The modern spearo lives in a constant stream of innovation that has permanently affected his way to dive through the countless new materials and processing techniques. Often, spearfishing equipment manufacturers introduce on the market fascinating brand new products with unique and innovative features and lead us to believe that they are indeed useful and necessary, but in most of the cases that is only marketing.

However, sometimes small artisans or companies managed by true sea lovers, produce some articles that make the difference as they are designed to solve a real problem. We have often heard that the most effective solution to a problem can sometimes be the simplest one and this is the case of the buoy "Balise" by Esclapez.

Everyone knows that the diving buoy is an essential instrument at sea and it can save our life, despite that, manufacturers have done nothing to improve its visibility. As a consequence, if you search for the visibility data on the technical sheets of the main buoys on the market, you will see, with disappointment, there is none.

The idea at the basis of the buoy "balise" which makes it very visible in the water is very simple: hooking a 2kg lead on one end to make the buoy rear up and creating a special mount allowing to keep the flagstick in a vertical position. You won’t believe it but such a system allows to place the flag at 120cm upon the surface taking into account that 90cm of such a measure are occupied by an orange torpedo (32cm diameter) floating on the water. This buoy is brilliant and above all effective, then let’s see it in detail.

TECHNICAL DETAILS

It's made of 201D nylon with TPU reinforcements and it is only available in orange colour. It does not have any air chamber inside and it can be inflated through an high quality valve (similar to the life vests ones) which facilitates and speeds up the operation. In the lower portion, right in the middle there is a pocket in which you can put a 2kg lead to stabilize the buoy balance when you use it in the torpedo mode. Whenever you want rear it up you simply need to remove the lead from the pocket and hook it on the front end. It is equipped with two elastic straps for carrying guns and two comfortable handles for transportation out of the water. Its weight is derisory (only 350gr) and in the package it is also included a 45cm flagstick that place the flag at:

60cm above the surface (horizontal mode)

120cm above the surface (vertical mode)

I'm really excited about this article because it is light to carry, easy to inflate and really more visible in the water. A lazy user might suggest to implement a pivoting system allowing to always keep the flagstick in the proper position when you switch from a mode to another in order to avoid user to remove the stick from a hole and place it into another one.

Anyway if we are using the buoy in the vertical mode, we don’t need to switch to the horizontal one to move from a spot to another while speafishing. You just need to pull it as usual and it will keep its vertical position.

Just try it and you’ll see it yourself!