He hovers on the surface of the water, face down, taking in huge breaths and then vigorously expelling the air through a snorkel. After about a minute, he vacuums his lungs full, juts his butt and flippers upward, and then shoots straight down into the inky abyss.
Destination: 75 feet to a shipwreck called the Blackthorn about 20 miles west of Clearwater. Mission: Shoot big fish. Cobia. Grouper. Tuna. Snapper.
He glides downward, barely kicking, aided by a 10-pound weight strapped around his waist with a frayed nylon belt. There's a speargun in his right hand.
He is 26-year-old Noel Karcher. His brother Dane, 28, hovers nearby. They are the preeminent freedive spearfisherman in the Bay area. It's a sport that requires stamina, concentration, guts and more.
"They're both certifiable," says Ian Beckles, a friend of the Karchers who's a host on local sports-talk radio. "Anybody who dives into that much water just holding their breath, spears a bloody fish and brings it to the top has got to be crazy."
Noel reaches the bottom of the Gulf in about five seconds. He sits there as motionless as possible — better to conserve oxygen and not spook his prey. He blends in, becomes one with the fish, waiting stealthily for a trophy to swim by.
Thirty seconds down. Forty-five. Noel's not like the rest of us. We drop underwater, tense, almost immediately thinking about our need for oxygen. We look toward the top to make sure we can make it back. Then we rocket upward, slightly panicked. We break the water and gulp air, relieved.
You can't hunt that way. Noel keeps his mind and body calm. He has an internal clock that tells him when he absolutely, positively must follow the sun shafts toward the surface. He's as comfortable at 75 feet as Liz Taylor is at a makeup counter.
Noel spots a decent-size cobia, considers taking a shot. Then out of the corner of his eye he sees the ghost-like visage of one big-ass fish. He waits, aims, fires. The spear, tethered to the gun, cuts 20 feet through the water. It's a hit, but a gut shot, not ideal. The fish freaks out and heads for the wreck. Noel pulls at the line, fighting gamely to steer it toward the top, but the wounded fish disappears into the mass of corroded metal and sharp edges. Then the line goes limp in Noel's hands. The fish, a 3-foot metal shaft through its stomach, takes refuge in the cavernous submerged ship.
Noel scurries to daylight, breaks the surface, and hollers, "Cubera snapper! A big one."
Last August, noel and dane Karcher set out for Cape Hatteras, N.C., to compete in the Riffe OMER Blue Water Spearfishing Tournament, one of the top competitions in the world. It was the brothers' first major tourney. Their mother, Liz Karcher, scared up about $2,500 to finance the sojourn.
The unknowns from St. Pete joined a field that included divers from the U.S., Brazil, Puerto Rico, Turkey and other countries. Most competitors donned sleek outfits emblazoned with the logos of their sponsors. Noel and Dane wore old shorts.
"All these other divers knew the size of the shafts and the spearheads, talking three-eighths this and half-inch that," Noel recalls. "I was like, 'I don't know all that. Just give me a gun and a mask.'"
The Friday-through-Sunday tournament called for contestants to submit three fish, one each from a list of 10 different species. The diver with the most total weight would win. Assigned to boats, they dove from 6:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. each day.
Noel, the rookie, won. He snagged a 39-pound African pompano, a 35-pound amberjack and a 15-pound cobia for a total of 89 pounds, 10 ahead of a Brazilian hunter.
When Noel got out of the blocks by spearing the pompano on the second day, Dane took on a support role. Early in the tournament, Noel had a large cobia in his sights when a Brazilian diver swooped in, took a wayward shot and sent the fish scurrying away. The Karcher brothers realized that the Brazilian was willing to play dirty pool. Early on the last day, Noel landed the cobia to put him in the lead. Then Dane spent several hours cutting off the Brazilian to preserve the win. Even so, Dane landed a 34-pound amberjack at the last dive spot to claim 10th place.
A few months later, Liz Karcher was talking about Noel's victory with a representative from OMER, a leading manufacturer of dive gear and tournament co-sponsor. "He said, 'You don't understand. It's like some kid coming out of the backwoods with a broomstick and beating Tiger Woods,'" Liz recounts.
Noel isn't sure about such hyperbole. "A lot of those guys would be putting on their gear and I was already in the water," he says in his typically matter-of-fact way.
Noel's a fisherman whom you have to pry fish stories out of. Not so Dane. He's a yarn-spinner, a trash-talker with the manner of a surfer dude.
The brothers share something of a facial resemblance, but beyond that it's hard to believe they're from the same pod. Noel's body is all sleek lines, his skin surprisingly smooth (he slathers himself in sun block), his face serene, his countenance cerebral. "I don't talk much," he says.
Dane picks up the slack, peppering his discourse with "dudes" and "bro's." He's a ball of simian energy and coiled angularity, with a splendid set of ripped abs that you can tell come naturally rather than through hours of crunches in the gym. Tattoos encircle his left shoulder; an outline of Florida is etched under his armpit. "That shit hurt, bro'," he says with a chuckle.
Despite their contrasts, the Karcher brothers are as tight as Starsky and Hutch. Blood bonds them. Water bonds them. Every spearfishing trip is a "backyard competition," yet each is the other's biggest fan.
"It never gets nasty," Dane says of their rivalry. "We just try to push each other to the limit."and jolts into action. "Get the tank!" he yells, as Noel swims toward the spacious 35-foot fishing boat.
Its owner, Bruce Dutton, today's captain and a fellow spearfisherman, quickly flings a scuba rig in Noel's direction. Noel grabs it, shoves the regulator in his mouth and plunges down again, tank in his left hand, Dane's speargun in his right. In the meantime, Dane freedives below for some reconnaissance.
Here's where common sense prevails over daring. A huge, injured snapper has apparently hidden out in the dark nooks and crannies of the wreck. Freediving after it is simply too risky. Better to go with scuba gear.
Noel has a lot of ground to cover. The wreck, the Blackthorn, is a former Coast Guard cutter broken into three pieces. Dutton, clad in full scuba regalia, hops off the boat to work the other side of the artificial reef.
It's so dark in the wreck that Noel's eyes never really adjust. He slithers around corners, through small holes, in and out of different-sized rooms. After about 10 minutes, he slides through an opening about 3 feet square, spots something shiny, something that could be a silver shaft from a spear gun.
"It's the next extreme sport," says Julie Riffe, a spearfishing champion and sales/customer service manager for Riffe International, a top maker of spearguns.
Freedive spearfishing is already extreme; it just doesn't have the same spectator appeal of X Games contests. There are no wheels grinding or engines growling. For long stretches of time, all will be quiet, Zen-like. Then the diver squeezes off a shot, and a series of high-tension rubber bands propels the spear into a fish. The hunter then springs into action, albeit with a kind of surgical control.
Spearfishing is in a growth spurt, Riffe says. Three years ago, her California-based company sold around 2,000 guns. This year, she says they're on pace to move 4,000, and their product line is growing.
"You should see the reaction of kids 9 or 11 years old," she says. "It's amazing. Every day I sell a speargun to a new 15-year-old kid. If you surf or swim in the ocean, or fish on a boat, once you try spearfishing it's addictive."
As beatific and nature-friendly as it is, freedive spearfishing is a risky endeavor. There is the constant threat of sharks. Once, Noel got tangled up with a grouper and his line, then saw a monstrous bull shark heading straight for him. He stopped cold. The deadly predator charged by within 3 feet.
When they were teenagers, Noel saw a hefty nurse shark closing in on his brother. "Usually they'll turn," Noel recalls, "but this one kept coming and coming. Its mouth was open. I turned and shot and killed it. It was about 6 inches from Dane's leg."
The deadliest threat to freedivers, however, is called shallow water blackout. It happens when a hunter runs out of stored oxygen and can't make it to the surface on time. "When you head up, you get a fuzzy feeling and you can go into shutdown mode," Riffe says. "You take in water and drown."
This life-threatening scenario usually happens when divers shoot a fish well into their plunge. Preposterous as it seems to landlubbers, they get wrapped up in the hunt and forget they don't have gills.
"I've had five friends die wrestling fish out of holes," Riffe says.
The Karcher brothers have never blacked out, but they've come close. During the tournament in Cape Hatteras, Noel speared the African pompano late in his dive. He was 98 feet down. He says the average dive lasts a minute or so, but he's been submerged as long as three. "I wasn't even paying attention," he says. "I was wrestling him on the line and then it's like, 'What the hell am I doing down here?' I looked up at the surface. It was a long way. Still, you gotta stay calm and steady. I continued fighting him on my way up, but I almost fainted."
Noel sees the glint of silver and figures it has to be the Cubera snapper in one of the murky corners of the wreck. He stays out of visual range so he won't startle the fish. Here's where strategy comes into play. He doesn't want to shoot from too small a hole; that'll make it hard to get the fish out. He needs a good, clean shot to the head. So he approaches from another angle, spots the tail, then a little bit of the head. He waits, waits, fires. Textbook head shot.
Noel lunges at the fish. The previous spear is jammed between two pieces of metal, effectively trapping the snapper. It takes a bit to free his catch. The fish still has some tussle left, but Noel manages to yank it out of the wreck. Holding the spear, he steers the fish toward the surface, then grabs it by the gills for the rest of the way up.
When Rod Karcher met Liz Keeton on a blind date in 1971, it was a little slice of destiny. He was 22, working as a block mason for his uncles. She was 17, a senior at St. Pete High, where he'd graduated four years earlier. Rod asked Liz to marry him on the second date. They tied the knot three-and-a-half months later, when she was 18.
Bonded by love. Bonded by water. They both grew up fishing and diving, and it carried over to their married life. "I couldn't get her out of the water," Rod says. "I liked that. Who wants a girl who's always saying, 'Let's get outta here.'"
Rod quit his job and started a construction company, Rodan Builders, which the couple still runs.
Soon they were bonded by children. Daughter Nichole ("Nackie") came first in 1973. Soon after, Liz got pregnant again. Two months before her due date, she and Rod were diving in Key Marathon. On the way home, her water broke. When Dane was born they said, "This is a keeper."
Noel came a couple of years later.
The kids took to the water as infants. The family swam, dove and fished together, but for the boys it became an obsession. Liz remembers Noel catching a fish and then tearing it open, covering himself in blood, just to see what was inside.
Nackie was appalled when her brothers would catch small sharks and have sword fights with them, leaving teeth marks on each other. Rod once saw Noel jump off a boat driven by Dane and catch a shark by smothering it with a towel. He told them to be careful.
The family started spending a lot of time in Key West, where they built a small compound that still acts as an aquatic retreat.
When Dane was 20 and Noel 18, the duo rented an ancient Aerostream trailer on the Atlantic Ocean at Big Coppitt Key, 10 miles east of Key West. When the weather was good that winter, they speared and netted fish, selling their catch to local markets and restaurants, making as much as $400 a day.
Eventually, the brothers drifted to the family businesses. Dane works for Rodan Builders and Noel runs Rodan Real Estate Services. They go spearfishing every chance they get, but rarely on weekends when all the boaters are out.
"I worry sometimes, but I know they've got level heads on 'em," says Liz. "I really feel confident that they know their limits. And I can say this without a question in my mind: If I was in a difficult situation, in or out of the water, I'd want one of my two sons there. They would blow those people on Survivor away. They'd have a three-story condo built, fish jumping out of the water into a pond. It would be unfair."
Noel pops to the surface and the Cubera snapper soon follows. Dane gaffs it, holds it up to show folks in a nearby boat, then shovels it onto the back deck. Thing is huge. Barely fits in a king-size cooler. Noel guesses 47 pounds. I say 57. Dane ventures 62.
On the leisurely ride back to shore, the afterglow of the catch radiates throughout the boat. "Damn. I can't believe you got a Cubera snapper," Dane says, more than a few times. Beers are cracked. Noel sits quietly, his face placid, but baring the tiniest victory smile. Two weeks earlier, he caught a ridiculous 87-pound Cubera snapper at another wreck. This fish won't challenge that.
Back home, the Karcher brothers drop their catch on a neighbor's scale. Fifty-two pounds. Within hours, the behemoth is carved up, bags of tasty white fish distributed to family and friends — and a writer, whose family gets to feast on sumptuous grilled snapper.
"It's a very natural type sport," Julie Riffe says. "I had someone ask me on CNN, 'Is there a cruelty factor here?' I paused a bit, then I said, 'Being in this lifestyle, we eat from the ocean.'"
Noel puts it more succinctly: "I don't like to shoot what I'm not gonna eat."
Senior Writer Eric Snider can be reached at snider@weeklyplanet.com or 813-248-8888 ext. 114.
This article appears in Jul 24-30, 2003.
