Safety policy
Safety first is a HEKNO principle, and a footer disclaimer is not a way of honouring it. This page explains how safety information is built into the structure of FishingHQ rather than added to the bottom of it.
Warnings travel with the thing, not with the page
A hazard is a record attached to the entity that carries it. Pike teeth belong to pike, not to whichever page happens to mention them, so the warning appears wherever pike do. The entity template renders every hazard on a record ABOVE the practical content, and there is no prop that suppresses it.
Each hazard has to say three things: what actually goes wrong, what reduces it, and — where relevant — what makes it worse. A warning that names a danger without saying what it does to a person is a warning people learn to skip, and a reader who learns that FishingHQ’s warnings are boilerplate will skip the one that matters.
Proportion, deliberately
Risk levels name consequences rather than scoring them: minor injury, can cause injury needing treatment, can cause serious injury or death. A reader deciding whether to wade needs “can kill”, not “4 out of 5”.
Treating a treble hook and a winter estuary as comparable would train readers to ignore both. The commonest fatal risks in angling are immersion, cold water and moving water — not tackle — and the emphasis here reflects that rather than what makes an alarming photograph.
Spearfishing carries a mandatory block
Every page in the spearfishing section renders the block below, verbatim, above everything else including the page title. No record can shorten it, reorder it or omit it, and a test renders every spearfishing page and asserts each point is present.
The order is the point. Training first, buddy second: the single largest cause of death in recreational breath-hold diving is a blackout during ascent with nobody watching, and a diver who has been taught that and is being watched survives an event that otherwise kills them.
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.
FishingHQ does not publish content that treats depth or breath-hold time as a performance target. See breath-hold blackout.
There is no “safe” flag in the model
FishingHQ does not clear anybody to do anything. There is no field that says something is safe, and none may be added, so the absence of a hazard record cannot be mistaken for a safety clearance. The product describes what the hazard is and what practice reduces it. The decision remains the reader’s.
Where a situation involves a hazard you are unsure about, stop and get qualified help.