Fishing 4/28/11

Today I had my first “successful” day of spear fishing. I managed to catch 2 fish and one of them was reasonably big and I was super excited and incredibly worn out. I got up very early in the morning, before the sun was up, at 5:30am I was down at the water putting my fins on to dive. One of my dads in the village Francis was with me and one of the boys got conscripted to follow us with a canoe to hold the fish. Francis is a champion diver. He'll dive down going to depths of close to 50 feet and he regularly goes under for over a minute to wait for the fish. After watching him shoot 3 fish with his spear gun I decided that the only way I was going to get a fish with my sling was to be patient. I dove down and slowly worked my way along the bottom until I came to a large hole in the reef where I know the fish tend to hide and I waited for what felt like minutes but was probably more like 20 seconds, and finally my lungs burning a fish was dumb enough to come close enough I could shoot it with my ghetto fabulous Hawaiian sling. Having shot the fish I shot up to the surface, waited a few minutes to catch my breath and then dove down to retrieve the fish. Coming up to the surface I realized the fish i'd just shot was only about as big as my hand. After another hour of swimming around and only having shot at 3 more fish while watching Francis put the reef in serious danger of extinction with his spear gun, I decided that the only way I was going to get a big fish was to dive deep, and wait as long as I could. So I swam to the edge of the reef and went over the side, swimming fast down to about 30 feet before I had to come back up because I felt like my head was going to explode. I realized that diving quick works when you go to about 20 feet or less but to go deeper you have to equalize the pressure in your ears otherwise there's no way you can do it. So I gathered a big breath and went again. Taking my time I dove diagonally down. 10 feet, 20 feet, 30 feet, and then evened out. My ears were good having taken my time and I was still feeling pretty good about the breath i'd taken so I tried to go a little deeper and then came my golden opportunity. There was a fish about as long as my forearm and as wide as my head hiding in side of the reef. I pulled the elastic back and fired and pinned him to the rock. Again my lungs were burning so I swam to the surface, planning to retrieve the fish on the next dive. Being so excited about the fish, and worried about it swimming off with my wire still stuck in it, I hit the surface gulped down some air and dove down hard. As soon as I got down to the fish I felt like my ears were going to explode and I was already out of breath again because I was rushing, so I grabbed my wire and shot back up to the surface. I threw the fish in the canoe with a huge grin and then hung on to the side resting for a few minutes because I was light headed and my ears were killing me. I ended up not diving after anymore fish and when we got back to the shore and pulled the canoe up, in the 4 hours we went diving I managed to shoot one tiny fish and one meal worthy fish. Francis had shot 6 parrot fish that were as big around as my thigh. He proceeded to tell me because it was low tide there weren't as many fish so he he was disappointed with how many he caught. Here I was grinning like an idiot over my single “big” fish that was about half the size of all the ones he caught and I thought I’d done a good job!