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.
What order to buy equipment in
Explainer · Last reviewed 2026-08-19
Mask, fins, suit, weights, float and knife before the gun — and the reason is not budgeting. Every item before the gun is either a prerequisite for being in the water or a piece of safety equipment.
Safety
Drowning and immersion — Can cause serious injury or death
The order most people buy in puts the gun first and the float, the cutting tool and the weight belt with a working quick release last — which means the equipment that creates line in the water arrives before the equipment that answers it.
What reduces it: Buy the safety core before the hunting kit: a quick-release weight belt, a marked float and line, and a knife reachable with either hand. A person with a full kit and nobody to dive with has bought the wrong things.
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.
A beginner's instinct is to buy the gun first because it is the thing that catches fish. It is the last thing that should be bought, and the argument is safety rather than economy.
THE ORDER, AND WHY.
MASK AND SNORKEL. Nothing works without seeing. A mask that fits is worth more than any other single purchase, and fit cannot be judged online — it is checked by holding the mask to the face without the strap and inhaling gently.
FINS AND SOCKS. Movement and efficiency, and efficiency is oxygen. Plastic blades are the right first choice: durable, forgiving and cheap.
EXPOSURE PROTECTION. The item beginners most underestimate and the one that decides how long a session can safely last. Cold degrades judgement before it produces obvious symptoms.
WEIGHTS AND A QUICK-RELEASE BELT. Safety equipment. The belt must open with one hand under load and be worn over everything.
FLOAT AND LINE. Safety equipment. A diver at the surface is effectively invisible to boats; a float is not.
KNIFE. Safety equipment, for cutting line rather than for marine life.
THEN A GUN — and a modest one. A short gun is easier to control, easier to load, adequate for the close shots a beginner actually takes, and remains useful forever because confined ground never stops existing.
Where the money is worth spending
Two items reward spending and the rest do not, at least at first.
THE MASK, because fit is everything and a leaking mask ruins every dive. This is worth trying on in person even in an era where everything else is bought online.
THE SUIT, because warmth is dive time and a badly fitting suit flushes cold water continuously. A suit that fits properly at 5 mm can be warmer than a poor one at 7 mm.
Everything else can be modest to begin with. Plastic fins outlast carbon and survive rock entries. A basic gun catches the same fish at five metres as an expensive one. Weights are lead.
WHERE NOT TO ECONOMISE AT ALL: the belt's quick-release mechanism, the float's visibility, and the knife's ability to actually cut Dyneema. Those three are the items whose failure is discovered at the worst possible moment.
And second-hand is reasonable for most of it, with one exception: bands on a used gun are replaced before it is dived, whatever they look like, because rubber ages chemically whether or not it has been used.
What differs by where you dive
The list is universal and the specification is not.
COLD WATER — Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia, the northern US and Canada, southern Australia in winter — means a thicker two-piece suit with an attached hood, gloves, socks, and considerably more lead to compensate for the buoyancy. It also means shorter sessions.
WARM WATER — much of the Mediterranean in summer, the Caribbean, the tropical Indo-Pacific — means a thin suit or a rash vest, much less lead, and longer sessions where hydration and sun become the limiting factors instead of cold.
LOW VISIBILITY favours a short gun. High visibility rewards a longer one.
SHORE DIVING over rock argues for durable fins and against carbon blades. Boat diving is easier on equipment and harder to get in and out of in long fins.
A kit list copied from a diver on a different coast will be wrong in the two places that matter most: thermal protection and weighting.
The order, and the reasoning that makes it non-obvious
Almost everybody buys in the order of interest, which is gun, suit, fins, and then whatever the gun turned out to need. The order that works is closer to the reverse, and the reasoning is worth setting out because each step follows from the one before rather than from a preference.
FIRST, THE THINGS THAT LET YOU BE IN THE WATER AT ALL. Mask, snorkel, fins, and a suit if the water requires one — which in temperate water it does, for the judgement reason rather than the comfort one. Nothing else can be used or evaluated until a person can spend an hour in the water comfortably, and a great many people find out at this stage that what they wanted was snorkelling, which is a cheap and useful thing to find out.
SECOND, THE WEIGHT BELT WITH A QUICK RELEASE, and it is second rather than later because weighting is not an accessory. It decides whether an unconscious diver floats, it has to be set with somebody competent watching, and it interacts with the suit bought in step one. A belt without a functioning quick release is not a cheaper belt; it is a different and worse object.
THIRD, THE FLOAT, FLOAT LINE AND KNIFE. These are the safety system: the float is how boat traffic and a rescue find you and what an exhausted diver holds; the knife is the answer to entanglement and is useless unless it can be reached with either hand without looking. Buying these after the gun is the commonest sequencing error in the sport, because the gun is what puts line in the water and creates the problem the knife answers.
FOURTH, AND ONLY FOURTH, THE HUNTING KIT. A pole spear or a modest gun. `speargun-or-pole-spear-to-start-with` argues that the pole spear teaches the thing that matters — approach — and that a gun teaches system management, which is a real skill and not obviously the first one.
FIFTH, THE THINGS THE FOURTH TURNS OUT TO NEED. Spare shafts, tips, bands, line, a reel or a breakaway depending on quarry. This is where money goes and it is genuinely unpredictable until a diver knows what they are hunting and where.
AND THE ITEM THAT IS NOT ON THE LIST BECAUSE IT IS NOT BOUGHT. Training, and people to dive with. Both cost money and neither is equipment, and both do more for a diver's outcomes than any purchase on this page. A person with a full kit and nobody to dive with has bought the wrong things.
Practitioner consensus
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.
- 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, technique convention and the safety expectations set 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: Freediving safety practice: hypoxic blackout, its absence of warning symptoms, the ascent as the highest-risk phase, and the surface supervision that addresses it.States this directlyPassage read and verified
- 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
Gear this affects
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.
Dive floats and float lines
Safety equipment ordered ahead of fishing equipment.
- BSAC diving safety guidance and annual incident report — British Sub-Aqua Club (Water-safety or diver-training authority)Relied on for: Diving equipment guidance including exposure protection, weighting and surface marking.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
Related reading
What these connections rest on (1)
Practitioner consensus — 1 connection
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.
Speargun or pole spear to start with
A claim that this record rests on a mechanism explained elsewhere in the catalogue. It is the edge that makes the material an explanation rather than a list of equipment.
- BlueWater Hunting and Freediving — BlueWater Freedivers, Ventura, California, 1995 (Practitioner report)Relied on for: Established description of spearfishing equipment configuration, its failure modes and the reasoning behind rigging choices, recorded as practitioner literature.FishingHQ's interpretation of what it saysCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
- CMAS technical and sporting standards for underwater activities — Confédération Mondiale des Activités Subaquatiques (Standards body)Relied on for: Technical standards for underwater activities, including the equipment configuration and inspection practice expected of spearfishers.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 equipment practice and configuration, recorded as practitioner consensus rather than as scholarship.Background and mechanism onlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
How this compares
- Weighting and buoyancy in spearfishingSuit thickness sets the weighting, so the suit is bought before the belt is loaded.
- Wetsuits, fins and masks for spearfishingMask, fins, suit, weights, float and knife before the gun, because each is a prerequisite or safety 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.
Weighting and buoyancy in spearfishing
The cascade that decides the order.
- BSAC diving safety guidance and annual incident report — British Sub-Aqua Club (Water-safety or diver-training authority)Relied on for: Diving equipment guidance including exposure protection, weighting and surface marking.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
Wetsuits, fins and masks for spearfishing
The equipment record and the sequencing decision around it.
- BSAC diving safety guidance and annual incident report — British Sub-Aqua Club (Water-safety or diver-training authority)Relied on for: Diving equipment guidance including exposure protection, weighting and surface marking.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
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 guidance including exposure protection, weighting and surface marking.States this directlyCitation 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 for mask, fins and weighting.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
How FishingHQ labels evidence is explained in the evidence policy.