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From the emergence of rubber spearguns right through to the rail gun, there is one more speargun that is finally entering the market - the roller speargun. After years of immense popularity in Europe, it is slowly making its way onto our Australian shores, which begs the question- what is so great about this particular speargun? Using a method that dates back many years, the roller speargun has only gained recent attention in Australia due to advancements in technology making it more readily and commercially available.
So, what is a roller speargun and how does it differ from traditional spearguns? Take the normal rubber powered speargun for example. This type of traditional speargun has a head or muzzle that the rubber screws into or passes through side to side to give a leverage point for loading the speargun.
The rubber is joined in the centre by the bridle or wishbone, used for loading onto the spear shaft. Quite often two, three or more rubbers are used to give greater power.
In contrast to this is the roller speargun. Unlike the rubber-powered speargun, the roller speargun has a muzzle with two spinning rollers- one on each side of the rubber, which are attached to a leverage point on the underside of the speargun barrel or handle. The rubbers on either side run parallel under the barrel, up and over the rollers, and then join at the bridle.
The frustrating thing was that I could not fi nd a conclusive test where a number of guns were tested, let alone what kind of setups were used. They would often just state that they compared the cm roller to a cm double rubber gun. But in my experience, very few guys have their guns set perfectly and just saying double rubbers on a cm means absolutely nothing. So off I set on a quest to find out for myself if the roller system did in fact, work and would it work in the environments we hunt in, and specifically large pelagics.
Can you imagine being able to reduce your gun size and increase your power and range? Mohammed Al Kuwari from Qatarsub got me in touch with Emanuel from Roller Power Head in Australia, who was kind enough to send me a sample kit to test.
The kit came the night before a yacht trip up the KZN coast and I went straight to the workshop to fit it. I thought it would be quick, but a good few hours later, I had got my head around the instructions and it was done. I got a few good fish on the trip with the cm gun I converted.
It performed very well considering that I did not even have the gun set up correctly. When I got back I landed up on skype with Emanuel for hours, working through everything, from the actual concept and functionality, to the way they need to be set up. A couple of days later it just so happened that I was booked to go and visit Mohammed in Qatar who had also been experimenting with the roller heads.
The great thing, is that Mohammed had ordered a number of roller kits to test, and we got stuck in converting a whole bunch of guns to test. The one really great thing about Qatar and the Arabian Gulf in Spring time is that the spearfi shing is excellent.
I had a chance to go on a couple dives and the number and quality of fish you shoot is on epic levels. The reason I mention this, is that I realized that this was the perfect place to test the gear. Here you shoot more big fish in one day than what you could hope to in a whole year at home. This gave me months of water time in a day, and the learning curve was dramatically reduced.
Those first days in the water were extremely successful, even though I had not fully understood how to set up the gun correctly.
So after some more consultations with Emanuel, Mohammed and I set out to test the guns before heading back out to sea again. All the rubbers on the guns were changed and new rubbers were fitted. For a target we made up a 60cm x 60cm x 6. Now there are probably hundreds of different speargun configurations we could test.
The main question we wanted answered was if the rollergun could replace our standard setups we use for everyday gamefish hunting.
All the documented tests show the rollergun being extremely good in short lengths, but nothing on bigger guns. I wanted to test the roller against my 2 favorite guns; this would give me a good idea of what the rollergun was capable of. These two are the cm with a single 20mm rubber cut to 74cm using a 7mm spear. This is the exact setup I used when I stoned the lb marlin. This gun however, was very difficult to load and with my dislocated shoulder I had to use a load assist.
My other favourite is the cm with 2 x 14mm rubbers cut to 70cm with a 7mm spear. This is currently my go to gun and is amazingly accurate and quick, and with the easy loading it makes it a fantastic gun for most pelagic hunting.
I was also quite keen to see how these 2 guns faired against each other. Some might ask why we did not test a cm with 2 x 16mm, well in the past I have found thisgun not to be as accurate and nice to shoot compared to the 2 others and in my opinion 2 short 14mm rubbers is better than 2 longer 16mm rubbers.
On the rollergun side, we made up the following guns all with 18mm the proposed maximum by the manufacturer cm using a 7mm shaft cm using a 7mm shaft cm using a 7,5mm shaft cm using a 7mm shaft cm using a 7,5mm shaft We also threw in some American artillery, a bluewater gun with 4 x 16mm bands and an 8.
Brian would help in the water and Richard would take notes as he was unable to get in the water and was still recovering from a serious shark attack a few month ago, while freediving in the Seychelles. It was a perfect team. The test was done in a pool at 28deg C with perfect vis. The first set of tests was done with the target 4m from the end of the spear tip. This was set as a practical distance at which most guys shoot their fi sh with a single wrap of line.
We gave the job of shooting to Mohammed who has become famous with his accurate kill shots on fi lm. Brian and I would take care of the measuring and documenting each shot. We started with the 2 std cm setups.
These spearguns do have limitations. Roller spearguns work on the principle of starting your band stretch from the end of the speargun. Bands only start to store energy as they get under tension. A traditional speargun does not start to store energy until the bands start to stretch. They break that mold by having the bands start at the back or middle of the speargun on the underside of the gun.
Roller spearguns require retention on the bands to work properly. Without pretension the spear shaft travels faster than the bands accelerate. This is one of the biggest drawbacks of traditional spearguns, and one of the biggest benefits of roller spearguns.
If a roller is properly pretensioned the shaft will accelerate for the entire length of the speargun. One of the biggest myths behind roller spearguns is that they are more powerful. To some extent they are, but it is from having more distance for the bands to stretch.
Speargun range is the result of band stretch distance. Power is derived from the size and number of speargun bands. They do have recoil. It is reduced compared to similarly powered traditional spearguns. The reduced recoil is because the bands are moving towards the front and the back of the speargun simultaneously. You still need to brace for recoil with roller spearguns, especially for larger spearguns.
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