Summer Spearfishing
Posted By John Moorcroft on 2 September 2004
I wanted to share with you a really good spearfishing experience I had on the Lleyn Peninsula of North Wales earlier this year when I first met up with Dave Harries, a freediver from North Wales who was keen to start hunting around our coast after learning to spearfish on his travels to New Zealand.
On the journey down we were chatting away, and I tell him that the dive today will be nothing like New Zealand. The vis will be bad, the fish are sometimes inexplicably absent and the tides make it all really hard work. He knew all this of course having scuba dived around the North Wales coast regularly while at university, but I felt duty bound to prepare him for what I was sure would be a somewhat under-whelming experience after the clean waters of NZ. After a car journey of a couple of hours and a yomp with the kit over some fields, we eventually arrived at the dive site and from that moment on I was proved totally wrong.
It was a beautiful clear calm sunny day, which is unusual in itself in North Wales and the sun reflecting on the water made it look like liquid glass, moving with the tide and the almost imperceptible breeze, perfect for diving. It reminded me of a time when I was freediving in Greece where some days the sea was an absolutely flat blue sheet of water, but wake up! This was Wales and during the 20 years that I have of dived around this coastline I could only recall 3 or 4 times when the sea has been like this. I stood on the shore, took in the scene and thought, “this is going to be good, I just know it”. It was a high spring tide, lines of tidal movement still streaked the water and the sight of gulls massed on the surface about 200m offshore gave a sure sign that something was happening underneath…
On the beach I hurried to get kitted up. I don’t know about other divers but I get irritable if I haven’t dived for a while, my skin feels like it has to get wet or I’ll go mad and my mind craves the silence of being underwater holding my breath. It truly is another world to slip into. Sometimes if I have been in the water spearfishing for 4 or sometimes 5 hours, when I come out, I wonder if the world has changed and I am left with a feeling that literally anything could of happened whilst I was away in the sea.
Slowly Dave and I finned out and I could see that we had about 5m of visibility, which for this part of Wales is exceptional believe me! I told him to hunt shallow and close inshore first to see if there was anything going on the bay. As I swam out beyond the string weed I could actually see fish from the surface and I dove down, hid in the kelp and was almost instantly surrounded by a large school of sea bass. I thought to myself, “this has never happened before, am I dreaming? Where have all these fish come from?” There were so many of them all gliding in for a quick look and then gone, into the blue. I surfaced and looked down; there were fish everywhere, literally hundreds of bass. (Maybe I am exaggerating a little here but not much I assure you)
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