I'm gonna let all you guys in on a few things I found out over the few years I've been doing this.
A former state freediving champion told me all the 10's he's found were on rocks that were surrounded by sand. The reason for this is that during times of rough conditions the sand works to remove parasitic worms off the abs shell enabling the ab to continue to grow continuously. Abs that live in very rocky areas that are protected generally will have more parasites in the shell which creates those little holes. The ab then expends all it's energy to thickening and rebuilding the shell and the outer dimension ceases to expand. That's not to say that you cannot find a hog in rocky areas, but percentage wise this is true. How many times have you dove a particular area and found that say 8 1/2" is about the biggest one in that area even after hours of diving?
Another tip (from me) is to invest in a pair of long blade freediving fins. If you are going to take this ab/freediving stuff seriously and want the ultimate in performance you need to get freediving fins. I own a pair of Picasso Black Team full foot fins and I wear them with 5 mm neoprene socks. I will not go back to regular fins for freediving.
The absolute worst fins for freediving are split fins of any brand. They may work OK for some people for scuba, but in my opinion and the opinion of 99.9% of the freediving community, split fins have no place in freediving.
The third thing is that instead of an ab float. get a boogie board and use that. I used to use a tube but I speared alot of fish in combination with ab diving and the fish spines popped holes in the tube. A boogie board can't get popped. What I did was took 6 stainless threaded eyes and drilled holes through the board along the outer edge. Two at the front corners, two at the center edges, and two at the rear corners then bolted the eyes through the board with big fender washers (with the eyes on top). I then took one continuous lenth of bungee about 30 feet long and wove a web from eye to eye, back and forth, across the top of the boogie board knotting the bungee at every intersection. With this, I could stuff all my gear under the bungee web on top of the board including spear gun, ab tools, otter box with licence, big lingcod. For the abs all I have to do is just place them on top of the board and they suck down and won't fall off even if the board flips over.
I also got one of those picasso open cell neorene freediving suits and I have literally been in the water for 6 hours straight and NEVER got cold. There are other brands that work just as well.
Humboldt County has the worlds biggest abs BTW, somewhere around Petrolia, that's as close as I'll say. That's where the world record came from , 12 5/16", up on the lost coast.
Good luck all.
ZKY
, I was able to choke it down and "finish the stunt" but it wasn't something I would ever order again!!!!
