OOne dives while the other stays on board and follows the
bubbles surfacing from the man below. It’s important for the
boat to be near when the diver comes up with a heavy stringer
of fish, often with a couple of sharks tailing him. The men say
it’s easier than it seems to lose a person in the water, especially
in strong currents and choppy seas.
After they each do a dive, they fill the empty tanks and
go again. Time is measured in dives, usually five to eight per
diver a day, each lasting about 20-25 minutes, in anywhere
from 75 to 160 feet of water.
The deeper the water, the shorter the time hunting fish. At
160 feet, 15 minutes of a 20-minute dive may be spent float-ing
at 40 feet to prevent decompression sickness — the bends
— that occurs from a rapid change in pressure.
“There are a lot of elements out of our control,” Kent says.
“The most important thing we can do is to stay calm and
make sure the things that are under our control are taken care
of.”
The business doesn’t come without competition.
“When I initially started, I got a lot of heat from the other
(hook-and-line) guys,” he says. “I made sure I was nice to
everyone and didn’t cause problems, and now, six years later, I
am friends with those guys.”
Solano shares information from being underwater. If a boat
gets an anchor stuck in the rocks, he will often dive down to
retrieve it.
Solano runs one of very few commercial spearfishing boats
in North Carolina but is not the first to run a commercial
spearfishing operation locally. Randy Batts of Topsail Island has
been commercial spearfishing since 1965.
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WBM june 2017 PHOTO BY ALLISON POTTER