When Mossimo Jar was spearfishing in Cambria with some friends this spring, he said he heard them suddenly flounder to their kayaks and hold four fingers up, thumbs to their foreheads. In spearfishing language, that meant shark.
Jar calmly swam to his kayak—he’d encountered sharks before, like the 10-foot great white under him. But when he accidentally flipped his kayak moments later, he said he thought it was over.
“In that last, little, stupid rush, I rolled my kayak, and I was like, ‘This is where it happens,’ you know? Like, you did everything right until here,” Jar said. “I looked down and the shark had actually just kept cruising—he wasn’t around, which was good. I flipped my kayak back, I got in, and I was just like, sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.”
This is the fun of spearfishing, SLO spearfisherman Jar said. You never know what you’re going to see.
Spearfishing requires two primary skills to establish before starting—being comfortable in the water and being able to hold your breath.
“The first part of spearfishing is just being in the water with [the fish], and once you’ve got that mastered, learning how to selectively choose what you actually want to hunt comes second,” Jar said.
Spearfishing goes something like this, he said: You descend into the deeper water with your gun, you navigate where the fish are or wait for them to come to you, you shoot the fish, and then you receive it successfully, all within the same breath.
Jar started his spearfishing journey using a pole spear with his dad as a kid. The two would go to La Jolla and shoot fish in knee-deep water.
His dad didn’t have any interest in going deeper, but Jar did.
“I convinced some of my friends to gather up shitty snorkel gear and take the pole spears that me and my dad had and went into San Diego’s Bay, or Mission Bay, and actually started shooting fish like bass,” he said. “So, it just kept going from there—just going, ‘I want to go a little deeper. I want to shoot a little bit bigger of a fish,’ kind of thing, and just follow that natural progression.”
As a beginner, Jar said fishers start with more of a sling, then move up to an actual speargun.
“A pole spear is a stick with a rubber band attached to it and a point, and that is the way that a lot of people start, and it’s got a really short range, and it’s kind of hard to master,” he said. “But if you want to increase your ability to successfully catch fish, going over to a speargun gives a big jump. You get more range. You’re not having to hold the thing under tension the whole time, which just makes it easier to kind of maneuver around with.”
In 2019, Jar started working for a spearfishing company called Riffe International, based out of San Clemente. After its owner had a stroke, Jar took on production to make sure the products remained top quality.
“I also designed some new pole spears and spearguns, and I even made a couple that were a little bit more custom to myself,” he said. “It was just a really fun process because I was using the passion I had for this sport. I thought, ‘What can I make that I think would make it better for others to do this sport as well? How do I make something that feels custom to every individual?'”
Take it from Anne-Marie Parkinson, who started spearfishing in Santa Barbara in 2021.
“The sling, you kind of aim a bit kind of to the side of your arm. Versus a speargun, you could hold it up directly in front of you. So, I was actually better aiming off to the side,” she said.
And because Parkinson said she lacked upper body strength, she often utilizes longer bands on her speargun, which don’t require as much force when pulling back to aim and shoot.
She said she sports these on a purple speargun her dad made for her.
“My dad loves to work with his hands, and he’s retired, so he made me a speargun in his free time with some purple-dyed wood, and purple is my favorite color, so that’s a nice gift that I always have with me.”
Parkinson said she sees spearfishing as a way to connect with nature and the past.
“This is a really cool way to get to experience the ocean and also sustainably harvest food that I can eat later on,” Parkinson said. “So much of our food now comes from grocery stores and this big disconnect from kind of how our ancestors lived, and so that was really a cool thing to be able to do kind of feed myself, friends, and family just from our own backyard.”
What both Jar and Parkinson agreed on is that sport isn’t just about shooting fish, though. It’s also about being a part of a different world, even for a few minutes.
“I’ve swam through stingray migrations. I’ve seen whales—even just seeing the smallest little slugs on the reef,” Jar said. “It’s just beautiful to be there—and so catching fish is just a part of it.”
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Get Outside – Summer/Fall 2025
This article appears in Get Outside – Summer/Fall 2025.