Things that are supposed to happen...
This past weekend, I finally got to go to The Blue Wild dive expo. After 3 years of everybody telling me about it and not being around to get to go to it, the stars finally aligned and I was able to check it out. Unfortunately, it meant missing out on 5-10mph winds and less than 1' seas inside the reef, but there were other reasons I couldn't get out this weekend, so I figured I would take advantage to check it out and possibly win something from the raffle to boot (I won't keep you in...
This year at The Blue Wild I was fortunate enough to meet Mike Hickey. I know of Mike from his appearances on Speargun Hunter on the Outdoor Channel with Sheri Daye. Mike was orginally a guest on the show and in later seasons participated as an underwater videographer. Mike is the USA distributor for FreeDivers ( FreeDivers USA ) spearfishing equipment. I came across his booth and after a great conversation about spearfishing, we started discussing the rising cost of spearshafts specifically....
Believe it or not my latest addition to my spearguns is not one for shooting fish (well at least not shooting to kill them). But it hopefully will help others watch online what I love to do underwater. I have made a camera mount for my Riffe Euro guns. This mount will fit on any Euro that has the reel inserts (basically all of them). It was terribly simple to make. The only fairly tricky part was putting together the actual mount screw for the camera tripod mount itself.
{sigplus link=oculusr5 index=1} {/sigplus}Hot on the heels of my review of the GoPro Hero2, I felt I would be remiss if I didn't follow up with a review of the case that resolves the one (and only one in my opinion) flaw in the Hero2 design, it's underwater focus (or lack thereof) flaw. You see, as I wrote about in the Hero2 review the curved lens on the stock case creates a focus fallacy when shooting underwater. It's fairly common knowledge now, so if you want to read about it, you can check...
I finally bit the bullet and decided to sell my No-Ka-Oi. It had gotten next to no use in the time I had owned it and it seemed a shame to have it just sit there so I Ebay'd it. With the funds from that sale, I invested in a gun that is a little more multi-purpose (at least that is how I convinced myself to get it :). I was extremely torn among 3 choices. I was considering the Euro 120, 120x and 130. After a couple of weeks of deliberation and a lot of flip-flopping, I decided on the Euro 120....
Back in March of 2010 I enrolled in and completed the FII Level One freediving course . I was extremely happy with the course content and the outcome (check out the SpearView ). Unfortunately for me, I'm not a professional freediver, so as with many people, life gets in the way and complicated which in turn keeps you from building a true regimen that reinforces all the good behavior learned in the course. Needless to say, I forgot some of the basics, fell back into many of my old bad habits...
Sat 6/23 Winds: East 5-10 Seas: 1-2 ft Surf Temp: 82 F Viz: 20-25 ft Finally some weather worth diving for... The winds have laid down for about 4-5 days now and we are finally get back to business. The water is calm and a wonderful temperature too. We didn't catch a whole lot, but at least we got back in the water. Just the usual suspects today, black grouper and mangrove snapper. Still, it felt good to get back in the water after the last few weeks.
Winds: 5-10 variable Seas: 1-2 feet Surf Temp: +/- 80F Viz: 15-25 feet T his weekend the water was fairly clean in spite of the fact that we had a whole bunch of rain during the week. Too much fresh water usually clouds the viz and makes the water cool (it did do that). We missed high tide by about 1 1/2 hours on Saturday morning, but were able to swim right through to low tide by moving around so the current didn't affect us as much as it could in the wrong spots. We really racked up the...
Wind Seas Viz Temp 5-15mph SSE 2-3 SE Swell 40-50' 86F The past couple of weekends were plagued with algea blooms and low viz thanks to the higher surf temps and a West wind that always seems to wreak havoc for us. But right around Wednesday of this week, the wind started to turn more Southerly with an occasional Easterly influence so we were hopeful that it would be enough to clean up the water in time for the weekend. We got some conflicting reports about viz from friends, but luckily we...
Well, the FWC met for 2 days on June 8th and 9th, 2011 and not only had a changing of the guard with a new chairman and vice chairman, but made quite a few other decisions. Most importantly for Florida spearos and fishermen are the changes in the Permit, Florida and African Pompano bag, size and gear limitations. You might need to take your Captain's course to be able to identify the new Special Permit Zones (SPZ's) that they have apparently approved wherein anglers (both rod/reel and spear)...
Winds: 5-10 variable (except for Monday) Seas: 1-2 feet Surf Temp: +/- 85F Viz: 15-25 feet Definitely better than our typical Memorial Day weekend weather. While Memorial Day is usually a pretty rainy weekend, this year the rainfall was confined to inland showers, and left us pretty much alone. The viz wasn't what we would have liked, but at least the weather was agreeable.
Seas: 2-5' Winds: 10-25 SSE Viz: 2-45' Temp: 83-87F Well, it's that time of year again. The time of year when people that don't normally dive will take a chance as well as the risk and jump in the ocean to look for those prized crustaceans, the Caribbean spiny lobster. This year's lobster season opened on Monday August 6th so it was really easy for a lot of people to just take a long weekend to see if they can grab a few lobsters. Almost as if following suit with the rest of the Summer, this...