I recently purchased a bunch of fishing stuff in an estate sale. In the box was a Farallon Shark Dart that must be for use in fending off sharks. You load in a CO2 cartridge and the sharp needle like point punctures the attacker and discharges the CO2. Sounds grisly. I have found very little info on these things on the web, except that they may now be illegal to use. Are they even illegal to own?
Farallon shark dart
- Thread starter drawde49
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ScubaSteve
Wow.....what a DB
olice: come to your location and bring you in for questioning and a life time sentence for owning a Farallon Shark Dart.
AbyssalPlains
Contributor
What you have is called a bang stick, I believe. I don't know about the legal implications, though. With sharks facing a very real risk of extinction in the not too far future, I'd say a bang stick definitely is a thing of the past. The point is that its use will kill the shark and there is hardly any excuse for that.
No, a bang stick is different. That's a shotgun shell on the end of a stick, basically. I think I saw a video on this years ago. It injects the animal with CO2, which, in turn, inflates it like a balloon and turns it inside out. Really ghastly if it's what I'm remembering!
See a picture of the dart here at the bottom of the page: http://www.chss.montclair.edu/~pererat/mshark6.htm
Sharks are beautiful creatures and not the menace they're made out to be in "Jaws". No need for things like this in normal diving...
I have since found some info on the subject. The shark dart does use CO2 to inject into the shark and disable or kill the animal. They were created for the Navy Seals as a silent way to kill an enemy diver and later adapted as a defense for divers against attacking sharks. They've stopped production some time back and are now prohibited in some states. Evidently the discharge of CO2 does little harm below a certain depth as the gas does not expand, but simply causes localize freezing of the immediate tissue and thus no bleeding. Still a grisly instrument that might look better in someone's trophy case than in their dive bag.
halocline
Contributor
Probably not very useful against sharks who are very unlikely to attack a diver anyway, but it sounds handy for those Cozumel cattleboat night dives with all the new camera owners.
Grisly is right. I remembering seeing footage of the shark dart in action some 30 years ago. Some hapless guinea 'shark" pig was baited in and the tester stuck it in the stomach area. It took a long time for the shark to die and the pressure from the cartridge forced some organ to come out of the mouth. Ick.
X
Jupiter31
Contributor
One of those pieces of equipment best consigned to the dust bin of diving history
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