoprene cement for suits, used at home rather than at the water. A spare mask strap. And knowing where the nearest exit is before entering, which is not equipment but is the thing most likely to matter.

WHAT NOT TO DO. Do not improvise a weight-belt repair and dive on it. A belt whose release is uncertain is worse than no belt, because the whole weighting decision assumed the release worked. Do not tape a fin and take it into swell. And do not continue in cold water in a flushing suit because the session is nearly over — the last hour of a cold session is where the incidents are.

AND ONE ITEM RUNS THE OTHER WAY. A hood that has split changes buoyancy slightly and changes hearing and equalisation more, and both of those affect the dive rather than the swim home. It belongs in the same class as a mask problem: fix it on the surface, do not diagnose it at depth.

Authoritative guidance

Stated by a fisheries authority, scientific institute or recognised angling body. Authoritative, but summarising rather than demonstrating.

  • DAN guidance on freediving safety, hypoxia and shallow-water blackout — Divers Alert Network (Water-safety or diver-training authority)Relied on for: Freediving safety practice: hypoxic blackout and its absence of warning symptoms, surface supervision, and the management of equipment failure and entanglement on a breath-hold.States this directlyPassage read and verified
  • BSAC diving safety guidance and annual incident report — British Sub-Aqua Club (Water-safety or diver-training authority)Relied on for: Diving safety guidance covering buddy protocol, entanglement, equipment failure in the water and the incident patterns behind both.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
  • General angling website restatements of established technique — Various (Credible secondary source)Relied on for: Widely restated descriptions of established spearfishing practice and equipment convention, recorded as practitioner consensus rather than as scholarship.Background and mechanism onlyCitation 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

Related reading

What these connections rest on (2)

Practitioner consensus — 2 connections

Widely and independently recommended by experienced anglers and specialist sources. This is real angling knowledge, not proof: controlled evidence for it is limited, and FishingHQ records it as convention rather than as a demonstrated effect.

  • Spearfishing wetsuits: open cell and closed cell

    One record resolves a question the other raises and cannot answer alone.

    • 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

  • Which equipment failures end a dive, and which end a session

    One record resolves a question the other raises and cannot answer alone.

    • DAN guidance on freediving safety, hypoxia and shallow-water blackout — Divers Alert Network (Water-safety or diver-training authority)Relied on for: Freediving and breath-hold spearfishing safety practice, including the supervision requirement that applies across the discipline rather than to particular equipment.States this directlyPassage read and verified
    • CMAS technical and sporting standards for underwater activities — Confédération Mondiale des Activités Subaquatiques (Standards body)Relied on for: Breath-hold diving safety practice and discipline definition set out by the international underwater federation.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly

Safety reading

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.

  • Breath-hold blackout

    A safety topic that applies to this record specifically rather than to the discipline generally.

    • DAN guidance on freediving safety, hypoxia and shallow-water blackout — Divers Alert Network (Water-safety or diver-training authority)Relied on for: Freediving and breath-hold spearfishing safety practice, including the supervision requirement that applies across the discipline rather than to particular equipment.States this directlyPassage read and verified
    • CMAS technical and sporting standards for underwater activities — Confédération Mondiale des Activités Subaquatiques (Standards body)Relied on for: Breath-hold diving safety practice and discipline definition set out by the international underwater federation.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly

Sources for this page

  • DAN guidance on freediving safety, hypoxia and shallow-water blackout — Divers Alert Network (Water-safety or diver-training authority)Relied on for: Freediving safety practice: hypoxic blackout and its absence of warning symptoms, surface supervision, and the management of equipment failure and entanglement on a breath-hold.States this directlyPassage read and verified
  • CMAS technical and sporting standards for underwater activities — Confédération Mondiale des Activités Subaquatiques (Standards body)Relied on for: Technical and sporting standards for underwater activities, including spearfishing conduct, equipment practice and the safety expectations set by the international underwater federation.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
  • General angling website restatements of established technique — Various (Credible secondary source)Relied on for: Widely restated descriptions of established spearfishing practice and equipment convention, recorded as practitioner consensus rather than as scholarship.Background and mechanism onlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly

How FishingHQ labels evidence is explained in the evidence policy.

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