Spear fishing

This past weekend a friend of mine on the Island took a couple of us new teachers spear fishing.  This was quite the adventure.  We drove up to the northern part of the island and when we reached the beach we walked along the bank for about a quarter of a mile.  We had to do this in order to get past the coral so we got in and let the current just pull us out into the ocean a little ways.  This was quite crazy for me because within a matter of 2 minutes of swimming we could see the bottom of the ocean and we were swimming in about 40 feet of water.  It was amazing that you can see down that far and the water is so clear here.  So I started off with a hand spear this spear has a rubber cord on the end of it that you pull up near the top of the spear, you sneak up to about 6 feet from a fish and release the spear and hang on to the cord.  This was a challenge for myself.  It is a lot harder to spear fish than I thought.  You have to be really good at diving and holding your breath in order to get near a fish and I could not do that as good as I would have liked to. For those of you who know me well I am really competitive and wanted to catch a fish however I was unsuccessful at doing so.  I also was able to try to spear fishing guns one shot about 12 feet and one shot about 20 feet.  It was hard getting use to shooting and predicting where the fish was going to be along with playing the current as well.  I had a good shot on a fish and barely missed the fish because after I shot at the fish the guy told me it was a  poisonous fish and we wouldn't have been able to eat it anyway.

This was a really fun trip I was able to swim and see a lot of different things in the water ranging from small little colorful fish, eels, and even a sea turtle.  Sea turtles are kind of hard to find around here since they are endangered animals and people from the island hunt them illegally and eat them because they taste good they say.  I told someone about seeing a turtle the next day and he said to just shoot it because they were so good.  So the mindset of the people on the Island sometimes is if you can get away with it then it is ok to do it.  This is hard for me to grasp because it is so different then what I grew up around.  I would really like to go spear fishing again and learn more about the area fish and water life.