Boats and boaters: On the water
Who needs hook and line?
By Abi Nichols
Provided by Rob Harding
Lowcountry diver raises profile of spearfishing, underwater exploration.
Meet Rob Harding.
His business card would tell you he’s a computer network engineer for Nucor Steel.
Everything else about him would say otherwise: a boater’s sun-soaked skin; a diver’s solid build; a fisherman’s weathered hands.
This guy might sit at a computer all day, but come quitting time, he’s on the water — or rather in it — among the barnacles and soft corals and wrecks that lie in piles of rubble, where the light is darker, the fish are bigger and the sharks have to be beaten off with a stick. Or a speargun.
A wreck-diving fanatic and spearfisherman extraordinaire, Harding is one of the most intense guys you’ll ever swim across.
Rob Harding
AGE: 35
RESIDENCE: Mount Pleasant
TYPE OF GUN: Spearfishing Specialties Freeshaft
ACCOLADES: Most recently, he won the Spearboard Open near Tampa, Fla. in May, one of the world’s largest spearfishing tournaments. Despite a swarm of problems — a blown engine, a sick dive partner and nothing but a knife he bought at a gas station for $6.95 to gut all his fish — Harding landed first place Hogfish, first place Sheepshead and Tournament Champion.
OTHER: He’s the brainchild behind Charlestondiving.com, a nonprofit community Web site for local divers to find dive partners, share photos, post blogs and learn anything and everything about Charleston’s diving scene.
TL: When did you start diving and why?
RH: I guess I learned it from Dad. When I was young, like in high school, most kids were working jobs at grocery stores or something, but I was working with my dad doing commercial freshwater mussel diving. My father was a diver all his life. First a Navy diver, and then he started working as a commercial diver, and now he’s still working in the dive community with the Army Corps of Engineers. He actually wrote their diving manual.
TL: What is your favorite part of a dive?
RH: When you’re kind of falling down, and the bottom just starts to come in view, especially when you’re hitting a new spot and you don’t know what to expect. It could be a shipwreck; it could be a reef ledge; it could be anything. You don’t know what fish are there. There could be sharks. You just don’t know what’s there. That anticipation is amazing.
TL: How long does it take you to descend?
RH: Going down is really fast. I rocket to the bottom about as fast as if you drop a rock in.
TL: What was your deepest dive?
RH: 240 feet. That was a pretty scary one. It was an old shrimp boat-style wreck with lots of cables and lines and nets that could tangle you up.
With our helium mix, we’re breathing less of a percentage of oxygen than regular air, so I was down on the wreck less than two minutes. I dropped down and shot one gag grouper — 45 pounds. I reloaded, then I shot it again. Then I reloaded, grabbed the grouper and started heading up.
As I’m heading up, my dive partner shoots a fish, scaring out another one that’s about 40 pounds. So I drop back down, get that one — stoned him dead — grab him and bring both of them up. Those were just the ones that were at the edge of the wreck. There were actually several way bigger ones, but I just didn’t have time to get to them. And they don’t get big by being stupid, either.
TL: It can take well over an hour to get back to the surface; what do you think about on the way up?
RH: It depends on the dive, but usually the stops are about 40 minutes, and you’re kind of relaxed and taking it in. Anytime you’re in the water, even when you’re hanging out in the middle of the water column, there’s always little things swimming around in front of your mask, like little jellyfish and plankton. You can look off into the distance and see wahoo, sharks, bait coming in. A lot of times you can look up 70 feet or so and see the bottom of the boat when it’s really clear.
TL: What are some of the risks involved with diving so deep, and spearfishing on top of that?
RH: I’ve run out of air twice, on the bottom at 110 feet, which is about how deep recreational divers usually go, and made it up fine. You just have to be calm, drop what you’ve got, and make a slow, calm ascent to the surface.
But if you’re using the bigger tanks like I have and going to deeper depths, then you can’t do that because you’ll have more nitrogen in your system; you’ll be more loaded up.
There’s an effect on the body called nitrogen narcosis, which basically takes the nitrogen in your blood, or in your body, and it makes you drunk. We bring helium mixes, which help, but still it affects you.
It’s kind of scary because you’re in an environment that can kill you. You can’t escape. You can’t just come to the top. Any problem that happens underwater has to be solved underwater.
TL: Like sharks?
RH: Yeah, you can’t just swim to the surface if you see a shark.
Two months ago, I had a stringer of fish with me while my dive partner and I were down on the ledge. All of a sudden, I feel something tug on my side. I look down, and Discovery Channel is right there on my hip, a shark that’s probably 400-500 pounds clamped onto the fish on my side. And the fish are rubbing on my side, so there’s fish slime all over my leg; it probably would taste just like a fish.
I hit the shark with the butt of my gun, and I turn my gun around and hit him with the other end. He lets go, then he turns around and comes back. And when he comes back, I stick him again, and he just keeps coming at me — that thing was like the Terminator.
Finally, my buddy showed up, and there were two of us sticking this thing. I didn’t know it, but the shark had already stolen his fish. It was following him as he was swimming down the ledge towards me, and when it saw me, it just took off past him. It came straight from behind. I didn’t even see him.
TL: What do you do with all the fish you catch?
RH: I eat a lot of what I catch. It’s the freshest, best seafood ever. People who have eaten fish in restaurants or wherever have no idea how good it could be. Probably my favorite meal to make is Captain Crunch Hogfish.
Hogfish don’t bite at the line, so the only way to get them is to spear them. They’re a very incidental, very seldom catch.
If spear fishing counted, I’d probably have broken the state record on that 30 times over. The great thing about Hogfish is that they’re so numerous because commercial fishermen can’t catch them; the population is so healthy.
And with spiny lobster, it’s the same thing. Every rock, ledge, everything out there holds lobster. There’s just lobster all over the place out there, but you have to dive to get them.
TL: So what’s your take on local fish populations and conservation efforts?
RH: Actually, we’re helping the Department of Natural Resources with its flounder research.
As far as fisheries management goes, nobody knows what’s actually down there except us. We go deeper than anyone around here, so we have a unique perspective. I mean, they called red porgies endangered, but that’s not the case down there. And now, they’re saying gag grouper are in trouble, but that’s certainly not what I see.
TL: What about wreck diving?
RH: I’m good at spearfishing; I win tournaments; we get bigger fish than anybody in Charleston. But my real passion is wreck diving. I love wreck diving — finding new wrecks, looking for artifacts and trying to identify the ships.
Usually the wrecks we’re interested in aren’t the ones that have structure. They’re completely flat. It’s like wooden schooners or things like that. All the wood’s disintegrated, all the steel’s rotted away. And all that’s left is an anchor, cargo and black goo that used to be steel.
Not long ago, my buddy and I went right after work and found a wreck. We found a piece of pottery and the old Popeye-style anchor. I’m just guessing, but it’s probably an 1850s schooner.
Another time we dropped down on what we believe to be a Civil War blockade runner that was out pretty deep.
You see, you look at different things about it — engines, the construction of it — to figure out if it’s a sailing ship or a sidewheel steamer or a schooner or whatever. I do a lot of research on what we find diving, and when you get enough pieces of the puzzle, you can kind of match things up and figure out what that shipwreck was. Sometimes it happens easy, like you find a bell with the name of the ship inscribed on it, but I’ve never been that lucky.
TL: How do you find the wrecks?
RH: Commercial fishermen, ones who have been fishing all their lives offshore, find things on their depth finder, and when they do, they write down the Loran numbers — that used to be the coordinate system.
Well, converting Loran numbers to the new GPS format is not exact; you can’t just plug it into an equation and get an accurate result. You have to have corrections for every area off Charleston, and you have to know what you’re doing to convert them accurately.
I work in IT, and I’ve figured all this stuff out, so a lot of people give me their Loran books to convert for them — I get a copy of the numbers, and they get their numbers in GPS format.
I get thousands and thousands of numbers off Charleston, and every time we dive, we’ll go look at new spots. Probably one out of every 100 spots we hit will be a wreck.
TL: What would you say to someone looking to take up diving? Any words of wisdom?
RH: Definitely get proper training. It’s so important to learn how to do it safely. Atlantic Coast Dive Center in Mount Pleasant has great classes that I would definitely recommend to someone new to diving. Diving can be extremely dangerous, and you have to be thinking all the time. All you have to do is slip up once, grab the wrong mouthpiece once or come up too fast once, and it’s over.
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