During our last dive, I speared a nice perch in 15ft of surging, rough water. The shot landed a little further back than a stone kill, meaning that the fish was still violently struggling. Once you’ve got a fish on your spear, you want to retrieve it quickly then give thanks as you effectively dispatch it to prevent unnecessary suffering. Most divers simply stab between the eyes with a sharp knife which instantly kills it. It sounds gruesome but that's because we don't see what happens to the animals we eat every day. Anyways, Dominique carries the cheapie knife for fish stabbin and swims over to give a hand. She pulls out the knife and we both burst into laughter through our snorkels as we realize the knife blade had completely rusted though and fallen off.
Now let me tell you another story.
Pretty much anywhere interesting to dive has abandoned or lost fishing gear in the area. Lobster traps are often lost and have pretty strong rope and during a dive I found a bunch of mussels attached to a section of rope that had tangled on the reef. I love mussels so I decided to cut off the section with all the mussels on it. The non-serrated side just didn't feel like it was making any progress at all, so I flipped it around to the serrated side. That did the trick and it ripped through pretty easily. While swinging the knife around wildly, I realized how important a blunt tip is. I originally wore the knife on my ankle, then on my thigh, and now finally on my belt. I love to swim through kelp forests and the knife would get caught on my ankle or thigh pretty easily and the rubber straps would often come loose. I went one step further and used zip ties to help aim the handle towards my right hand, but still in reach of my left hand
I highly recommend two knives if you're spearfishing. You can split between you and your dive buddy but in total you need one with a serrations and a sharp tip for fish dispatching, and one with a blunt tip and serrations for utility use. I carry the utility knife and Dominique carries the sharp tip knife.
We also learned the hard way how important a high quality knife is. I bought that cheap knife and my Atomic Aquatics TI6 at the same time. The Titanium knife is definitely the way to go. If you can't afford a quality titanium blade just get a quality stainless one. 304 is good, 316 grade is slightly more resistant to corrosion (Electrolysis corrosion that occurs near high boat traffic). 400 series tends to be knockoff crap! See below for my recommendations.
One final note - Many free divers have lost their lives due to tangles. Tangles on the bottom, tangles with float lines, tangles with fishing gear, tangles with anything and everything imaginable. There are well documented instances of divers whose weight belt was tangled/snagged and the latch flipped around facing the divers stomach making release impossible. There was an instance where the weight belt flipped around and the release was on the back of the diver. There have been many instances of float line tangles with knives, belts, and much more so be careful out there and act in way that you can't fail.
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