Spearfishing 101

I haven't talked a lot about my training with Ryan Meyers.  Ryan is the 2017 North American Spear

3 Min Breath-Up on Surface

Fishing Champion and travels the world spear fishing.  He is very much like a friend of mine Eric Steward, who is an professional captain and world class fisherman.  Both of these guys are expert in their fields and are willing to give information away to help improve the sports participants.

We dive three days, then we take a day off.  Those are the days you see when we go ashore.  We dive 6 hours a day, clean fish, and talk about spear fishing and free diving.  This has not been an easy thing to learn. 

1 Foot Entry to Start Dive

First, you have to be able to hold your breath.  I trained for the last 3 months at home doing static breath holds.  My longest static breath hold was 3:20.  My longest dive on this trip was 1:05.  The time difference between the two is first you are laying on your couch completely relaxed, the second you are in the water and moving.  The goal is to "breath-up" on the surface with your snorkel, then dive using as little energy as possible.  This is much harder than I ever thought.

Decent While Equalizing

The second is ear equalization.  As you dive deeper than 6 feet, the water pressure pushes on your eardrums and the pressure must be equalized from your eustachian tubes.  This is easy enough on an airplane or with SCUBA equipment, hold your nose and exhale hard, but when free diving, the air is compressed in your lungs and you can't blow hard to clear your ears.  You have to use your tongue as a piston to move the air in your mouth past your soft palate and into the tubes.  This again was practiced at home for over two months to be able to do this.

The third is having the proper technique to start the decent with as little effort as possible while at the same time holding your nose so you can equalize on the way down.

Resting at the Bottom

The final and hardest one for me, that I am still working on, is when you get to the bottom below 35 feet, you feel like you have no air left in your lungs.  At this point, you are well past two times the normal pressure at the surface, and your lungs have compressed that much.  To overcome this, you must lay on the bottom and "rest" for a few seconds before continuing the dive.  If this isn't done properly, you'll swim to the surface.  Once I learned to rest at the bottom, my dive time went from 25 seconds to a minute.

Nassau Grouper

Ryan has been extremely patient with the "old guy".  He has never trained someone this old, or for this long.  Some days he just shakes his head as I make the same mistakes over and over again.  But when I shot my first fish at 40 feet, he said "now your starting to look like a diver".  That was a big compliment for me...

Yellow Fin Grouper