Was just watching Tosh.0, they showed a video of these people who caught a huge swordfish. The fish jumped onto the boat and flopped like mad and moved around the boat rapidly doing so. The one guy even had to jump out of the way.
Obviously, such monstrous fishes present a hazard in their escape-attempt-throes
So I propose a stun gun for fish. A stun gun works by pumping electricity into a mammal at the same frequency that the nervous system clicks at, causing a complete loss of muscle control. Something similar could be used to cause the fish to no longer be able to move. Perhaps it could be detachable and stick onto the fish so as to continuously pump out the disabling current, like on sci fi movies.-- EdwinBakery, Jan 06 2015 Click to enlarge http://www.kenaipeninsula.com/I would be willing to get in the water with it, but I would not shoot it with a stun gun. Even our California halibut are known to come at divers who have speared one. [normzone, Jan 06 2015] Nah. I figure that if humans are going to prove their machismo by putting a barbed hook through the mouth of a fish, it's incumbent upon them to deal with the thing once they've got it in the boat. That goes for whaling too.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jan 06 2015 Hooks are for the lazy. Get in the water and shoot spears at them. The word sporting may not be applicable, but it does give them a chance to share their opinion with you.
I've had some great times spearfishing. I wonder if a spear that delivered an electric charge would be practical.-- normzone, Jan 06 2015 Considering it is well-known that dynamite can stun a great many fish at once, it may be reasonable to think that a smallish blasting cap would be suitable to stun a single fish.-- Vernon, Jan 06 2015 [Warning! Oncoming personal anecdote only tangentially relevant to the idea] This gives me another chance to mention Neal Stephenson's novel 'Snowcrash'. There's a line in there about using a Magnum pistol to shoot halibut once they had been hauled aboard the boat because they were too dangerous to leave flapping around. Coming from a culture where halibut was only seen as a small square of battered fish to go with your chips, this comment seemed to be a complete non-sequitur. Why would you use a bloody great hand-cannon to shoot such a little fish. It would be blown to bits, surely? The world wide web was in its infancy at the time & wikipedia hadn't been invented yet so I let the reference go as just one of those bits in books that sometimes you just have to accept at face value & just get on with the story. Anyhow, come the new millenium & a re-read of Snowcrash was on the cards. Stumbling upon that same passage again, I remembered my former perplexity but now there was a method for instant gratification of my curiosity. From Wikipedia... "The current Alaska state record for a sport-caught halibut is 459 lb (208 kg)..." Whoa, I thought! How do they get them into the deep fat fryer???-- DrBob, Jan 06 2015 Down in California our halibut are puny in comparison. I was with some other divers off San Diego, and one of my companions, at the end of his scuba tank, found a 40 inch halibut while only armed with a pole spear.
While out of air, he speared the fish, got one hand on either side of the spear tip going through the fish, and made his way back to the boat. I happened to be onboard at the moment, and after some back and forth confirming I knew what was expected of me he passed me the fish and spear in the same manner he was holding it.
I shook the fish off the spear, which had been placed nicely through it's head, and watched it do a series of leaps resembling piscine pushups in our small boat. I thought I would have to lay on top of it to keep it from escaping, but it expired before it reached that point. And it only weighed perhaps fifty pounds.
Oh, and there are freedivers who spear bill fish as referenced in the idea. Damn close to a fair fight if you ask me.-- normzone, Jan 06 2015 random, halfbakery