Author needing some assistance

[Akimbo]

Yuck. Was that the Farallon Shark Dart?

Yes. The same guy that started Farallon started Tekna... Ralph Shamlin. I can't remember the sequence and there might have been a third company in there someplace. He developed some innovative products but was not financially successful enough to survive. I wasn't following the recreational market in those days so others would probably know a lot more about it.

Bob Hollis bought some or all of the company about the time that Oceanic Products evolved from an underwater photography product manufacturer into Oceanic, a full-line Scuba gear manufacturer. Bob and Ralph were on opposite sides of San Francisco Bay. The photo above is from the 1973 expedition to the Andrea Doria.

 

[dberry]

That might be the case for some bang-sticks. There were quite a few different ones out there in the 1960s & 70s. Most were made in very small volumes and DIY. I remember a lot of tiny ads in the back of Skin Diver Magazine from companies nobody ever heard of.

On a related note, there was also a stick that was basically a huge compressed air hypodermic syringe... made by Tekna as I recall. It worked if you hit the shark in the right place. This is the result from injecting it around the area of the gills.

View attachment 624323​

That is one odd photo; those are it's gills? It looks like that shark was trying to eat a commercial quantity of spaghetti without chewing and puked it back up.

 

[Akimbo]

That is one odd photo; those are it's gills?

My entirely uneducated guess is it's the shark's stomach. @drbill might know (photo in Post #18).