The first thing a French spearo will tell you, before he tells you where the fish are, is where you are allowed to put the gun in the water. I learned that the hard way off the Var coast, loading up near a beach that looked deserted and getting waved off by a fisherman who knew the local order better than I did. He was right. The rules here are not vague, and the Affaires Maritimes do check.
If you are cruising France with a speargun aboard, the regime that governs free-diving for fish is national, layered with local prefectural orders, and unforgiving of the casual approach. Get it straight before you splash.
You free-dive, full stop. No bottles.
The single rule that surprises visitors most: in France, spearfishing on scuba is illegal. You hunt on a single breath or you do not hunt at all. Carrying a speargun and bottles in the same trip is itself an offence, so you cannot even have the two aboard together if you intend to dive. This is apnea hunting, the way the French have always done it, and it is non-negotiable.
That ban does a lot of quiet work. It keeps the depths the preserve of the fish, it caps how long a hunter can stay down, and it means the better spearos here are genuinely good free-divers, not tourists with tanks. If you have only ever speared on scuba elsewhere, you are starting over.
You also cannot carry any light source while spearfishing, and you cannot use an underwater scooter to get to your spot. Night spearfishing is out. The hunt happens in daylight, on lung power, with your own fins doing the swimming.
Minimum age and the licence question
You must be at least 16 to spearfish in France. Under that age, no speargun, no exceptions, even with a parent in the water alongside.
Recreational sea fishing itself does not require a paid licence for a visitor, which catches people out because they assume spearfishing must need one. It does not, in the basic sense. What it does need is a declaration: anglers from 16 up are meant to register their activity with the maritime authority before they fish, free of charge, the day before at the latest. Many cruisers skip this and get away with it; the safer move is to do it. The bigger exposure is not the paperwork, it is the gear and zone rules, and those are enforced.
What you take cannot be sold. Nothing speared in France may enter commerce, full stop. This is a sport-and-supper activity and the law treats it that way. If you are also rigging a line over the side, the same no-sale principle runs through the whole recreational frame, which I set out in my piece on fishing from your boat in France as a visitor.
Where you cannot dive
This is where most visitors go wrong, because the forbidden zones are not obvious from the cockpit.
- You must stay at least 150 metres clear of bathing beaches, fish farms and harbour entrances. Some local orders push that to 200 metres or more. Near a supervised beach you are firmly inside the 300-metre coastal band rules that govern all watersports, and spearfishing inside a marked bathing zone is simply banned.
- Marine reserves, the national parks and many cantonnements de peche are off limits altogether. On the Provence coast that includes the heart of the Port-Cros national park mooring area, where spearfishing is forbidden across a wide zone and the wardens patrol it. The same protected-area logic shapes where you can even snorkel, as I cover in the snorkelling Calanques marine life piece.
- Local prefectural orders close further patches seasonally or permanently. The only way to be sure is to read the arrete prefectoral for the department you are in. The capitainerie usually has it pinned up.
A speargun loaded inside a reserve is the kind of thing that ends a cruise badly. The fine is one part of it; confiscation of gear is the other.
The flag you must fly
When you are in the water with a gun, the boat or your float must carry the dive signal: in France the recognised marker for a free-diver hunting is a flag, red with a white diagonal stripe (the alpha-style signal, or the red-and-white sport diver flag), visible to other craft. A snorkeller drifting low in a busy anchorage is nearly invisible, and a hunter concentrating on the bottom even more so. The flag is your only protection against a passing boat. Tow a buoy with the flag on it and stay near it.
This matters more than people think on the crowded Provence coast in August, where day boats and charter RIBs run between anchorages at speed. The 5-knot limit inside the coastal band protects you, but only if the skipper can see there is someone in the water.
What you can take, and how big it has to be
Minimum landing sizes apply to a spearo exactly as they do to an angler, and the Mediterranean numbers differ from the Atlantic. A few that matter on the Provence coast:
- Sea bass (bar / loup): minimum 30 cm in the Mediterranean, against 42 cm on the Atlantic side.
- Sea bream species each carry their own minimum; check the table before you shoot, because dorade and sar sizes vary.
- The dusky grouper (merou) is protected on the French Mediterranean coast and around Corsica. You do not touch it. The moratorium has run for years and shows no sign of lifting.
Carry a tape on your float and measure before you decide. A shot fish you then have to discard is dead for nothing, which is the opposite of the point.
The gear, and the gear you cannot carry
The speargun rules in France are about what you may carry and where, as much as how big the gun is. The headline restrictions, beyond the no-scuba ban already covered, are practical ones aimed at keeping the hunt fair and the hunter visible.
You hunt on a single breath, so your kit is a gun, a mask, a snorkel, fins, a weight belt and a wetsuit. The wetsuit matters more here than people from warm coasts assume: even in 25 degree summer water, an hour of repeated diving cools you fast, and a chilled free-diver makes bad decisions about how long to stay down. A float with the dive flag, a line and a catch bag complete the rig.
What you cannot have: no light source carried while spearfishing, no underwater scooter to ferry you out to the spot, and no air supply of any kind in the water. The gun itself must not be loaded outside the water. You load it once you are in, you unload it before you climb back aboard, and you never wave a charged gun around the cockpit. A loaded speargun on deck is both dangerous and, in the eyes of an inspecting officer, evidence of careless handling.
There is a real safety case threaded through all of it. Free-diving carries the risk of shallow-water blackout, where a hunter pushing breath-hold limits loses consciousness near the surface on the way up. This is why experienced spearos dive in pairs, one watching while the other is down, never both submerged at once. The boat-based version of that is having someone aboard keeping eyes on the float and the diver. Treat the buddy system as part of the kit, not an optional extra.
How it works on a real cruising day
Say you are anchored off the Giens peninsula with the morning still glassy. Before anything goes in the water you pull up the local prefectural order on your phone and confirm you are not inside a reserve or within 150 metres of the beach off the bow. Gun stays unloaded on deck until you are clear of swimmers. You rig the float with the dive flag and trail it. One person ideally stays aboard as eyes on the surface.
You dive on a breath, you measure what you take, you keep nothing protected and nothing undersized, and you sell none of it. Back aboard, the gun is unloaded before it comes over the rail.
Do it that way and spearfishing in France is one of the great pleasures of a Mediterranean summer. The water off the Var and the Iles d'Hyeres is 24 to 26 degrees in August, clear enough to pick a fish at depth, and full of life precisely because the French guard their reserves so hard. Respect the lines they have drawn and you are welcome in the water. Ignore them and you meet the Affaires Maritimes, who have heard every excuse a visiting skipper can invent.
