Roni Essex
Freediver, Spearo, Creator
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Roni Essex
Freediver, Spearo, Creator
How do you find spearfishing spots? Or even better, how do you find the best spearfishing spots? Alchemy partners, Aaron Young aka Key West Waterman and Garrett Moss, reveal their favorite techniques, apps & gadgets, which keep on bringing in the monsters from the deep.
Hello, my name is Aaron Young, I am an Alchemy Team diver and a full-time spearfishing guide out of Key West Florida. So, one of the most popular questions I get is "what do you look for when you're looking for new spots, how do you find new spots"? So I'm going to give you a few tips and tricks on how to find new spots and what to look for.
So, my favorite way to find new spots is drift diving. Get a couple of buddies, get a driver, pair up, get up current of an area that you've been wanting to search, and just drift with the current. Use your eyes, look for fish, look for structure, look for bait. I personally think that's probably the most effective way in my area at least to find new spots.
Another way, if you've got dirty water or you're hunting some deeper areas, use your bottom machine, get used to your sounder, learn the difference between the hard bottom, sand, rocks, ledges, stuff like that. That's another way to look for new spots. Now, when we're looking for new spots what am I personally looking for? I want some type of food source, fish got to eat, they want smaller fish, they want squid, crabs, bigger fish got to eat smaller fish, so the first thing I'm looking for is the bait of some sort, some type of food source. The second is structure. Fish want to feel safe, they want to build a hide, when they're in trouble they're feeling there's a bigger predator around, a shark or whatever, fish want to build a hide, ledges, again fans, hard bottom, rock pile, stuff like that. Fish want to build a hide and be safe after their meal, you never know. So that's all I got, I hope that helps, I appreciate it, and happy hunting!
Aloha everybody, Garrett Moss here, coming to you from the beautiful island of Maui, in my backyard. The sun's shining, the birds are chirping, bananas are growing, avocados are growing, and today I want to talk to you about finding new spearfishing spots.
So, what I do is I go on a lot of the time on a beautiful app called Navionics, and Navionics is a free download that you can get, or you can pay like 10 or 15 bucks for the year or something like that. And it's got all kinds of charts with bathymetry, places where you can mark GPS and waypoints, and you could really scour the bottom of the ocean that's close to you or nearby or also far away in a place where you're gonna be going on a spearfishing trip. And then once I actually find these spots on Navionics, I'll mark them and whether I'm going out to these spots say on a kayak, I'll go up against current from the spot and I'll just if there's current, I'll just drift along and that way I can cover ground and if I find a really good little reef or a coral head or a patch where I see a bunch of fish, I can go ahead and mark the spot on my phone on Navionics, either that or on my Garmin system on my boat.
So, another way that I look for spots as well, is I go on my boat sometimes, I trawl and while I'm trawling, I'm going slow enough to where I can mark the bottom of the ocean and if I go over a nice spot I'll go ahead and mark that, and maybe I'll go dive it a little bit later on in the week and see what's happening, make a drop or two at one of these spots and if it looks nice I'll keep going to it, if it's not I'll move on to the next spot, I don't really want to waste my time, as it can become really time-consuming. I'd like to say thanks for tuning in, mahalo nui loa and we'll talk soon.