question about spearfishing competitions

[Lil Dragonfly]

It seems to me that most spearfishing competitions give prizes for the biggest fish.

But shouldn't they be giving prizes for the smallest fish? It seems to me that the smaller the fish, the more aim it takes to hit it...

Just wondering.

 

[azapa]

there are several prizes and systems but the norm is the biggest combined weight of VALID fish. Sometimes as in the world championships this is done over two days. Typicall winning catches are up to 50Kg of fish per day (maybe 20 or 30 fish?) Just giving you an idea. Things vary a lot in different parts of the world.

You can't shoot any old fish and any old size. Typically valid fish start at 1kg up.

Some comps also have "biggest fish of the day" award too. Again. VALID fish.

You would be surprised (maybe) to find that 90% of sprearos are very eco friendly and aware of the marine environment.

 

[spadefish]

To add some spice, in South Africa, a species bonus is being tried where the difficulty of getting a particular species is taken into consideration. To prevent targetting heavily angled species, these species get zero species points. This encourages competitors to target difficult non-threatened species. This requires one to know the species as well as the points allocated to that species. There are times when it is better to forfeit a large (threatened) fish in favour of a smaller difficult species -this while lying on the botton trying to decide what to take.

It certainly makes things interesting as even at the weigh in it is difficult to determine who has won before hand. We are also only allowed one fish per species.