| Brendan Batt | |
| The Wong
I remember the first time I saw a Daryl Wong speargun. I was a teen, dive tending for my dad and his spearfishing buddies in the Louisiana Gulf of Mexico, when I grabbed the gun from his friend to load it on the boat…. I was awestruck. The barrel was so thin, black checkered carbon fiber and the gun itself was like this beautiful saber, splatter painted and just dripping with style and it was like seeing a truly great painting or sculpture up close for this first time. A few years later I could barely afford to buy a used 55 reef hybrid of the internet, and my journey with the spearguns of Daryl Wong truly began. The gun was a beautiful mid handled 55 hybrid black with blue streaking and it moved in the water like the sword of a god. I don’t think I missed a fish on my first few trips. The gun was so smooth and accurate, I learned that if I missed with this gun….it was the Indian and not the bow. For a decade, my used 55 hybrid traveled the world with me spearing giants. Dogtooth tunas, giant trevally, coral trout, countless cobias and snappers, giant amberjacks, wahoos….they all fell to the gun. It became a part of me in the way a surfer needs his board, or a birdhunter’s shotgun becomes and extension of them after years and years. The gun began to hold a mystique in my own mind, the metric tons of fish that had fallen off its shaft, like a legion of ghosts adding to the essence of the gun. I received a message after posting a video shooting cobias in the Gulf, it was the original owner of the gun! He recognized it in the video, the color pattern and his emblem was engraved on the side. He told me he remembered his first hunt in the kelp Forests of Cali with the gun for white seabass and that he had a miraculous first shot that stoned a large white at long range… and he said he felt the gun always had “magic.” He sold it to make way for larger guns in his quiver but always regretted letting it go. His words echoed in my mind, while hunt after hunt, fish were pummeled by accurate shots, and the mythos of the gun only grew in my mind. Sometime after owning the gun for a while I had my first phone conversation with Daryl. I called him to discuss a big water Pelagic cannon. We talked for maybe an hour, sharing stories of our adventures across the globe. Keep in mind I had never bought a gun from him, he had never turned a profit on me, but we spoke like old friends about the passion we both shared. I purchased a 65 inch blue water cannon from him that has taken some truly world class giants. On my first hunt with the gun, on the other side of the world, in Cape Verde, Africa…the trigger pull was tight. I panicked and called Daryl’s cell phone maybe 20 times until he answered In what was the middle of the night in Hawaii…… he talked me off the ledge and told me to back the screw out of the trigger mechanism a little bit, sure enough the next day I pulled the trigger on a 90 lb wahoo and watched the shaft rocket into its side right where I had placed the shot. That big gun has killed a lot of big fish since then, yellowfin..big eye…cubera. Back in my home waters one day I speared I big red snapper that found its way wrapped deep in the structure of the platform, near the bottom in the murk. In the process of untangling the fish, the gun was lost in the murk layer and I never saw it again. I spoke to Daryl explaining to him the catastrophe of the loss, the magic of the gun and how tough it was to lose it. He assured me he could create another gun… with the magic. And Sure enough when I received the new gun… and baptized it where the river meets the Gulf…and stoned my first snapper, I knew it wasn’t the magic of that gun . It was the magic of his guns. Daryl also custom built me a gun for dirty water, a 36 inch forward handle small arms cannon! Many triple tail in the 20-30 lb class and a literal ton of cobia fell off its rail. When I get in the water with one of his guns, there is a confidence and swagger that comes with knowing what I have in my hand and what it is capable of. Spearfishing would not be the same for me without my weapon of choice and the magic of a hand shaped gun by Daryl Wong. I sleep well at night before a trip knowing in my home waters, or in an ocean off the coast of a far away land, when that long awaited opportunity for a world class fish presents itself… my speargun will never let me down. It will move silky through the water, it will draw to the fish like a magnet, and when the shaft flies, it will fly true…because its a Wong. | 
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