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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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 record 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.
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.
- Using a kayak as a dive platformTwo disciplines whose hazards multiply rather than add: a diver away from the craft, a craft that drifts, and — unless it is deliberately arranged otherwise — nobody on the surface watching.
- Competition spearfishingOrganised competition exists, has done since the 1950s, and is the most contested part of the sport — worth understanding whether or not you would ever enter one.
- Freshwater spearfishingA small, regionally concentrated practice in an environment that is colder, murkier and more variable than the sea — and one whose legal position differs from marine spearfishing almost everywhere.
- Darkhouse spearingA hole in the ice, a blacked-out shelter over it, a hand-carved decoy worked below, and a spear. A regional winter tradition of the upper Midwest and the Nordic countries, and one of the oldest continuously practised fishing methods in the northern world.
- Scuba spearfishing, and why it is treated separatelyUsing compressed air removes the constraint that limits what breath-hold spearfishing can take — which is why it is regulated separately almost everywhere and why the two are treated as different activities rather than as one with better equipment.
Gear
What each item is for, what the numbers on it decide, and how it fails. Most of the equipment decisions in this sport are made by the ground being dived rather than by budget.
- 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 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.
- 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.
- Spearguns and slingsBand guns, pneumatic guns and pole spears differ in range, power, noise and simplicity, and the right choice follows from the water being dived rather than from the specification.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Snorkels, gloves, socks and hoodsThe small items, each solving one specific problem — and the snorkel carries a safety rule most self-taught divers have never been told.
- Catch handling and transportWhat happens to a fish after the shot — a welfare question, a food-quality question, and, if the fish is towed, a safety question.
- 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.
- Mask fogging, leaking and squeezeThree different problems with three different causes, routinely treated as one — and only the third has a safety consequence.
- Reel jams, clips and the rigging that fails quietlyThe small hardware between a diver, a gun and a float — clips, swivels, reels, crimps and line stops — fails more often than anything expensive on the rig, and its failures are the ones that put loose line around a person.
- Suit tears, fin straps and personal kit that fails mid-sessionThe 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.
Fish, identification and the shot
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Taking crustaceans on breath-holdHand-gathering crustaceans on a breath-hold is a different activity from spearfishing that happens to share the equipment: the animal is in a hole, both hands are needed, and the diver's attention is entirely on the rock rather than on the water.
- Octopus and cuttlefish on breath-holdHunting an animal that can see you thinking. Cephalopods are found rather than chased, and the practice raises a welfare question the rest of this catalogue does not have to answer.
- Diving for scallopsGathering a bivalve off the seabed by hand on a breath-hold. Almost nothing about it resembles spearfishing except the breathing, and the food-safety question is one that cannot be answered by looking at the animal.
- Invasive species, and where spearfishing genuinely helpsTargeted removal of an invasive predator is the one situation where spearfishing is used as a management tool with evidence behind it — and the evidence is also clear that the effect is local and needs sustained effort.
Conditions
Visibility, current and tide decide whether a dive happens at all, and the water changes what your eyes are telling you.
- Reading underwater conditionsVisibility, current, swell and thermoclines decide whether a dive happens and what it can achieve — far more reliably than skill does.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
- 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 Asia and the Indo-PacificThe region where spearfishing is least likely to be recreation — subsistence fisheries, the Japanese ama diving tradition, and the richest reef fish communities on earth under substantial pressure.
Where it is practised
Coasts and countries where the catalogue records spearfishing 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.
- 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.
- 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 records 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.
Share this page