Neck weight for spearfishing?

[Rodrigo Gonçalves]

Hello there!

Question: Why don't spearfishers ever use neckweights? Could there be a safety concern I'm not seeing?

Recently, I realised I had too little weight in my weight belt and tried (freediving) spearfishing with an extra kilogram. The buoyancy seemed to be the way I wanted down on the reef - however, what I noticed was that the extra weight made my legs sink while on the surface, ruining my relaxation. This is obviusly because the weight belt doesn't sit above the point where the sum of the buoyancy acts on my body, making my legs rotate until I'm vertically, if I don´t do anything to compensate for the unwanted motion.

My thought was, I have to put that extra kg higher in my body, either through a weight vest or a neck weight. Since I can (and already did) make a neck weight basically for free, I'm not willing to buy an expensive weight vest (they usually cost ouver 25 bucks). I unfortunately haven't had the opportunity to try the neck weight yet (I'm able to go near the ocean veeeery occasionally, not having a car nor a buddy makes things tough, even tho it's "just" 70km away), so here I am to see what your thought are of this weighting alternative.

Thanks!

 

[cdavis]

Neck weights work fine for spearing. I've used one for years and prefer it to a weight belt alone. You have to get the weight distributed right for your conditions and that distribution will be quite different from line diving. For me, a light neck weight and a weight belt is the best for getting horizontally neutral bouyency, generally better for spearing.

I think spearos don't use neck weights because they never tried it.