I was teaching Mark Zahorik from Chicago a Freedive clinic, at the end of the clinic he wanted to see how we do spearfishing, he is a Divemaster but really had never been spearfishing.
So I got my 140 R/A and teach him how to load it and basically how to use it.
I was the one with the gun in hand and he went down to a sopt i have, he hit 73 feet
and came back telling me he had seen a fish, and described it to me, not mentioning size.
Thought he had seen a Dog snapper, he said it had gone inside a cave, so went down, and made an aspetto in front of the cave, wainting to play with the dog snapper the way they do, wich is so much fun, i remember looking up to ark, while doing the wait, and when my attention went back to the structure, I could see some really big teeth in the dark, i realiced really quick it was a nice Cubera snapper and took my shot, it hit the target and tryed to lift it while swiming up, but it just took me down again and rip the gun from my hands, broke the 400 pounds mono.
Mark pulled the gun out while the Cubera went crazy inside the rocks, many fish came out including a big nurse shark, and while i was resting on the surface, knew it was going to be hard work landing this one, still, there was no way i was going to let it die for no reason, plus it was a good chance to teach someone that if you take a shot and injure a fish, everything must be done to land it, also, he had learned very well the safety part of the clinic, and we did dives looking for the fish.
In one of these dives he told me he had seen the fish, and it was moving erratically under the ledge, and that it still had the shaft in, so I rested enoungh for a nice dive and went down.
Found the fish close to the entrance, and grabed it on the eyes and the shaft, and swim up with him, was afraid it would bite me since he was opening and closing the mouth, not trying to bite but still i had my arms around him, and he still felt very strong.
When I surfaced , Mark asked me if everytime we went speasrfishing we got fish like this, that almost gave me a black out...
