Yellow Fin European Spearfishing Record (Canaries)

In this post I am sharing the story of a very special fish, landed by a very special friend.

I met Ariel Quintana on a trip in Indonesia and since then we have been on many different locations around the world. A relationship that quickly turned into a close friendship.

We talked about spearfishing tuna in the Canaries for a long time on our trips. We actually went to Tenerife together for the first time and landed some nice fish. We shot some big eyes up to 50kg and some solid Albacores including a fish that was just 200g shy away from the world record. Ariel kept on his journey and soon after, landed this insane fish! A Yellow Fin European Spearfishing Record. A crazy fish that makes it just a bit more special, knowing it was shot by the speargun we have been developing for 2 years now.

You can read it from him, below!

On December 3rd my friend Humberto, Borja and I went spearfishing on my friend’s boat crestewave captained by my good friend Jack. We left the pier at 10 in the morning heading west, just a few miles from the coast since yellowfin tuna and some bigeyes were seen on several occasions in the previous days.

After a few minutes of sailing, the captain sees some birds in the distance with tuna action underneath. So we set course as I finish preparing all the gear. We got to the point and I wait for Captain Jack to tell me to dive. After a few seconds he tells me to jump into the water and as soon as I get in I see a large yellowfin tuna, surrounded by some skipjacks, swimming in my direction. I aim and miss the shot. The captain tells me to get on board so that the bait can swim back underneath the boat and hopefully bring the tuna in again. After a few seconds he attacks the ball again, he tells me to jump again and after a few attacks on the bait I decide to shoot, missing again. But the tuna is still around here circling, we do the maneuver of throwing the bait into the water, hoping it goes under the boat again.

I was using my Alemanni but decided to switch gears and jumped with a brand new OCHOA speargun that my friend David Ochoa has been working on for the last year. Just as powerful as the Alemanni but more manageable underwater. I jump into the water and I see this beast shortly after but swimming a bit further than the previous times. I decide to dive on top of it and shoot from above. I manage to hit it and the 3atm Riffe float sinks along with the 1.5bar Spearmaster 35ltr. Unfortunately, my string of bad luck continues as I watch this last buoy releasing after going down a few meters. We cannot not believe this! The fish goes straight down with the Riffe float and disappears.

We get on the boat and wait to see if we if we can spot the float, but nothing… The minutes go by, feeling like hours… And suddenly we see it popping! I jump in quick to find this still very lively fish as the shot was in the back half and it goes down again! We decide to wait for it to die because the shot is in the tail and the fish will end up suffocating. We wait over 1 hour for the fish to get tired and eventually it floats dead on the surface. We finally land the beast and take it on board! We take photos and celebrate! As we weigh it we can see the beast that was 128,5kg, a Yellow Fin European Spearfishing Record! yuijuuuu