esqeddy:
The speed and severing bite of a cuda are truely amazing. I watched a cuda hit a big amberjack on the end of my friends spear. WAP!!! .... Nothing left but a head.
I now take special care when coming to the surface with a stringer of fish. It's not that I'm worried about the fish. Rather, having the fish attached to a stringer and dangling against my left thigh seems like an invatation for disaster. I'm afraid a cuda hitting the fish may inadvertinly hit me as well. If I've seen cudas in the area, I now remove my stringer and attach it to my spear gun before I ascend. I then keep the fish far enough away from my person as I can.
Maybe you can benfeit from this system:
I've a small float made out of a gatorade bottle with a little hole in the cap for air exaust.
The float have a 10ft long poly line with a swivel clip at one end and the bottle at the other. The Stringer is knoted to the line in the float end, not to the float perse. The float is zip tied by the bottleneck to the loop at the Stringer leaving it upside down when air filled.
I chose the gatorade bottle for the wide throat, easier to fill with the octo.
In case someone wants to mess with your catch, you'll notice the pull in your belt and decide if you let go the system (grey suit visitor) or spear the attacker (usually a Cuda)
Before the dive, the line and stringer are neatly rolled around the bottle and cliped to my belt Dring, when I spear the first fish, I deploy the system and clip it to my belt again, then fill the float with air from the octo and let it go. The small hole in the cap is to let the air out when you surface (you fill it at the bottom)
The advantage using this method are the following:
1) The fish is not near you in case the greysuit comes around.
2) The fish spines won't poke you.
3) You don't have to go to the surface float to leave your fish, just pull the line, string, and let go.
4) The fish doesn't drag on the bottom.
5) The float won't pull you up with that small air volume.
6) The float can handle well over 20# of fish without a problem.
7) The system is very compact and until deployment, you barely notice it.
8) The bottle can be replaced very cheaply.
I started with a bigger bottle, but upon trying out diferent ones I settled for the gatorade size. I started with 20 ft long line but find out that 10 ft is just fine.
The first couple of times that you use this system, you may want to adapt it to your dive style, but once you know how to work it, it's very effective and easy to use, I never jump in the water without mine, even in a non spearo dive, you can clip your mesh bag to the float in case you find a bug or some small artifact.
My setup is for SCUBA diving.
The reason is to eliminate the need to surface to leave the fish in the Stringer hanging from the surface float.
In the case of freediving, you have to surface anyway so in freediving, there's no need for this setup.
The main reason I developed this setup is that I was tired of the fish poking in my leg during the dive, not to mention the premature wear of the wetsuit.
I dive in the caribbean, no kelp here, so for reef diving it's excellent.
If any diver wants to fish in an overhead enviroment, Like a cavern or wreck (shouldn't fish in a cave), I wouldn't recomend this settup due to entanglement hazard.
Just my $0.02
