Posts by Dan

  • 2009 Funnies

    Nice.


    Reminds me of a few of my attempts to shoot a fish from a boat or a dock. I think the first time I ever done it was off Pantoja's boat back when we were just getting to know each other. We were gassing up and standing on the dock holding the pump he said look there's a cuda under the boat. Like a pro I loaded a band, put the gun and my arm in the water and shot it. I was glad to land the fish and impress my new friend with my aim, and at the same time display the superiority of band guns :)


    A couple of years later (2009?) with another group of guys, after a day's diving that produced very little fish, we pulled up to a dock that also had an adjacent restaurant. We were going to gas up on food this time. We then noticed many sizable jacks milling around right under the dock. I must have shot at them 20 times and couldn't hit one. Until finally I hit something on the bottom. I had to pull hard to get my shaft back and it came up with a huge contorted piece of sheet metal which stirred up the silt and scared away all the fish. All this with the restaurant patrons eating and gawking at the blood thirsty spearfisher.

  • Capturing law breakers on video

    I'd concentrate on taking evasive or preventative action instead of filming an imminent accident. Having a video of an "almost" accident IMO wouldn't be helpful in any way. What would you do with such footage?

  • Spearguns that float with the shaft in

    Quote from hau

    A POSITIVE reason to have a floating LOADED gun is in case the gun gets away from the spearo,; like a flipped yak in the surf, or falls out of a boat, or comes disconnected from a float line, etc.

    I don't see any reason why a gun would get disconnected from a float line. I check my rigging once before I start diving, if everything is connected properly nothing will ever come apart. It never has.

    Quote from hau

    I like to let go of my LOADED gun in the water and prefer the gun stay exactly where I let go of it in the water column.

    I don't know how you would achieve this. The gun would have to be neutral at all depths which is impossible. I like my gun to sink, maybe slowly but still always sink, that's what the float line and float are there for.

  • UW Video questions/answers

    Sorry, I have no idea about your software. Photoshop is for editing images, we're talking about editing video. For editing video I use a few different programs depending on the complexity of the editing. Each program has its own learning curve.


    Windows comes with a program called movie maker. Movie maker should be able to do everything you'll need to start.

  • UW Video questions/answers

    I've already given you the answer but I'll explain a little more.


    Do not use digital zoom, it will make an already crappy picture even crappier.


    Do not use optical zoom, you'll run into digital zoom as you're messing around with the button. You will not have time underwater to use the zoom function. The optical zoom available to you doesn't make much of a difference underwater anyways. Just leave it at no zoom and vary the distance between you and your objective.


    Uploading to youtube:


    You'll need a youtube account.


    You'll need the video file in your PC.


    I can't comment on editing the video because every program is different and so is the kind of editing you will want to do. The most common editing is cutting and joining video segments. You also will probably want to encode the finished video file to a video format that will make the file smaller, otherwise it will take too long to upload to youtube.


    If your video segment is short you may get away with uploading it to youtube without encoding it to a different format. The camera will usually give you a .AVI file to start with and those files are too big to upload to youtube if the video is anything more than a minute long. If the video is longer I usually encode it to .WMV (windows media video) format. Youtube encodes it again anyways to .FLV format.


    Every time you encode the video loses quality so you want to minimize the amount of steps. In the worst case it should be:
    .AVI file - Cut and join segments - .AVI file - .WMV file - youtube


    Once you have the finished file you go to your youtube account and upload it.


    Once it's uploaded and processed you copy the direct link to the video and paste it into any post.


    So easy a caveman can do it :)


  • Spearguns and buoyancy

    That's what I was thinking, for buoyancy to be affected the barrel would have to compress which it doesn't do. But I think there's another factor that affects buoyancy. That is to say if the object is just barely buoyant at the surface, if you take it down to certain depth, even if it doesn't compress it may no longer be buoyant at that depth. I'm not sure about this..

  • Spearguns and buoyancy

    Quote from hau

    Do you think an air filled barrel acts like a diver who is positive on the surface yet sinks past a certain depth?

    I don't know. But it doesn't matter because based on my experience I wouldn't want my gun floating in 15ft nor in 60ft.

  • Spearguns that float with the shaft in

    It's generally considered undesirable for a speargun to have so much buoyancy that it floats with the shaft in, although I've heard a few people say they like it to float with the shaft in. I never paid much consideration to this detail because I use wood guns, with a preference for slim stocks, and as a rule they all sink with the shaft in even without ballasting.


    Recently I tried to use a speargun made of a carbon tube which has plugs and is consequently very buoyant. I added some ballast at the rear end of the tube/in front of the handle but the gun still floated with the shaft in. Another 150 grams would sink it but I didn't want to put the lead at the other end of the tube (muzzle end) because the gun would be even harder to swing, it's a 120cm.


    I did some target practice and found that the floating gun messes up my aim. It's hard to describe exactly why but it was more difficult to maintain the gun aimed at the same spot. Has anyone else experienced this with a gun that floats with the shaft in?


    What are the other reasons against having a floating gun? A safety consideration could be that a gun floating horizontally on the surface puts the diver at more risk in case of a misfire.

  • New gun. New Moon. First Blood.

    That's the biggest pole spear collection I've seen. What's the really short one for? I'm assuming that your JBLs are the hollow aluminum ones? I found them to be very fast. I always wondered how they'd fare with a really big fish that would put some pressure on the pole, I imagined it will bend easily and become useless.