Personal Best Speared Fish

My good buddy Dave took me to go hunt for halibut at a new area for the first time and it was absolutely beautiful!!

After an hour or so of diving Dave shoots a halibut and I am starting to get nervous because I have just seen sand, and bait, and sand, and crabs, and sand.

Then I spot a fish buried in the sand…a BIG fish. I recognize it as an Angel Shark and right away everything I know about them zips through my brain: meant to be delicious, hard to kill, can be aggressive, have very sharp teeth, hard to clean, difficult to swim to shore….meant to be delicious…I pull the trigger. : )

At first the shark doesn’t move and then when I grab the shaft it lifts off the floor and I can feel the POWER of this fish.

I can see my shaft bending back and forth as it thrashes and I let it go and it sinks back to bottom. Last thing I want to do is jack up my shaft before I can shoot a halibut today!

Pull up the fish from the bottom, manage to push the spear all the way through, grab the shooting line and the tail and keep the shark head as far away from me as possible!!

Swim it back to my Cuda14 and string it up and gut it right away. Ok…back to looking for halibut.

We move spots and head back to where Dave shot his fish. Right away I spook a nice butt and take a shot as it is heading away but miss. Grrr!!

Nervousness is really kicking in now…the fish are here and I am blowing it!!!

Calm myself down and circle back around and while scanning the bottom I see one laying off to my left….swing the gun around as smoothly as I can and luckily it stays put and I blast it!! It takes off swimming, but circles back around to me and I can see that the shaft and flopper are through, and I easily grab it, get my hands in its gill and bring it to the surface!!

Rip out some gills, admire the fish, take some video, and then string it up and hop on the Cuda for some gatorade. Dave congratulates me on my butt and a quick measure shows that it is well over 31 inches. My previous PB was 29.5 inches…STOKED!!

Jump back in and start hunting again…spook another butt and this one looks HUGE!! I take a shot and nail it right in the back! It heads up vertical to the surface, and I get to it as quick as I can and grab it and see the shaft is not through at all!!

Wrap my legs around it, get my hands in the gills and grip HARD expecting it to come alive and start going crazy any second!!

Try to shove the shaft all the way through, but must have hit the spine cuz it won’t go anywhere…but I know it won’t hold if the fish gets free!!!

Rip some gills out and get it on my belt stringer as quick as I can, and then I know the fish is mine!!

Grab the shaft and it just falls right out…figure it must have hit the spine and stunned the fish causing it to fly up and let me grab it before it regained its senses?!??!!

As soon as the shaft is out it gives some BIG strong headshakes…but it is too late…I just watch it and pet it and admire it bleeding out. : )

Swim it back to the kayak and string it up…dive for awhile more looking for a third butt but to be honest I am just playing and enjoying myself now…

See another big angel shark and let it live, and then Dave and I paddle back into shore and have a beer, take some measurements and pics and just enjoy the stoke of having had such a great day together.

Smaller butt was 33.5 inches.

Big butt was 41.25 inches and 31 pounds.

My biggest halibut ever (diving and hook and line), and biggest fish I have ever speared.

In 2014 I dove for halibut 9 times at 6 different spots in 3 different counties…this day made every second of that time worth it.

: )

Here’s a vid and some pics.

Thanks for looking!

Sincerely,

Jim