Spearfishing Advice Part 3: Hunting - 3 Pieces of Wisdom
#1 Time In The Water
Darren Shields:"Become a good hunter. You can be the best athlete in the world, but if you don’t know how to hunt a fish… some of my best mates have been amazing athletes, but they can’t hunt a fish. They don’t know how to find the fish. Learn to hunt and that just means spending lots of time in the water."My Takeaway Actions:
1. Get out spearfishing regularly. Seriously plan ahead so that you can dive more. It sounds easy but as you get older and busier, getting out regularly becomes harder.
2. Also dive with different people and in different places. If you only dive warm and clean water you will lack a broad skill-set and the adaptability that diving a variety of conditions provides.
#2 Remain Active While On The Surface
Tanc Sade: "...use your eyes, it sounds funny but you’d be surprised at how much ground you can cover just with your eyes. Just with your eyes and your head. (It's) something I’ve got to constantly remind myself of, because it’s very easy to get lazy when you’re in the water, your head just kind of focuses on the bottom, and you can just be swimming. Just keep your eyes moving, keep scouring, scouring, scouring, get that head moving, you don’t have to move your whole body around."Shrek: "You can get into a kind of passenger tourist snorkeling mode can’t you?"
Tanc's Actionable Takeaway: "Exactly, yeah. You’ve got to keep scanning."
# 3 Increase Bottom Time Easily
Roman Castro: "So for the guys that are down there for thirty seconds, you want to make the most of your time on the bottom, right? So instead of diving down and looking around on your way down, just go straight to the bottom, and enjoy your 20-30 seconds on the bottom doing some hunting instead of on the way down or on your way back up. I guess number two would be go straight for your target depth, don’t dilly-dally in between."My Experience: Roman pulls out a blinder here; Lifting your head as you descend is hard to avoid, but is a major factor that separates the experienced from the inexperienced. Lifting my own head is still a bad habit that I try to minimize. I find it consumes a huge amount of energy and therefore oxygen and that ruins my bottom time. I also spook more fish. Sometimes now when I behave myself and only look up when I reach the bottom, I am surprised at how close Parrotfish and similar species have come to me because I have been ignoring them.
Takeaway Action:Simple, Dont look up till you are at the depth you planned on.
Anvar Mufazalov keeping his head down
This content was provided by noobspearo.com, a great spearfishing podcast which aims to grow and educate the spearfishing community
