Share this on
In the past I've really only speared small dogtooth tuna, and although baby doggies are powerful for their size, big ones are a totally different animal. But before you even get the chance to pull a trigger on a monster fish, it takes a lot of time, a lot of money, and a lot of effort to even find one. And that's the easy part. The hard part comes after you pull the trigger.
So, here I am, thousands of dollars in debt, thousands of miles away from my family back in New York, living on a boat off a remote island in the middle of nowhere, almost 100 feet deep, searching for a monster, and I find two! My entire spearfishing career has been leading up to this moment. While both of these fish are big, one of them is clearly bigger than the other, but the bigger one won't come close enough for a shot. So I line up on the smaller one and prepare to pull the trigger. But at the last moment, I decide to go for the big boy, even though it's a long shot. I take the shot and see all that blood coming out of the fish. That means that my shot placement is good, I've hit some vital organs, and the fish is badly wounded but it's not over yet!
As I swim back up to the surface, the fish pulls my floats down so fast that it looks as if they're filled with lead, rather than two atmospheres of pressurized air. But then something horrible happens, the line becomes slack, and as the floats resurface my heart sinks. I pull the line up from the depths but I already know that there's nothing on the end of it, not even my spear, which means that it's still stuck in that poor fish. Remember that little metal crimp that holds the shooting line to the spear? Well, apparently I didn't squeeze it tight enough during installation and when the fish pulled that second float under, it snapped under the pressure.