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Another long overdue edit, but what can I say? Life continues to get in the way of my hobbies...
More things for you to see...
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Another long overdue edit, but what can I say? Life continues to get in the way of my hobbies...
Over the weekend of March 27 th & 28 th I took the Level 1 Freediving course offered by FII (Freediving Instructors International) at their Headquarters in Pompano Beach FL. FII was started by Martin Stepanek, a multiple time freediving world record holder. The Level 1 curriculum is taught over a 2 day course. The first day is classroom and pool based and spans almost 9 hours. This course is designed for beginning freedivers and is supposed to get novice divers to a depth of 66 feet.
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....
The summer had been busier than I would have liked this year and I honestly hadn't had as many opportunities to post much less given much thought to writing a new SpearView, but after having time to really reconsider, I realized that I had actually had multiple opportunities to try out new equipment this year (not all of it successfully). Further to that point, when I took the PFI Freediver course back in March I had decided to invest in a new mask and ended up deciding on the Omer Zero Cubed...
Over the winter I looked into and purchased a couple of sets of Reef Runner Gear's fin skins. I had contemplated having my own manufactured but when I came accross these, it just didn't seem worth the hassle. You can create your own custom design for a few bucks more and although you can run into some small snags when doing so (I'll elaborate later on), Jon from Reef Runner Gear is an awesome guy to work with and he will do everything he can to make things right.
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....
{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...
Seas: 3-8 feet Winds: 10-35 SSE Temp: ?? F Viz: ?? feet Thanks to the system that would become TD4 this weekend in the Gulf of Mexico, the weather turned to crap mid morning Saturday and got progressively worse throughout the day and into the night. We did get one break in the weather around 3:30p and headed out to see how badly the viz had gotten. Drifting with the tide and with minimal viz of only about 8 feet we were actually still able to shoot a few hogs and pick up 5 bugs too in about an...
This story just goes to show that sometimes you get lucky, and you don't even know it until everything has happened. It was late in August, 1999. We were spearfishing a ledge that we visit from time to time. Usually we find a fair amount of grouper there. But we also know that this late in the summer, we sometimes get a little something extra... a shot at some Cubera Snapper. We don't get to see a lot of these during the peak summer months, so we make extra efforts to come here in the later...
I'm not going to lie to you, I got a little lazy and didn't track any of my weather stats this weekend. Diving, cleaning fish and cooking start to take their toll on you and you get to the point where all you want to do is get some sleep instead of being responsible and entering your blog. Then again, I probably tell more people about our goings-on these weekends than actually read them here... Opening day of lobster season! What a madhouse!!! The really interesting part (and by interesting, I...
I won't even bother putting up any stats about this weekend's weather because it would only remind me how bad the past 3 weekends have been due to the fact that the Atlantic has just remembered that it's hurricane season and we have had (and will continue to have for at least the next couple of weeks) tropical storms and hurricanes wreaking havoc with the seas and weather. After having one of the best visibility summers I can remember, it has all come to a crashing halt! From what I could see,...
Winds: 30 east Seas: 5-8 feet Surf Temp: ?F Viz: 0 feet Unfortunately, even the weather people have to get one right every once in a while. This weekend was everything just as advertised. The winds were howling at about 25-30 mph from the east which made it for very rough going for those brave few that even attempted to get on the water this weekend. We ended up breaking out some frozen fish and lobster and cooking up a big meal for everyone. While the company was great, the fishing was...
Seas: 2-3 feet Winds: 5-10 SW Temp: 82 F Viz: 10-15 feet This was a real good news/bad news weekend which sort of makes it a fitting sequel to last weekend. Fact is, the viz was even worse this weekend and it got worse from Saturday to Sunday as well. We headed out Saturday for a late morning patch reef dive so we could kill time until the 4:30p high slack tide, hoping it would be clean. We headed to a spot that had been productive recently in about 30 feet of water. Upon getting there we...