Spearfishing/Freediving
So what's the difference between freediving and Scuba? For scuba you have to get certified and you dive with a tank on your back. Freedivers use no tank because you are holding your breath and going down in the water. Expert freedivers like Brandon Wahlers and Jason Hijirida can hold their breath for five minutes or more and hit 100 plus feet. Me, I just started in the end of 1995, I can only hit 50 feet and hold my breath 2.5 minutes. I know that doesn't sound like much but try it sometime, if you get 1.5 minutes I'll be impressed.
As I'm adding pix I'll just put them to the front of this page, don't be lazy, you'll have to scroll down to see the pix from previous years! The fish below is the 60 lb white sea bass I shot at catalina island, it was one of the biggest speared there this past season. It was a fantastic year for me, I got a 60, 35, 30, and several in the 20 lb class size.
60 lb White Sea Bass
The mammoth white sea bass underwater shot
35 lb White Sea Bass
My first spear tournament, the Picasso Open. I took 4th place and won a 300$ Speargun! My buddy Kevin took 1st place, we took my boat to catalina island. Wait till next year!
A great day of spearing, 7lb bonita, 6.5lb calico, and two 12 lb yellowtail
More Lobster? I caught over 30 this year so far, I'm getting pretty sick of eating lobster. The biggest one in the pix is over 4 lbs.
freediving underwater with a moon jellyfish
Typical spearo gear, Long ass fins, low volume mask/snorkel and my home made float/floatline. The name wupass is a joke between me and my buddy mako. His float is named bad mfer. We always say he brought the bad mfer and I brought the wup ass! I've got a bigger float this season named "bee yotch" as well. Yah I'll never grow up, who cares.
I've had a speargun for the last eight or so years. Before that I was spearing "three prong" or what they call pole spearing. I liked three prong but only did it once a year in baja. My buddy Mako had been going a lot but I didn't see the big deal. Then one day last fall he invited me on his 13 foot boston whaler boat. We headed out to the secret area of San Pedro and I shot my first calico bass and sheephead with my crappy JBL Explorer speargun. I shot the sheephead first because I was lame at stalking fish. The big ones are old and smart so I refuse to shoot them now and have passed up shots at 25 pounders.
The first days of Spearfishing, 3 Large sheephead to 8 pounds
On the very next trip I shot more calicos and mako promptly lost my spear to my speargun. What a Fag! He felt bad and handed me his 90cm Rabitech Stealth speargun. Man was that thing a bitch to load! It had a single 20 mm band that you had to load on your chest, at first I was such a wuss he had to load it for me. I shot a bass and was amazed at how quiet and accurate it was. I struggled to reload it myself and shot a few more fish. Right after that I contacted Erik Sun at Sumora.com, he is the west coast distributor for Rabitech railguns and a bad ass spearo.
Erik Sun and a massive 7.5 lb calico bass
From then on I was hooked! I have since bought six guns but recently sold one and ended up with five. My favorites are still rabitechs, but I also have a hammerhead evolution that I use as my calico gun at work. I also just picked up a Poseidonsub Voodoo stick, its a custom all wood hand made gun for big white sea bass. All of my good guns have reels to track down bigger fish after you shoot them.
My railguns: rabitech stealth carbon fiber 120 for shooting yellowtail, rabitech aluminum 110 for all around and white sea bass, and hammerhead evolution for calicos. I nicknamed the top two guns "bad karma" and "sting" I can take down fish from 15-20 feet with these bad boys
Big Calicos speared close to work
The more I got hooked on spearing, the more I started blowing money on spearo gear. Dive knife, spear reels and line, wetsuits. And then I started spearing all the time. One time I went fifteen straight days, lol. Everyday after work I'd head down to the pv area and do beach dives searching for white sea bass. That was a lot of work, if you've never hiked down the pv trails it's quite a work out. There are some spots so worn away that you have to take your gear off and slide it down the hill, ever step has to be watched so you don't tumble down and die. All for stinking white sea bass. They have to be a minimum of 28" to keep, and before I started spearing I had never even seen one on scuba gear. You have to be super quiet to stalk them, everything scares them away! If your snorkel burps, they spook. If your fins click together, they spook. If my sinuses made squeeking noises, they'd spook! Dammit everything spooks them! But finally after months of stalking I shot my first one, a puny 29" one. I got lots of razz for that cuz the good guys spear fifty to seventy pounders! My goal was to shoot a decent one this year, and one day in pv I shot a twenty plus pounder! Success!
My second white sea bass
And freediving isn't just limited to fish, I also started freediving for bugs (lobsters). I found one secret spot that held a lot of them and I even pulled limits (7). I ate so much lobster this season I got sick of it. Imagine that, sick of lobster, lol!
One nights work
My four pounder
Thai lobster salad with grilled lobster in butter and garlic sauce. Yeeeep I know how to cook!
And so the progression went from smaller fish to bigger fish. And then it happened, I started hearing about the other spearos getting yellowtail at the islands. I'm no stranger to yellows, I got a fourty plus pounder fishing and have caught tons of them. But I've never speared them and I heard how hard they fought and how much fun it was. But it's impossible to get to the island without a boat right? Well it just so happened that I started posting on spearboard.com, there are a great group of guys there and some that aren't so cool too. But one of them was really nice, his name was Nate Baker. Nate is one of those legendary guys that always spears white sea bass and yellows. Big ass ones. And it just so happened that mako told me he was selling his boat, I contacted him and he sold me his pride and joy, a 17 foot boston whaler with a 100 hp four stroke yamaha engine, exactly what I needed for short trips to the islands. We negotiated on a price and the rest is history. I named the boat c-level, c for chris of course :).
The favorite of all my new toys
And so I made the transition from beach diving to boat diving. C-Level made it possible to make runs to catalina island in an hour. We've seen dolphins, been hassled by seals and sea lions, and have seen blue whales and heard humpback whales singing. But of course the biggest benefit has been the yellowtail and bonita action. The first time out I nailed three and the biggest was over 20 pounds. My best day was when I was there alone and I shot eight yellowtail in less than two hours, it was phenominal. Yellowtail are now my most favorite fish to hunt, they are smart and fast and I'm becoming fairly good at hitting them. As soon as I got c-level my friends started hitting me up for rides. No you can't go either, because 1. I don't have any scuba tank racks on the boat which means I can't carry the tanks. 2. This is a hardcore spearos boat, you might be an excellent swimmer but unless I know for sure you won't drown I won't take you because the current rips at catalina island a lot of times, I mean really really strong where you have to swim all your might just to stay in one place. If you drift away I wont be able to get to you in time, there are also resident white sharks on the backside of the island. Are you still sure you want to go?
My biggest yellow and I don't want to hear sheyet about the camo wetsuit either!
Mako's big twenty plus pound yellow
One of my best big fish days
5 nice ones out of the legendary 8 fish day
mmm fresh sashimi and broiled yellowtail collars!
My goal next year? Shoot a 65 plus pound white sea bass. The world record is standing at 93 pounds, someday... maybe someday....