A first-class section, not a subsection
Spearfishing
The most selective way of taking a fish, and the most demanding of the person doing it, because the limiting factor is a single human breath. Everything here assumes you will train for it and dive with somebody.
Safety: Never dive alone, dive one up one down, and never extend a dive for a fish. A breath-hold blackout is silent and a diver on their own does not survive one.
Start here
What the discipline actually is, what it asks of you physically, and the order the first few months have to happen in.
- What spearfishing is, and what it demandsHunting fish underwater on a single breath, at close range, with a weapon — three constraints that between them explain every technique, every piece of equipment and every rule in the discipline.
- How to start spearfishingThe order matters more than the equipment: learn to freedive with an instructor, find people to dive with, then buy kit — because the first two decide whether the third is survivable.
- Fitness to dive: health, medication and when not toWhether somebody is fit to breath-hold dive is a medical assessment made by a doctor for an individual — and the categories of condition that require one are worth knowing before a course, not after a problem.
- What to expect on a first diveCold, breathless, unable to equalise, unable to see much, and no fish — described honestly, because a beginner who expects this stops when they should and a beginner who expects otherwise pushes through.
- Speargun or pole spear to start withA pole spear demands a better approach and forgives less; a gun is more capable and more to manage. The choice depends on the water and, in several places, on what is permitted there.
- What order to buy equipment inMask, 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.
- Spearfishing myths, and what is actually knownSix claims that recur, set against what evidence establishes and what it does not — chosen because each one has a consequence, not because any of them is easy to knock down.
Also in this section
Safety, which is the first technical subject and not a disclaimer
Breath-hold blackout gives no warning and a diver on their own does not survive one. This is the part of the discipline that is not optional, and it is here second rather than last.
- Why spearfishing is never a solo activityA blackout is survivable if somebody competent is watching and is close enough to reach you, and is otherwise almost always fatal — which makes the buddy the single load-bearing component of the entire safety system.
- The spearfishing buddy systemOne diver down and one watching the surface, close enough to reach them and attentive enough to notice — because blackout is silent and a diver alone does not recover from it.
- Training and coursesThe one piece of spearfishing equipment that cannot be bought secondhand — and the only intervention that reliably changes what happens when something goes wrong.
- A pre-dive safety checklistA structured run through the things whose failure is discovered at the worst possible moment — built from the safety family rather than invented, and short enough to actually be used.
- Planning a dive sessionAlmost 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.
- When to call a dive offThe most valuable decision in the discipline and the least taught — and the reason it is hard is that every factor pushing towards getting in is immediate while every factor pushing against it is hypothetical.
- Which equipment failures end a dive, and which end a sessionThe same catalogue describes a torn glove and a jammed quick release, and a reader has no way to tell which one means get out of the water — this page is the ladder that separates them.
- Loaded speargun handlingA loaded speargun is the only thing in fishing that behaves like a firearm, and the handling rules are the firearm rules for the same reason: the injuries are penetrating and they happen to companions.
- Marine-life hazards for divers, in proportionThe animals that actually injure divers are mostly small, stationary and stepped on or grabbed — and the one everybody asks about is genuinely worth managing and is not the thing most likely to hurt you.
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 the body does on a breath-hold
The physiology under every rule above. Blackout, the samba and the injuries that follow forcing an equalisation are not rare accidents — they are what this system does when it is pushed, and they arrive without a warning the diver can feel.
- Breath-hold physiology for spearfishersThe urge to breathe is driven by carbon dioxide while unconsciousness is driven by lack of oxygen — two separate signals, which is why breath-hold diving can fail without warning.
- Shallow-water blackout: what it is, and why it gives no warningLoss of consciousness from low blood oxygen, occurring most often at or just below the surface on ascent — and the reason it gives no warning is that the sensation people rely on is driven by carbon dioxide rather than by oxygen.
- Why hyperventilation before a dive is dangerousRapid deep breathing before a breath-hold lowers carbon dioxide without meaningfully raising oxygen — so it delays the urge to breathe while leaving the oxygen supply unchanged, which is precisely the combination that produces blackout without warning.
- Loss of motor control, and what it is warning ofInvoluntary shaking or twitching at or after the surface is a hypoxia symptom one stage short of blackout — and treating it as a curiosity rather than as an emergency signal is a recognised route into a serious incident.
- Rescue principles for a blacked-out diverThe buddy system only works if the person watching knows what to do in the seconds after they see it — and this is the one subject in the discipline where reading is explicitly not enough.
- Equalisation and pressureDescending compresses the air spaces in the ears and sinuses, and equalisation restores the pressure balance — a technique that must never be forced through pain.
Techniques
Waiting, hunting and searching are three different activities that happen to use the same gun. Which one suits a day is decided by the ground and the water, not by preference.
- Aspetto (waiting)Descending, settling on the bottom and waiting for fish to come to you — the technique that produces most of the large fish taken by shore divers.
- StalkingMoving quietly over ground to find fish rather than waiting for them — the technique that covers water, and the one that costs the most oxygen for the least return if done badly.
- Hole huntingSearching caves, cracks, overhangs and undercuts for the fish that live in them — highly productive, and the technique with the least margin when something goes wrong.
- Reef spearfishingHunting the most species-rich environment there is, where identification matters more than technique and the substrate is a living animal.
- Shore divingEntering and leaving the water from land under your own power — the most accessible spearfishing and the one where the entry and exit are the dangerous part.
- Boat divingSpearfishing from a vessel, which removes the swim and adds the two things most likely to kill a diver: propellers and drift.
- Shore diving and boat diving comparedThe same activity with a different escape plan. A shore dive is limited by what you can swim back from; a boat dive is limited by whether the boat is still there and whether anybody on it is watching.
- Reef and kelp diving comparedTwo structurally complex environments that hold fish for the same reason and present opposite problems: reef is a maze you can see through, and kelp is a forest you cannot.
- Night spearfishing: what changesDarkness changes the hazard profile, the buddy system and the fish — and it changes the fish in a way that is the main reason night spearfishing is restricted in many places.
The gun, and everything that leaves it
A speargun is a spring with a trigger. What each part does, what the numbers on it decide, and which of them is under load in your hands while you load it in the water.
- Spearfishing equipment, and what each item is forSix 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.
- SpeargunsElastic- or air-powered devices that propel a shaft over a short distance underwater — and a piece of equipment that must be treated as loaded at all times.
- How a band speargun worksStretched rubber stores energy and releases it into a shaft, and every design decision — band length, band diameter, shaft mass, gun length — is a way of trading how much energy is stored against how fast it can be delivered.
- Speargun power systemsBand-powered and pneumatic guns store energy in completely different ways, and the difference decides maintenance, noise, recoil and where each one suits.
- Speargun length, and what it decidesLength trades reach and accuracy against manoeuvrability, and the water decides which matters — a hole hunter and a blue-water diver need opposite answers, which is why there is no beginner's number.
- Roller and inverted-roller speargunsA band routed over a pulley at the muzzle so that it pulls along the whole length of the gun rather than only the back half — a mechanical arrangement with real advantages and real complications.
- Pneumatic spearguns, and what they tradeCompressed air rather than stretched rubber, which buys a great deal of power in a short gun and costs noise, servicing complexity and a failure mode a band gun does not have.
- Shafts and tipsThe part that reaches the fish, and the part that decides whether it stays on — a slip tip and a fixed flopper solve completely different problems.
- Pole spears and Hawaiian slingsThe simplest spearfishing tools: a shaft powered by a rubber loop held under tension by the hand, or launched free from a handheld track.
Staying attached to the fish
A reel keeps the line with you and can tangle around you; a float line keeps it away and drags; a breakaway puts a fighting fish onto a buoy instead of onto a diver. Each is a trade rather than an upgrade, and the ground decides.
- Reels, float lines and breakaway systemsThree ways of staying connected to a shot fish, and what actually separates them is what happens when something goes wrong — which is why the choice is a safety decision as much as a fishing one.
- Speargun reelsA drum of line on the gun that lets a fish run instead of towing the diver — the middle option between a fixed line and a full breakaway rig.
- Dive floats and float linesThe marked surface float and its line — the piece of spearfishing equipment most often thought of as a convenience, and actually the primary means of not being run over.
- Shooting line and breakaway riggingHow the fish is connected to something that is not the diver — and the single most important decision in blue-water rigging.
- Surface marking and signallingHow a diver is seen by boats and found by their own — the equipment whose entire function is to work on the worst day rather than the average one.
What keeps you in the water, and what brings you back up
Suit, mask, fins, and the weighting that decides whether an unconscious diver floats. Most of the equipment decisions in this sport are made by the water being dived rather than by budget, and this is the half where getting it wrong is dangerous rather than annoying.
- Wetsuits, fins and masks for spearfishingFreediving equipment is built for a single breath: low-volume masks that waste less air to equalise, long fins that move water efficiently, and suits that trade convenience for warmth and camouflage.
- Spearfishing wetsuits: open cell and closed cellA spearfishing suit is warmth equipment, and warmth is dive time — which makes it the item that most decides how long a session can safely last, and the one beginners most often buy last.
- Weighting and buoyancy in spearfishingWeighting offsets the buoyancy of a wetsuit, and getting it wrong is the difference between an unconscious diver floating to the surface and one that does not.
- Weighting and quick releaseEnough lead to descend comfortably and not one gram more — and a buckle that comes off with one hand, first time, in the dark.
- Low-volume masks, and why volume mattersAir spent equalising the space inside a mask is air taken from a single breath, which is why freediving masks are built small — and why a scuba mask is the wrong tool even though it looks the same.
- Long fins, and what blade stiffness doesA long blade moves more water per kick at a lower cadence, which uses less oxygen for the same distance — making fins one of the few pieces of equipment that directly extends how safely a diver can operate.
Maintenance, and how the kit fails
Salt water destroys everything in this sport and does it invisibly. What to inspect before a dive, and what each failure feels like from in the water.
- Corrosion, maintenance and pre-dive inspectionSalt water destroys everything in this kit, and the components it destroys are the ones under load — so maintenance is a safety practice rather than a housekeeping one.
- An equipment maintenance checklistA schedule rather than a routine — what to do after every dive, every few sessions, and once a season, because the components that fail are the ones under load and they fail on age as much as on use.
Reading the ground and the fish
Getting within range is the whole technique, and it is done by understanding what the fish is doing and why it holds where it does — not by moving quietly and hoping.
- How fish behave towards a diverA diver reads as a large predator, which is why stillness works, direct approach does not, and heavily dived ground behaves differently.
- How fish respond to a diverFish treat an approaching diver as a potential predator, and the distance at which they leave is measurable, species-specific and — importantly — learned from how heavily they have been hunted.
- What a fish can see of you underwaterA fish sees contrast, movement and silhouette long before it sees colour — and from below, a diver against the bright surface is the most conspicuous thing in the water regardless of what they are wearing.
- Sound, vibration and the lateral lineFish detect water movement with a sense people do not have, and it works in the dark, round corners and behind them — which is why a diver is often detected before being seen.
- Reef fish territory, and where a species holdsFish occupy predictable positions relative to structure, flow and light, and the position is a consequence of how the species feeds and what eats it — which makes it one of the most transferable pieces of knowledge in fishing.
Identification, and the decision to shoot
The selectivity that makes this the least wasteful way of taking a fish only exists if the diver can tell what they are looking at. Identification is a skill here, not a formality — and colour, the character everybody identifies by, is the first thing the water takes away.
- Identifying fish underwaterThe one skill spearfishing genuinely requires that angling does not — because the decision to take a fish is made before it is caught, not after.
- Lookalike species, and why uncertainty means do not shootConfusable species routinely differ in protection status, size rules, seasons and ecological role — so a misidentification underwater is not an embarrassment to correct later but a decision that cannot be taken back.
- Identifying fish by shape when colour is goneOutline, proportion, fin placement and swimming action survive depth, distance and turbidity when pattern and colour do not — which is why the character hierarchy a diver uses is not the one a species page publishes.
- Why colour disappears with depthWater absorbs light unevenly by wavelength, so red is effectively gone within the first few metres and every colour follows it — which means the character most people would name first is the one least available when it is needed.
- Telling juveniles from adults underwaterJuveniles frequently differ from adults in colour, pattern, proportion and habitat — sometimes enough to look like another species entirely — and they are exactly the fish a size limit exists to protect.
- Why fish look bigger underwaterA flat mask faceplate bends light at the water–air boundary, so everything looks larger and closer than it is — an error that runs in the direction most likely to make a diver shoot an undersized fish.
- Deciding not to shootSpearfishing is the most selective fishing method there is, which means every fish taken was chosen. The decision not to shoot is the skill that follows from that, and it is the one least often taught.
After the shot, and what you owe the fish
The part of the dive with the most going on: a fish on a line, a gun to control, a breath running down, and an obligation that does not end when the shot is taken.
- Controlling a fish after the shotThe seconds after a shot are the most dangerous in the dive and the most likely to lose the fish — and the two problems have the same solution, which is line management rather than strength.
- Catch handling and dispatch in spearfishingA speared fish should be dispatched immediately rather than carried alive, which is both the welfare position and the reason spearfished fish can be exceptional on the table.
- A fish that comes off, and what you owe itSpearfishing's claim to be the most selective way of taking a fish rests on recovering what it hits — so the honest treatment of the shot that fails is not an aside, it is where the claim is tested.
- Keeping a catch cool and safe to eatCooling a speared fish quickly is a food-safety instruction rather than a matter of quality — because in the species spearfishers most often take, the toxin that forms in warm muscle is not destroyed by cooking.
Conditions
Visibility, current, surge and temperature decide whether a dive happens at all, and the water changes what your eyes are telling you once it does.
- Reading underwater conditionsVisibility, current, swell and thermoclines decide whether a dive happens and what it can achieve — far more reliably than skill does.
- How visibility changes everythingVisibility decides the range at which fish are seen, the confidence with which they are identified, and — the part that matters most — whether a buddy can watch you at all.
- Tide and current for diversTide decides where food is delivered and whether a diver can get back — and the second consideration outranks the first every time.
- Surge, and how it behaves around structureSwell arriving at the coast becomes back-and-forth water movement that amplifies near the bottom, in gullies and against rock — and it is surge rather than the swell itself that puts divers into the ground.
- Thermoclines, and where they put the fishA sharp boundary between warmer water above and colder below, visible as a shimmering layer, which concentrates life at the interface and reminds a diver that their suit was chosen for the surface.
- Depth as an environmental variableWhat changes as you go down — light, gas volume, temperature, buoyancy and the time available — treated as conditions to understand, not as a target to reach.
Also in this section
Travel and unfamiliar water
Rules, kit and hazards all change at a border, and the ones that change most are the ones nobody thinks to check. Legality is the first question, not the last: spearfishing is prohibited outright in places where the fish are abundant and the water is warm.
- Travelling with spearfishing equipmentThe durable parts of travelling to dive are the research done before booking and the assumptions worth abandoning — not the baggage rules, which change and which this platform does not maintain.
- Spearfishing in UK and Irish watersCold, tidal, kelp-dominated water with visibility measured in single metres — an environment that makes almost all internationally produced spearfishing material inapplicable, and that rewards a completely different set of skills.
- Spearfishing in northern European watersCold water that is frequently very clear, a brackish sea with a fish community found almost nowhere else, and a season shaped by ice and daylight rather than by swell.
- Spearfishing on Atlantic Europe's coastsThe same countries as the Mediterranean tradition, facing an ocean instead of a sea — and the swell, tidal range and cold that come with it change the diving completely.
- Spearfishing in southern and eastern AfricaTwo oceans meeting at one country's coast — cold Atlantic upwelling on one side, warm Indian Ocean on the other — and a blue-water tradition that has produced some of the discipline's most demanding diving.
- Spearfishing in the Canary Islands and MacaronesiaOceanic volcanoes with almost no shelf, so the deep water starts at the beach — and a catch record showing that ninety per cent of the divers cannot reach it. The archipelago's diving is defined by the gap between the depth available and the depth a breath-hold can use.
Where it came from
The oldest way of taking a fish, and two living traditions — one Mediterranean, one Pacific — that shaped the equipment and the etiquette everybody else inherited.
- The history of spearfishingThe oldest fishing method there is, and — in its modern breath-hold form — one of the youngest sports, invented in the Mediterranean within living memory of people still diving.
- The Mediterranean spearfishing traditionModern breath-hold spearfishing was largely codified in the Mediterranean between the 1930s and 1950s, and its techniques still carry the Italian names they were given there.
- Pacific spearfishing traditionsAcross the Pacific, breath-hold spearfishing is an old subsistence practice embedded in customary management systems, not a sport imported from the Mediterranean.
Where it is practised
Coasts and countries where spearfishing is documented as an established practice. Every one of them regulates it differently, several restrict the equipment rather than the activity, and a few prohibit it outright in places — the page for each says who holds that answer. Inclusion here is not permission to dive anywhere.
- AustraliaA continent where sea fishing is the default, the seasons run backwards from the northern textbooks, and the rules are set by states rather than nationally.
- Balearic IslandsA near-tideless archipelago on its own shelf, with water clear enough that sight matters more than scent, extensive seagrass meadows that decide where everything lives, and a squid and cephalopod tradition that defines the local fishing year.
- Canary IslandsYoung volcanic islands rising from deep Atlantic water with almost no continental shelf, where deep water is reachable from the rocks and there are no rivers at all.
- Fiji and MelanesiaWhere the reef belongs to the village rather than to the state, and where a customary tenure system that predates every fisheries agency is now the basis of modern marine management.
- FloridaA peninsula between two seas with more distinct fisheries than most countries: flats, reef, offshore, backcountry, spring-fed rivers and a bass fishery, all within a day of each other.
- FranceThree coasts on two seas plus one of Europe's largest inland fisheries, governed by a licensing system that treats fresh water and salt water as almost unrelated activities — and a shore-gathering tradition with no British equivalent.
- Galicia and the Iberian ria coastDrowned river valleys open to the Atlantic, flushed by one of the world's strongest upwelling systems, producing a coast whose shellfish culture is unmatched in Europe and whose exposure is easily underestimated.
- GreeceFifteen thousand kilometres of coast, six thousand islands, a sea that is nearly tideless and among the least productive on earth — and permission that comes from the harbourmaster rather than from any fisheries body.
- HawaiiThe most isolated major island group on earth, where deep water lies within sight of the beach, a distinctive shore-casting discipline evolved, and a traditional management system is being formally revived.
- ItalyEight thousand kilometres of Mediterranean coast, an Alpine river system at the other end of the same country, and a spearfishing tradition that shaped the equipment the rest of the world uses.
- Mauritius and RéunionTwo volcanic islands a few hundred kilometres apart in the open Indian Ocean, with deep water immediately offshore, a lagoon on one and almost none on the other — and a big-game fishery built on a seamount rather than on a coast.
- MediterraneanA nearly enclosed, low-tide, historically overfished sea with the oldest continuous fishing culture in the world and the strongest spearfishing tradition in Europe.
- PortugalA long Atlantic coast with almost no shelter, fed by the same upwelling that makes Galicia productive, and a country whose fishing culture is organised around octopus and salt cod to a degree no other European nation approaches.
- South AfricaTwo oceans meeting at a continental corner, with a cold productive Atlantic coast on one side and a warm Indian Ocean coast on the other, and a shore fishing culture built on both.
- SpainTwo seas, seventeen fishing administrations and one of Europe's largest shore and spearfishing cultures — where the first question is never what the rule is but which government sets it.
- Strangford Lough and the Ards coastA large, shallow, island-strewn sea lough fed through a narrows that runs one of the strongest and most reliable tidal streams in Europe — reliable enough that a commercial tidal turbine was tested in it.
- The Aegean and CreteSeveral thousand islands in a warm, clear, nutrient-poor sea with almost no tide and a wind that blows for days — and a fishery whose problem is that everything in it has been fished for four thousand years.
- The Agulhas CurrentOne of the fastest western boundary currents on earth, running warm tropical water down the African east coast and producing both the sardine run and one of the most dangerous seas in the world.
- The Bay of BiscayA wide shelf, a very abrupt canyon-cut edge, and a fetch open to the whole North Atlantic. Those three facts explain the tuna, the swell and the fisheries of two countries.
- The Coral TriangleThe centre of marine biodiversity on earth, where more reef fish and coral species occur than anywhere else, and where the world's largest small-scale fishery works on top of them.
- The Croatian AdriaticA thousand islands on drowned limestone, the clearest coastal water in the Mediterranean, almost no tide and a fierce local wind — and the densest spearfishing culture in Europe.
- The Great Barrier ReefThe largest reef system on earth, zoned in detail for what may happen where, and a fishery whose defining constraint is a map rather than a season.
- The Ryukyu IslandsA thousand kilometres of subtropical coral island chain trailing south-west from Japan, where the fishing has more in common with the Philippines than with Honshu and the culture was a separate kingdom.
- The western Indian Ocean coastA warm reef and mangrove coast running from the Horn of Africa to the Mozambique Channel, where a monsoon-sailed dhow fishery is being joined by flats, reef and offshore angling.
The discipline in depth
The full pages behind this section, with their sources and the reasoning under every claim.
- Blue-water spearfishingHunting pelagic fish in open water with no bottom in sight — the most committing form of the sport, and the one with the least margin for error.
- Freediving for spearfishingThe breath-hold discipline underneath spearfishing — the part that has to be learnt properly, and the part that decides whether the rest is safe.
- SpearfishingHunting fish underwater on a single breath, using a speargun or pole spear — the most selective way of taking a fish, and the most demanding of the person doing it.
Spearfishing rules — permitted equipment, protected species, minimum sizes, seasons, marine protected areas and whether the activity is allowed at all — are set nationally and locally and change. FishingHQ explains how the frameworks are structured and names who holds the current answer; see rules and access.
Specialist spearfishing and freediving gear is a small trade here, and most of it is mail order. FishingHQ lists a few of the shops and schools — researched rather than advertised, not ranked, and each showing when somebody last checked it.
Share this page