Speargun Reel DIY

[popgun pete]

Remember these guns originate from mainly meeting Mediterranean diver's needs. Euroguns were not so popular here in the old days because they were too weak, but often they were all that was available in your locality. Basically you need a reel to retrieve all your line and having a lot of line is really only useful if your victim is holed up on the bottom and the line allows you to see the gun, either on the surface or hanging just below. Water depth is the decider. Bigger and much faster fish you don't use a reel unless you have a gunsaver system. As you crank the line back in the water adds line drag, so the line doesn't go on loose. You never, as some landlubbers think, drag your catch in kicking and screaming on the end of your spear using the reel.

Don't forget advertising copywriters often write up gun adverts, don't put too much trust in what they say.

 

[Bill McIntyre]

I guess "big fish" is a relative term, and local conditions will dictate whether a reel can be used. Jon Huberman, maker of Ulusub guns, regularly shoots big wahoo with a reel, but his blue water reel holds 100 meters of 1.8 dyneema and wahoo don't tend to dive- they run horizontally. In Southern California, I'd guess that experienced divers are about evenly divided between reels and breakaway float lines. Our premier target fish, white sea bass, are almost always in thick kelp beds. If we put pressure on, they will turn and wrap up in the kelp before we run out of line. But they will often go down, up, and around a lot of kelp before tying up. I recall trying to help a buddy find one when the visibility was less than 10 feet, and the line went under kelp at 45 feet before we found the fish just 10 feet below the surface. In cases like that its impossible to take the fish back the way it went, so we generally detach the shooting line from the reel line, bring the fish up, and then pull the line back through all the kelp. I used a reel for many years, but in my old age I decided its safer to follow a thicker float line through the kelp in poor visibility. Reel line is thinner and more likely to tangle me. The photo shows my friend Dam Nguyen with a 78 pounder taken on my boat last spring, and he used a reel. The Hawaiian background is a photo shop job to protect our spot at Catalina Island.

 

[GRAPHITE SPEARGUNS]

i think we are starting to slightly sway off topic yes reels are used in different situations around the world but in very basic terms they are line keeping devices and i want information about design decisions that manufacturers and home builders use to make the very best, and hopefully integrate into my own designs.

 

[Bill McIntyre]

We are straying. So keep it simple. It’s just a line storage device.

 

[popgun pete]

Here if a pelagic fish runs it will likely spool you and take the gun down through the reef where it will look decidedly second hand if you ever get it back. Kingfish even of modest size and Samson fish will take your gear from your hands unless you shoot them in the head. The groupers and cod which we used to shoot, now fully protected, would hole up, so if you had a line in them your gun would be floating above it provided it had not woven most of the line up in the reef, particularly with coral. Telling people how to shoot and rig for fish in their own backyard is not really very productive.

 

[popgun pete]

I actually just bought one of the Leonardo reels to take a better look at it. This one is made of titanium with a plastic spool, some are stainless steel frames. The main thing with line is you don't want too much in the water and you need to wind it up as soon as you can, loose line in the water can wrap you up depending on how much of it is out, not always your own line. Here we try to shoot to kill or incapacitate, we don't want fish buzzing around too much as the sharks will be joining in in no time at all, and we have plenty of sharks.