I say write'em a story...I don't think they have ( balls, guts, fortitude or whatever) what it takes to accept & acknowledge what our skin diving club accomplished in that particular competition..I remember you had shot all the fish & I personally was intimidated by our equipment( lack of). We had NO boat, & only snorkels with homemade spear guns,& diving mask that some had modified with different lens. I guess we would be considered by today's standards of just a group of punk kids just trying to get some attention..I remember mentioning to you about how all these people had aqua lungs, boats & fancy equipment..& you said don't worry we will get the biggest fish because all those bubbles from the aqua lungs spook the big fish.. You were right..we got the biggest & most fish... Incidentally the 57 chevy was a hard top convertible.. This is a girl I was teaching how to dive (HONEST) at Makaha Beach in Hawaii and you can see the Addict gun that I made in her hands. It was stolen from the Diving Locker (It was actually called "Scientific Diving Consultants" then.) while it was still on Cass Street in Pacific Beach and I was overseas with the Navy (Military service was considered a diving occupational hazard as your stuff would always disappear before you returned from a tour and at $72 a month salary, it was hard to come up with money for a storage place.). It was actually called "Scientific Diving Consultants" then. I later found the gun in a dive shop's Addict gun collection in Chula Vista, CA. They tried to deny it, but you can see the little brass plate on the bottom of the handle that was engraved with "Butch DeLong, Diving Locker, Pacific Beach, CA." Let me know if you want more, because the Navy wants me to write them a story about my shooting with firearms. Believe me when I say that swinging a speargun through the water, while tracking a fish, had a GREAT deal to do with being able to shoot guns! And now I just got a message from a Naval officer that wants to collect some of the shooting memories of the old, great shooter of the US. Most are dead. They should've been divers instead of smokers and drinkers? 1967 Laurie McGrath was a trooper and went out so far with me that a Hawaiian dude in a boat came up to us to warn about the sharks out there. I could only see the bottom by diving down about 40' at that point... The area behind me was where the famous surf would form. I squatted down in the water with my Polaroid and snapped that shot and then ran like the dickens to beat the shore break before it ruined my camera. She's got that photo on her wall in a 46 by 38(?) size. Same day with Laurie at Makaha, Hawaii First thing I ever taught her was how to use a Thompson and other machine guns. I taught her to shoot pistols and she embarrassed a lot of macho Mexican shooters when we went to their matches and whipped them all. She couldn't whip me though. . Beach photos were on a very flat day at Makaha...east end. Here we [ Herb DeLong, left; Wally Kittman, right] are at my house in San Marcos [Califormia]. in 2008 [ Wally was one of Herb's spearfishing team members at the 1958 spearfishing contest of the Southwest Council held at Possum Kingdom Lake, Texas. ] SEARCH AND SALVAGE GOODIES. USED TO LOCATE AND MAKE REPORT FOR INSURANCE CLAIMS ON SUNKEN BOATS BACK WHEN TIMES WERE ROUGH FOR FISHERMEN AND THEIR BOATS KEPT SINKING MYSTERIOUSLY IN DEEP WATER. We were once able to see toatuva over 200 lbs., but the shrimpers have almost eliminated them in the Gulf of California now. Tony Reyes Fishing Tours Here's the speargun that was stolen from me at a shop in CA where I found it 40 years later in a guy's Addict gun collection. I let the guy keep it as it rounded out his collection...all he was guilty of was buying it from someone and there's no telling how many hands it passed through. It would stick that 3/8" shaft clear through a big black sea bass though! Silver inlaid sharks and manzanita fore end, with a walnut thumbhole stock. Thank God for our May West break away rigs then! When you found your long lost gun, what thoughts and feelings did you have when you first saw it? I was talking to the girl that worked in the shop and looked up at the wall and saw the addict guns up there on display. I bragged a little to her (not too much as the wife was next to me) and told her that I used to make those guns. When I got the "Yeah, sure." response, I took out my driver's license and told her that the one in the center belonged to me and had been stolen (or sold) from the Diving locker 40+ years ago. I made her see the name on the license and get the gun down and read my name and info on the brass plate underneath the butt of the handle. I told her that I would just be taking it home with me and she informed me that the gun was not leaving the store. I told her to go get the owner before I got the police as I had proof that it was mine. The kid that owned the store was OK about it and I thought about it and decided that I would need a larger gun since I was headed for Africa in a month. It looked better up there than it would gathering dust in my closet anyway. I thought that I could always go back to visit my gun, but he's since closed up shop and has gone to who knows where? Vintage Spearguns - This is the most impressive collection of speargun photos I've ever seen. Most of the Addict guns used some form of breakaway rig because sometimes, quite frequently in fact, it was just too hard to muscle up a fish from the bottom when you were out of air...especially when they were bigger than you. A 20 lb. fish could clean the bottom up with you if you didn't stone him. (spine) The gun I made for Africa was shooting a 7/16th stainless shaft, 6 feet long and had 3 big rubbers on it. I saw fish there that would scare me, but it was totally virgin as there just are no divers over there that spearfish. Sharks were very aggressive also. There was a big fish that they called a "Spanish" that looked like a giant carp, that hung around the mouths of where the rivers emptied into the ocean. They considered white sea bass a trash fish! Once more, after 40+ years, holding my long lost speargun ! We will have our club's one and only reunion in April in Texas somewhere. We still have 5 members left alive and their extended families. Our purpose for this is that they been telling their kids and grandkids about the diving we did and as Wally put it when I happened to drive up to his house in Hemphill, "Damn! Am I glad to see you! I've telling these stories of the stuff we did and every one just thought that I was full of bull. I even went down to the jetties in Velasco and stood there and looked out to where we swam out to and watched you spearing fish and even I was having a hard time believing that it really happened." I actually speared snook that day. How many of those have you ever seen that far over in the Gulf?