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FDD blog moved!!

2009-11-15T11:43:00.005+02:00

FDD blog has changed name and address!

You can find the new updates here:

FDD news: www.fddnews.blogspot.com

You can find it on our Freedive Dahab website under the button NEWS.

Also, check out our new website, FreeDiveInternational for both our freediving centers in Dahab and Cape Town!

The Valsalva Maneuver

2009-10-17T12:24:00.015+02:00

Since nobody seems to believe that I'm capable of writing anything serious (not even me) I want to prove them (well, us) wrong, and give it a go.
Plus, Jeremy (who is the most useless freediver on earth, but when it comes to writing he's my role model, my hero, my muse. You can read some of his funky stuff right here on this blog), challenged me to write something that for once is not about taking the piss out of him (or other useless freedivers) but something manual like about freediving. To which I answered "no way, manuals are for nerds" but then again I'm aware that lots of my blog readers are nerds, so I figured why not?

Now, I have been doing a lot of thinking before I could come up with something serious enough to write about, which, let me tell you, it hasn't been easy, since the only thing I have a hard time making fun of is death and diseases (being a neurotic hypochondriac).
So, I thought, what is as bad as a deadly disease?
I came up with 2 things:
The Valsalva maneuver and packing.
Now, I don't have the nerves to talk about packing: it upsets me.
Therefore Valsalva is what I'm about to write about.

The Valsalva maneuver is the most common way to equalize. This is what your scuba diving instructor will tell you to do during your first open water dive. Well, scuba instructors are actually not that advanced: very few of them are aware of the concept hidden behind equalization and what actually happens in your aerial cavities and passages when you perform it.
However, back to your scuba diving instructor, he won't tell you what the Valsalva is and how it works, but he will tell you instead "pinch your nose and blow", which most times will end up blowing your eardrum instead.
Now, I'm saying this not simply because I'm unfriendly with the scuba divers and I think most of them are pathetic, and they move in the water like zombies, and squeeze puffer fish and kick their fins all over the reef amongst other things.
No, I say that because I know.
I've taught freediving to few scuba instructors (which I enjoyed very much, since I love to take the piss when they do embarrassing things like frog kicking on a descent), and I always like to ask them "how do you equalize?" and they always say "I pinch and blow" to which I say "well, that's called Valsalva" to which they say "Valsalva? Isn't that some tasty Italian food?", to which I say "however, can you show me how you do it?" to which they pinch their nose and perform a Frenzel (it's very easy to see the difference) .

To which I say "actually that was a Frenzel that you just did", to which they say "Frenzel? Isn't that some dodgy german food?" to which I tell them to fuck off and the next day I call in sick and I send Marek to continue the course.

However, the point here is that lots of people do Frenzel thinking they're doing Valsalva, and it's ok if it is some clerk working in a useless office stamping paperwork all his life, but it's not ok when it is somebody that teaches diving for a living.

This summer I have been visiting my doctor at the recompression chamber several times a week, since I had a dodgy and very persistent ear infection. Now, this doctor is treating only about 5% of his patients with recompression treatment, another 5% with other minor injuries (mainly stupid snorkellers falling on the reef and getting coral burns - and unfortunately survive), maybe a 10% with ear infections, and the remaining 80% of the patients are going to see him because of ear barotraumas.
Most of them get hurt because they haven't been explained properly how to equalize, so I'm sitting there waiting for my turn, listening to dr. Heikal (who I think is a saint) explaining over and over again, several times a day, how to equalize to these people.
One day I felt so moved (and trust me, I don't feel moved very often) that I suggested to him that we run free equalization classes once a week so that these poor wannabe scuba divers have the chance to learn equalizing before starting their course and getting hurt.

So (and I apologize for the long intro), why then Valsalva is so bad?
Because of the aggressive way it is performed. When you do it, you pinch your nose and try to exhale forcefully against your closed lips. This will move air from the lungs into the mouth cavity, therefore increasing the pressure inside the mouth. This overpressure will force open the Eustachians tubes, which are narrow air passages which connect the mouth cavity with the middle ear. So now air will be free to pass through the E. tubes and get into the middle ear, equalizing the difference in pressure created by the descent.

This forceful "blowing" action will become harder and harder the deeper you go, since the air in your lungs will get more and more compressed, and therefore it will be more and more difficult to move it up to the mouth.
On top of that, the fact that freedivers (at least the real ones) go down head first, make equalizing Valsalva even more difficult, since you will have your lungs higher than your mouth, which means pushing air from up to down (while normally gas likes to go from down to up, which is for example the reason why you burp up gas from the stomach, or why it's easier to fart while doing headstands)(well, I don't know about that, but a yoga teacher friend of mine told me)

So basically, when you do Valsalva you are doing sit ups, since you are contracting your abdominal muscles on each single equalization. Now, I know a lot of freedivers that would need to do lots of sit ups because they look embarrassingly floppy and baggy, but I much more recommend doing this kind of exercise not while freediving.

Also, the frequency with which you can equalize with Valsalva is nowhere close to Frenzel. That means that when you do Frenzel you can equalize every 20cm if you like, while you can only Valsalva every 1 or 2 meters.
Why would you want to equalize as frequently as you can? Because if you do that and miss an equalization, you only miss a very little one, and you can catch up immediately after.
If on the other hand, if you equalize every couple of meters, and you miss an equalization, well, you are fucked so to say, and you have to stop your descent.

To add drama to the disaster, when you will start diving deeper than 30/40 meters, equalizing Valsalva will greatly contribute to give you a nice lung squeeze, because of the strain and tension you put on the diaphragm and in the chest area.

If you are a Valsaver, no need to worry. Even the dumber person on earth can learn to do Frenzel. Trust me, I taught lots of dumb people to freedive, and I know what I'm talking about (ask Jeremy, even he learnt Frenzel).
You just need to come to us, and ask for "FDD Frenzel speciality"; it's only 1 day, 2 dive sessions. If you are a slow learner (which is the politically correct way to call retarded people) we add the "Special Linda program" which is one extra session. Success is guaranteed, and you will only pay if we make you a Frenzeler (provided that you survive).
And if you pay lots of extra cash I even teach you how to make a proper Mouthfill (but don't forget we also accept credit card).

As for the gallery section of this entry, I would like to start with Mr. Valsalva, the guy who invented the evil maneuver. He was indeed Italian, but as you can see he's not classifiable as food (unless you are a cannibal), and he certainly doesn't look tasty.

And here you see what can happen when you do aggressive Valsalva: not only you can burst your eardrum, but you can even burst the hood of your wetsuit.

And here, you will see how Frenzel have changed the life of so many people that used to do Valsalva before:

Pim during his Valsalva period:

and Pim after he learnt Frenzel:

Marek before Frenzel:

Marek after Frenzel (ok, he turned a bit gay, but he dives much deeper):

Jeremy before Frenzel:

Jeremy after Frenzel (yes, i admit he didn't change much and he still looks as pathetic as before):

Martin before Frenzel:

I don't have a picture of Martin after, because he still didn't get there.

Me before Frenzel:

Me after Frenzel:

Herbert had the greatest change. From this:

To this (true, he lost all of his beautiful tan, but now he can dive much deeper)

the dogblog

2009-09-17T13:43:00.015+02:00

My name is Lua Flexi Paganelli the 1st. I am an Italian Volpino, the fierce guard dog who defends the Freedive Dahab shop. Volpino is Italian for little fox.

People are surprised that I am an Italian Volpino.

Are they surprised because that means I am small, and an odd choice for a guard dog? No. I may be 20cm long and 12cm high now, but soon I will be 30cm long and 15 cm, high, so watch out, I could easily bite your arm off.

Are they surprised because I am an Italian breed of dog living in Dahab? No of course not, there have been Italians in Egypt ever since Tiberius Claudius Caesar took control of the Red Sea coast in 10 BC . Nowadays they mostly do snorkelling and not so much with the running of empires and conquering though.

No. People are surprised I am an Italian Volpino, because my mama is a Rottweiler.

Here are Mama and I, about to ride on Mama’s motorbike. I am more comfortable in my pouch now that I have managed to chew an air hole at the top.

I know my name is Lua, because I have met lots of freedivers in the shop, and they tell me this. Initially I thought my name was “NO BITING!!” because that is what mama always calls me. Usually when she calls me this I get scared and piss myself, and then all of the other people in the shop call me “Shit, she has pissed again”.

I think my favourite name is Lua, though.

If you haven’t ever met a freediver, they are great fun. They look like this:

And this

Actually, I am not always sure. There are a lot of animals in Dahab, and many of them come into the shop. Sometimes I think I am looking at a freediver, but Mama says they are a pussy or a chicken, which confuses me.

This is me chewing on Jeremy’s finger. Mama says he is both a pussy and a chicken (but definitely not a freediver). I don’t see how he can be two animals, and he tastes very nice, so I am thinking probably more likely a chicken.

Either way, he is easily the nicest person ever to have braved Mama’s company in the shop. She says he feeds the fishes every time he is in the sea which strikes me as a very kind thing to do, and Lotta (more about her later) says that he spares no opportunity to have a Samba, and I think anyone who dances regularly is a happy and jolly person. (Mama says that disco is the key to why the Israeli’s are the most loved nation in the world. I don‘t know what that means, but, well, you try arguing with Mama and see what happens. )

Life in the FDD shop is great. I can pee wherever I like, everyone looks after me, especially Leif, Mama’s slave, and Mama even lets me stay in the shop by myself, to improve my courage. Here you see the sacrifice she has made, forcing herself to go off with friends so that I can practice being a guard dog on my own.

During the day I get to meet many famous pussies, chickens and freedivers. This is Mike. Apparently he is a famous chicken now and on TV (I don’t know what TV means because I am just a little dog, but it seems to be a good thing.) He did something very brave by himself with just a giant flip flop.

I can’t imagine what it was, but here is the flip flop. He thinks that is the Spanish flag on it. I thought it would be rude to point out that it is in fact the Brazilian flag. (I may be only a little dog, but I am not stupid). Perhaps he is confused because Brazil is a little bit in the Northern Hemisphere as well as the Southern Hemisphere. Mike is a little cloudy on Northern Hemisphere geography.

Mama actively encourages me to bite certain stuff. Like Jeremy.
And this.

She says I can chew this book because it is old-school Italian and doesn’t talk about mouth-fill anywhere. I don’t know what “old-school” means, (because I am only a little dog) but I know a lot about mouth-fill, and as you can see from the picture, I practice it at every opportunity.

My other favourite person is Lotta. She looks like this.

The bandage on her leg is where she says she was attacked by a toolbox. I have to say, though I was watching very carefully and the toolbox didn’t move. In fact, it was clearly Lotta who started the altercation. (I don’t really know what an altercation is because I am only a small dog, but Lotta definitely started it).

In fact, very often when Lotta thinks she is alone in the shop I can see one of these.

I don’t know what it is (because I am only a small dog) but I know that it usually means there will be singing and then crashing and swearing in Viking, often followed by blaming the toolbox for an attack. Lotta is a lovely and sweet person, though, so I never tell Mama about that.

There has just been a competition at the blue hole. This is the place where all the freedivers, pussies and chickens go when they aren’t in the shop. I am not usually allowed there, but I sneak there sometimes without Mama knowing.

See.

I don’t know who this is, but it might be Roman. I am told he wears a Winnie the Pooh hat. Since he doesn’t wear it on his feet, it doesn’t help me at all. I can’t remember who told me that but thanks for nothing, smartypants.

Jeremy says Roman is a great diver because he can pack shisha smoke. Mama thinks he smells because she wrote “BO” next to all of his dives in the competition. I don’t know much about competitions, (because I am only a small dog) but I think it is harsh of Mama to judge him for having bad body odour. She will have to start being more tolerant if she wants to find me a papa.

As well as pussies, chickens and freedivers, it seems the competition was also open to people from other planets which I think is very progressive (I may be a little Italian dog, but I am not a fascist). I actually had to look all the way up to make sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. This is Katfish, she is from the planet Newsy-land. She is one of the few people from there. Mostly the planet is populated by sheep. Apparently.

I don’t know where it is (being just a little dog) but it must be a very long way away from our solar system if all of their people have pink heads with the eyes on top and don’t feel the cold enough to wear a suit.

I have to go now. I have to pee, and I need to find a nice place on the floor.

Woof Woof!

Lua.

About the translator:
This articles has been clearly not written in English by Lua, who, despite being an exceptionally intelligent dog (being Linda's descendant), doesn't speak English that fluently yet.
Lua wrote it in Italian, and Jeremy translated it in English.

Jeremy, who you see here together with his dragon, is a very literate smartass and he kindly offered to help Lua with her blog.
Other than being a smartass and a useless freediver, Jeremy is also a writer, and soon he will move to Dahab to work on his book. And hopefully he will write some witty blog material for our amusement.

Thank you Jeremy!!

td 2009- the very end

2009-09-12T18:09:00.018+02:00

As always i'm totally sloppy with the last day of any competition i have been writing about. So this is not exception.

It must be the party bit that confuses me, and it takes me few days to get to remember my name again, and who i am, and especially that i have a blog to update every day for the rest of my life, which sounds even scarier than being married.

And about marriage, guess what.
I actually did find a husband!!

I woke up the next morning with my wedding noseclip superglued to my nose, which by the way is still there, and a husband next to me.
I don't know how that happened, but let me tell you that I'm aware that no sane person on this planet would (and should) marry me, which is basically the proof that the guy is completely crazy.
But hey, now it's done, so i guess my husband hunt is over. Which makes me sad, and i'm gonna miss it.

And here the wedding ceremony, celebrated by Rob the King.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7j-M057oi-Q

However, wasn't this about TD and all the amazingly useless freedivers that have been defying death during the most challenging day, number 3, where you have to propel yourself to the deepest abyss without the use of any device, and come back alive?

So here you get the result list again,

And you will see how the Israelis should start training seriously and quit with their disco breaks and fizzy bubblerh, because it's definitely not helping their performance.

This time John (who now everybody calls "husband") found the tag and finally got his first white card. We showed him the tag before his dive, so that he hopefully could remember how it looked like when he got to the plate, provided that his short term memory would stay switched on during the whole descent, which was unlikely. We wanted to drop one with a big "TAG" written on it, but we forgot, so we could only hope for the best.

For once in his life Mike actually got close to the plate enough to touch it, which i found very impressive. And he did that without the help of his giant monoflipper.
I'm aware I'm a bit harsh with him sometimes, and somebody might think I don't like the guy. Quite the opposite: despite being a chicken he's actually a nice and funny guy, who survived one of my instructor courses (respect!), and especially who arranged and brought most of the prizes for the winners of TD. I don't know where he got them from, probably he stole them, because let's be honest, who would want to sponsor Mike with anything?
Here's the proof of our friendship. See, i'm even smiling.

Marek made me proud again (and he'd better not disappoint me if he doesn't want to get fired) with a very nice 63 m.

And Matt, who you can admire here below in all his gracefulness, despite the massive drag created by his noseclip, made it safe to 70 and back, setting a very respectable polish record.

Rob and Alexey should have got the prize for the biggest morons of the competition, since they did 2 awesome dives, and not only got 10 points off for not letting go of the rope early enough (which is the stupidest beginner mistake you can make at a comp), but also missed the chance to set 2 national records.
Gordon also joined the moronic club, for doing a beautiful 50m, coming up, taking of his goggles, saying "THERE WAS NO TAG", and then completing the SP. Now you tell me, how stupid was that? Very. This is why we gave him a red card.

Karsten, who you see here above looking stupid, just chickened out at 17m and therefore deserves no mention here, even though i like the guy and the way he's helpful with everybody, especially the losers (but we're not here to speak nicely about people, so let's carry on).

But the best was Roman, the author of "the big black gay jewish dragon and the donut princess" novel, who added some excitement to the show with a black out on a silly 40m dive when he's been below 80 few times (ok, he had his giant monoflipper then), and once or twice he even made it back awake.
Honestly I was expecting something dodgy to happen, since he had a black out also the day before, and i told the safety divers to be ready to get him.
I did the same before Flavia's dive (and she also announced 40) and she switched off few meters below the surface. She had a very funky one, and it was obvious that she was having the best dream of her life. I'm sure she was more pissed off about waking up so early than about the red card she got.

Note that the Shisha team (which was obviously Marek, Roman and Flavia) got 3 back outs out of 9 dives, which is impressive, so everybody got to the amazing and absolutely unforeseen conclusion that smoking shisha is not good for freediving.

Thanks shisha team for sacrificing your lives to science so that the rest of us can become better freedivers.

The women did well, and few NR were broken:
Alana (who you see here below, doing what I like to do best, which is giving the finger to Mike) with a 23m dive;

Agata with 36m; our blond Wendy with 45m; Jarmila with an impressive 52; and Jana, with a even more impressive 53m.

So, after the last dive, we took the pyramid in, drank a coffee, peeled off the last burnt bits of skin that was left on our faces after 7 days in the sun, and went home: I updated the blog, while Lotta was supposed to put the final results together.
And here something went wrong. Maybe some of her coffee leaked in between her few neurons interfering with the cerebral transmission, or maybe is simply the senility: however, she managed to fuck up the overall women results.
So, we all happily go to the party, and before everybody was completely drunk we managed to do the prize ceremony, announcing Liv as the bronze medal winner, and giving her a beautiful mask. Now unfortunately for Liv, she was behind Jana of 1 point, which means that Jana was third, while Liv was only fourth…

Nobody realized until the day after, but when we tried to get hold of Liv to get our (or Jana) stuff back, she did a runner and tried to fly back to uk before we could get to her. Which didn't work out since we sent the egyptian secret police behind her, which is world famous for its efficiency, so they found out all about her escaping plan, stopped her and recovered the medal (not the mask, because they are not trained for multitasking).

Here you can see Liv with her misleading angel face. Don't trust her, she's bad!!!

And below you see Jana, surfacing from one of her successful dives. She does look bad, and she probably is, but at least she didn't try to steal anything.

And here Jana with the rest of her winning team:

So in conclusion, apart all the bullshit, we would like to:
-thank Mike from the bottom of Lotta's heart (I don't have one) for the funkiest prizes from suunto, technisub, neptune wetsuits.
-thank Elios for giving us some free neoprene, the puking bag for George, and lots of hats.
-apologize with Jana for the fuck up. Hopefully we will be able to send her the medal soon.

I would like to say something about the party, but unfortunately I have memories only until the wedding, after which somebody unplugged me and my files have gone forever. Which happened to a lot of other people, since at some point there was a bunch of us (namely Lotta, the Husband, Roman, Wendy, Matt, Betti, Agata) lying on the ground (half of us on top of Husband because he's big and comfortable), while Roman was reading for us the story of the gay dragon while sucking on Lotta's dirty toes.

If somebody have pictures, please send them to me.

TD 2009 - the end

2009-09-07T18:28:00.013+02:00

Finally back from blue hole. And it is over!!! Now there's only the boring prize ceremony to go through, and if we manage to stay awake we will eat the awesome food from Rush and have a disco break until late night.

So, what had happened yesterday and why was I so dead tired?
The main pulley placed on top of the pyramid was broken, so, who did they put up there to hold the rope? Me, while my slaves where hanging out drinking coffee and smoking shisha.

Not only I'm the boss and I should be entitled to privileges, I'm also an old lady who should stay home knitting and taking care of her arthritis.
I'm really not happy about all this.

However, for everybody else it was a good day. Lots of white cards, only 1 black out. It was silver guy, who is obviously gay, so I let Dean to catch him. I'm only rescuing the hot single hetero ones, as everybody know already.

Day 2 is always my favorite day, since it's CWT, and everybody show off their most expensive giant monoflippers, and you look at them in the water and you are all impressed, and you think "wow, this guy looks so professional", until the moment when they start their dive, with the most appalling, inefficient, useless duck dive that even my 2 star students manage to do better.

So we did have a good time commenting on the worst ones (French Marc was probably the champion), while we were trying to protect camera and operator from drowning in the splashes. Marc will win a coupon for a "duck diving workshop" with Freedive Dahab.
I have to admit that I've seen a few perfect ones, which I found very surprising, since I've been to a large number of comps, and I know that perfect duck dives are as rare as rich hot single men.

However, sorry for the continuous distractions, I really try to do some serious journalism here, but my attention span must be very short, since I keep getting distracted with irrelevant details.

Deepest dive was 90, and guess who did it. Yeah, him again.
Second deepest announcement was Roman who didn't make it.
Then there was Polish Matt with a nice 80 (polish record).

You see him here before his OT, and I want you to notice his noseclip. He obviously added some neoprene as padding, but didn't cut it round to fit the shape of the plastic. Now, I know that eastern Europeans are not so big on fashion, and they have other problems than looking funky, but since we care about the image of our competition, tonight at the ceremony (and he doesn't know yet) he will win scissor as a special prize.

Then there was my pupil Marek with a 76 m, which I agree was a bit of a pussy announcement but he needs to find his motivation back before we push him to more respectable depths.
But hey, he did it in a record time of 1.52, which is pretty fast. On the other hand if you are Czech and want to do a freediving record, you got to do like that Austrian guy and come up with your own creative stuff, otherwise you're fucked.

Gordon did also a Serbian record with a 70 m dive. And Alon did a Israeli record with 65m, after which he had a disco break with all his buddies.

Stuart turned early, and so did Mike (just for a change), and they both got the chicken badge.

John didn't do any record, and didn't even find a tag on the bottom (while witnesses swear there were 2 down there), which cost him lots of abuse. He got even more abuse for his ridiculous monofin, for which he will win a prize.

Actually i shouldn't be to evil with him, since the poor guy in a moment of confusion, promised to marry me. We'll get married tonight a the party so we don't have to spend money in a wedding party, which is a pretty smart idea of mine. now the only problem is that he's not rich (hence the lack of proper wedding), but he's promised me he will be rich in one year time. If not he will refund me for the loss of 12 months husband hunting (and when you hit my age 12 months are very precious).
Plus he seems to be a good housekeeper, and he's a perfect babysitter for little Lua (my puppy), which will make me save some money in salaries. I can probably even convince him to work for free as a office slave, since Sleif the slave will leave this winter.

Oh, i almost forgot to say that we had 2 national records also for the women: Wendy with a nice 60 m (finally!!!), and Betti, with a 53 m.

Apart from the diving, lot of sluttiness was going on again on the opposite platform.

and more

and more

I still wasn't sure what was going on over there, but I can tell you that everybody goes there and flash their boobs at Erika. Is she giving them chocolate or what?

So I couldn't resist and i went there and very casually I flashed my boobs to see what happened. So Erika's assistant put some lube-looking substance on my boob (and I thought, OMG, something really dodgy is gonna happen) and then she POKED me with a metal stick that had a wire connected to her headphones. And she said she could hear my feelings, which obviously was a big fat lie because it's notorious that I don't have feelings.
So I gave her the "piss off" badge.
But then she confessed that she was just listening for bubbles to which I didn't say anything, but I thought: didn't she realize that we're not bubblemaking here, and that she's hanging out with the wrong people?
But somebody explained to me later on that we can also have bubbles in our body from just freediving, and that no, it's not because you farted in your suit. And that you can hear these little bubbles with something called doping or topping, or dumpling or maybe doppler thing but now I cannot remember.

However, that was all for yesterday, and now i should write today report, but unfortunately the party started and i have to run. I'll have time to write more tomorrow, while trying to survive the hangover.

But of course you find all the results here below.

and here the overall results for the men

and the women (Lotta got back to her senses and finally fixed it).

TD 2009- CWT

2009-09-06T19:27:00.007+02:00

here the result lists:
i apologize for the shitty resolution, but today the egyptian connection is even slower than normal, and i'm too tired to sit here the whole night to upload the results...
(i also apologize for not writing anything about this absolutely exciting day, but i'm gonna have to go home and sleep or i'll drop dead before tomorrow.)

cwt women

cwt men

partial results - day 2 - women

partial results - day 2 - men

team partial results:

CNF announcements for tomorrow

TD 2009- FIM

2009-09-05T19:15:00.008+02:00

Wow, that was a boring day today.
Not a black out, not a samba.
Only the Israeli team (6 of them) made it worthy being exposed to the strong wind, the unforgiving sun and the cold water (now down to 27 degrees!) for so many hours, and provided us with some good entertainment. And amazingly a couple of them even managed to get a white card!
The others maybe felt in a happy mood and wanted more colorful cards. We got some late starts, some late surface protocols, some short depth, and I don't remember what else.
Now, a little digression so that you can understand what has been going on the pyramid during the whole day, because nobody else other than us and the Israeli had a clue: if you would have lived in a primitive country like Egypt for too long like we have, and your IQ would drop considerably (obviously due to the lack of intellectual stimulus) like ours had, then you could only watch intellectually unchallenging movies like "u don't mess with the zohan", which is obviously all about Israelis, their culture and their funny way of speaking, and then finally you would understand why all of us spent the whole day speaking about schnorHkels, HaustrHalians, fizzy bubblerH, Hummus and have a disco brHeak uuh uuh between every official top, and you would find it funny.
Well, I can tell you that the IsrHaeli team didn’t find it very funny, but who cares, we are the ones with the red cards in our hands.
(And just for the record, when I say US, I don't only mean Lotta and I, but the rest of the book club: Dean, Katya, Leif the slave and Nikki. And ok, I confess I had to watch the movie twice before I could grasp all the deep insights.)

While we were pissing ourselves, there was something strange happening on the other platform: several athletes kept sitting there exposing their private parts to the attention of Erika the scientist and the rest of her team.

Here you see Kathryn, who has this innocent angel face, and then look what she's doing.

And then Gordon, who (during poor Karsten final breathe-up) you can see in the process of lowering his pants. Poor Karsten didn't appreciate that, let me tell you.
However, I wonder if these people were trying to buy a white card by offering their naked bodies to others, which wouldn't surprise me considering the amount of sluttiness going on in the freediving world, but unfortunately they were on the wrong platform trying to bribe the wrong people.
No big damage, since there's not many of them that I would want to see naked anyways.
Guys, if you want to bribe the right people, tomorrow come to the big platform, and please show us money instead than your pale naked bits, thank you very much.

Oh, and by the way, here's the result list of day 1, the FIM day, where is so difficult to get a yellow card (because of the inability of making rope violations), but our athletes still manage to get them just to keep us entertained.

Most yellow went to early turns, and those are my favorite dives, because together with the yellow I can give the athletes the chicken card.
And here the team results:

I'm sure you're wondering who the team members are, and i have to say i ave no idea. lotta is doing all the paperstuff, including the teams registration, while i spend my time taking the piss (and embarrassing pictures). I'll investigate more and let you know about the team situation.

About the chicken's (or pussy's) situation, the athletes seem to believe that chickenness (or pussiness) is a medical condition. Now, how did I find that out? The other day I had a 10 minutes break during my 6 hours safety session in the water, and being very hungry I grabbed a bit of leftover food from Jeremy plate.
Mike saw me, grabbed his head in his hands in a dramatic motion, and in a panicked voice he screamed "Oh my god!!! Now you got infected with the chicken virus!!!"
I thought he was being ridiculous, but all the others were showing terrible concern.
But now that I think of it…OMG, what if he's right? That happened right before I jumped on the sled with George and I stopped halfway!

Anyways, chicken virus or not, I did the deep safety for the deep guys: I safely escorted back from the abyss Marek, Roman (who got DQ but then won the protest and got white), Mateusz, and Alexey.
Alexey was obviously the deepest, with a 90 m dive, and he came up, yawned, and did the SP in 3 seconds and a half. Since we were worried for his safety (not for the depth, but for the aggressive pissed off freedivers), the Egyptian army was in blue hole for his protection. Nobody noticed anything of course, since those brave higly trained special soldiers were cunningly disguised as defenceless snorkellers (or schorhkellers).

TD 2009-static and other things

2009-09-04T16:18:00.014+02:00

Today it was the static day. Out of 11 people that made an announcement (static is not that popular is it?) only 8 managed to compete, since the others came to the pool announcing an unexpected (and convenient) dodgy belly when they woke up. They did look very upset about not competing, with their beers in their hands while dancing at the other end of the pool.

So Lotta, who is the only person in the world to actually likes doing static, in order not to leave any breaks in between official tops decided fill them by doing static herself. She had two goes, but then she skipped the last one, which was her actual official top.

Most impressive performance was Jana, who thanks to the outstanding coaching of Alexey pulled off an amazing 2.32, of which she was obviously very proud.

Our newbie southafrican John (who is now highly ranked in my list of ex students who embarrassed me most) went easily to 6 minutes, but due mainly to inexperienced pushy coaching came up too late (6.23) and kept taking off his noseclip 25 times before he managed to fuck up his surface protocol. Just to be sure that he got a red card, his coach kept touching him the whole time during his struggle to stay awake, or maybe she just fancy him badly and couldn't restrain herself.
Here John before he lost his dignity, when he still knew he had 1 noseclip only.

Here John after, when he was upset for the loss of the other 24 noseclips.

However, the gold medal goes to Alexey of course, who doesn't really give a shit about doing good times, or winning.
No, he only likes to piss off the others who obviously have no chance to win anything when he's around.
Look at how pissy Mike got when he figured he got second after him.

Let me tell you, Alexey doesn't have many friends left, and I hear rumors of sabotaging plans against him.
I think I heard something about mutiny on the platform during his dives, and kidnap the judges and the official surface camera. If somebody must kidnap me I hope he's at least hot and rich and that he will ask for a very high ransom that nobody can afford to pay so he has to keep me forever.
Here the other results of our amazing noname competition.

1.alexey molchanov- rus- 6.49
2.mike wells- aus- 6.33
3.kathryn mcphee- nz- 5.25
4.lotta ericson- swe- 5.16
5.stuart bond- uk- 5.04
6.jana strain- can- 2.32
7.karsten schneider- 3.05, yellow, short

As for the official training, we're done, and tomorrow the real comp is starting.
We had a couple of fun days on the sled, during which some of the athletes trained some depth adaptation, while some others were just having fun.

Even I had a go, first with George, which I chickened out half way (how embarrassing!), which was actually a good thing, because I went again on my own just after, and I got so badly narked (shallower and shallower every time) that I don't want to be responsible for other people down there when I'm in that state.

The beautiful picture of me, my sled and my finger was shot by Mike, and i hope he doesn't mind the fact that i stole it from his facebook album. If he does and complain, i'll give him a red card.

Serbian/Swedish Gordon, who is one of our oldest freediving friends, is now coached by Sara, who during TD is also going to be the shortest safety diver ever (I'm trying to convince John to black out at 20m, because I want to see her picking him up, since he's just around double her height, and it's gonna be fun). So Gordon is obviously using Sara's non-training approach, since not only I've seen him in Blue Hole only once, but he seems to be doing all sorts of activities other than freediving. The other day we went together on a bike ride in the desert, which was very funky and I totally understand why he'd rather do that instead than holding his breath and endure contractions.

So, for next year's events, in addition to the freediving/climbing weeks (called "go vertical") we're planning freediving/biking weeks (which I want to call "go horizontal", since I have the tendency to fall a lot, but then we have to go freediving in a pool and do only dynamics).

Here you see the most funky staff of any competition ever. Apart from Ingela of course, who keep haunting and stalking me with her even more massive boobs. And the worst bit is that she's planning to stay in Dahab for 2 months, and if that wasn't enough, it seems that her mother will join her soon.

And above another bit of our staff, little Vera (here with Lotta), who is almost as short as Sara, and if you don't believe that, the next pic will prove it.

TD 2009- training

2009-09-01T18:29:00.012+02:00

First thing first: I have to say that I'm totally upset with all you who read the blog and don't vote when I suggest a contest. "Funny faces" seemed very successful, everybody read it and found it funky, but only 2 people voted, and one of them voted for himself, and he wasn't even in the official contest.

And now, let's forget all about the pussy pool freediving, and let's go back to the real subject: TD 2009

Here we go. For the fifth time since 2005 freedive dahab is hosting the funkier and funkier triple depth. This time we told the various Herberts, Natalias, Saras and Williams to stay home watching telly because we are so tired of seeing them breaking world records and banging their heads on the bottom of blue hole all the time.
We want more beginners, chickens, pussies, nerds, losers and useless freedivers this year!

Therefore Rob the King signed up, but he's still undecided if joining the useless category or the chicken one. It will be a very hard head to head with Marek, who is also representing his gay club together with Silver Guy (alias Roman).

Silver guy, being the master of the uselessness, is the same guy that in the Rab Off competition got stuck with his noodle in between his legs. After that he got sponsored by Vaseline. Now he's rubbing himself with it before every dive, so his noodle is not getting stuck anymore, but who knows what a guy like that can come up with at the next occasion?
Here you see him in a mug shot that I found in the Czech police archives.

Apparently him and Marek got arrested once for having a fight over a hottie outside their gay club. Here's Marek mug shot.

However, also Marek got sponsored, by a big Egyptian company, Masri Shisha Inc., and he's working together with them at the prototype of an underwater shisha for freediving and scuba.

Australian Mike, who has been the chicken icon during "minicomp 2009" escaped from the chicken coop and flew back to Dahab after becoming a TV star for being the first freediver to swim a 120 long underwater cave with his giant flipper. Check it out, and listen to the audio.

http://video.ninemsn.com.au/video.aspx?mkt=en-au&brand=ninemsn&tab=m163&from=39&vid=E7FD6DD0-6975-4132-BD2E-1D596BA5887F&playlist=videoByTag:mk:en-AU:vs:0:tag:AUnews_AU60minutes:ns:MSNVideo_Top_Cat:ps:10:sd:-1:ind:1:ff:8A#::e7fd6dd0-6975-4132-bd2e-1d596ba5887f

French Marc will have his own category: FWS (fucking weird shit). Hopefully nobody will challenge him on that one, since recently he didn't train much fws: in the last month he's been seen hanging out with a giant underwater scooter. His mate Jeremy, who's the captain of Marc's cheerleaders, refers to it as "Marc's masculinity".

here you see Jeremy holding Marc's masculinity, and if you look at his face you can very well guess what he's thinking about.
By the way, this is the same Jeremy who we badly abused last may during his first FDD experience; now he's back, and he's spending all his waking hours in our shop, despite the continuous abuse and the rudeness. At the closing time the slave has to chase him away with the cattle prod we bought for the annoying customers.

Unfortunately some real freedivers heard about the most amazing prizes we have for the winners, and after paying massive bribes managed to infiltrated the competition. Molchanov junior, miss McPhee & miss Strain are some of them.

here you see the two girls practising mouthfill:

and here Alexey looking very cool:

By the way, the bid for Alexey computer bag with his autograph is still on. The winner will also win a coupon for a date with him, so hopefully if will be a girl...

Badges updates: since this is my competition and there's no Maria telling me to fuck off when I ask for more badges, I can have as many as I want.
I'm gonna have (amongst many others):
-piss off badge (my trademark)
-choppy chop badge
-what u want badge
-pussy badge
-chicken badge
-suck it up badge
-I'm single badge (to show only to the hot athletes, together with the choppy chop badge)
-no Mohamed, I don't want to marry you badge

Unfortunately i don't have any gossip yet, everybody is still behaving and the whole atmosphere looks very boring indeed. Shit, why do the sordid athletes only go to Crete to do their dodgy stuff? Hopefully something will happen later on...

free WC 2009- funny faces

2009-08-24T17:59:00.023+02:00

WHAT BREATH HOLDING DOES TO YOUR PUBLIC IMAGE
(nothing good, let me tell you)

how many of these hypoxic faces can you recognize?
we have been struggling a lot to put the names down, and we are not done yet....please help!

also, please vote to decide who is the winner of the stupidest look, so we can send him/her an award!!

to vote, drop a mail at info@freedivedahab.com

thanks to wonderful nanna kreutzmann for the beautiful shots!!
by the way, also nanna is single and looking for husband, so if you are interested, drop me mail and i'll make arrangements.

number 1:

it's definitely somebody from the japanese team...but it's a girl or a guy?

number 2:

actually apart for the vampire lips he look a bit hot. no idea who he is. vampire lips, if you read that, let me know if you're single and rich.

number 3:

another vampire lips. beautiful eyes though. you can also drop me a mail.

number 4:

scary!

number 5:

ah! i know who that is! i gave him a white card on this one.

number 6:

i know also this one!

number 7:

she looks horrified! maybe her judge was very ugly. she was definitely not on my lane. she must be french.

number 8:

ah! i know this one. i even gave him a red card! but he said that he doesn't hate me for that, which is good, since he's big and scary and you don't want to be on his black list.

number 9:

this one is one of those ex students that i pretended i didn't know. can you blame me?

number 10:

doesn't he looks like a funky hobbit?

number 11:

i've been nice to this one: i gave him a yellow card and a white one.

number 12:

i gave him a white card, and i still regret it, since he's french!

number 13:

this is how he usually looks at the female judges to make them fall in love and get white cards. i used the same technique with cops to skip speed tickets and it always worked.

number 14:

wow, i think this is the best i've ever seen him after a breath hold!

number15:

she'll be in triple depth this year, i hope to give her some red cards then.

number 16:

she must have had the same ugly judge than the other girl!

number 18:

he looks like somebody just hit his big toe with a hammer...

number 19:

he looks like a sweet kid here! doesn't it make you want to squeeze his cheeks?

number 20:

looks like he's seeing something that we didn't...

number 21:

one of my favorite freedivers: always happy to be hypoxic!

number 22:

i think i made enough comments about this one, so i'll restrain myself.

free WC 2009- the end

2009-08-23T18:43:00.008+02:00

Finally it's over! I wanna go home!
It's cold here, my clothes are all humid, smelly and dirty, and there are mushrooms growing in my hotel closet. And the doctor says that humidity is very bad for my arthritis, and that women my age should only live in tropical countries (better if they are retired and married with a rich husband, so that they don't have to work hard, which is also very bad for arthritis).

However, I'm aware that I didn't do much writing during the competition days, which is only Bill's fault. Bill is our beloved aida president, and head judge at this competition, and many others. Too many, somebody might say. Doesn't he have a job like everybody else? Bill kept us locked in the pool building 15 hours a day, and he would let us out only to sleep. And I couldn't do much writing at the pool, since my computer also suffers from arthritis (it's even older than me), and I had to keep it sealed in his bag.

So, what happened during the comp?
I'm not so sure, since I was very busy giving red cards to people. Even though I have to admit I didn't give half as many as I wanted to. The most disappointing were the French. I was so hoping to disqualify them all, but it really seemed they knew what they were doing, which is quite amazing.
Luckily I got some funky black outs, like Alexey, Liv, Jessica, and few more. And a couple of times I had the pleasure to write PBOMM on my official paper impressing everybody with my knowledge about things of life, like this "post mechanical black out movements" whose essence nobody seems to grasp, therefore making a judge appear like a supernatural being with a superior understanding.

I met lots of ex students, and students to be. And lots of them got disqualified. So I had to start pretending I didn't know them, because of the bad advertising, which is very hard when you spend the whole day stuck in a confined area with them.
On the other hand, what was I supposed to do?

I have to say it was not so difficult to discourage people from talking to me. I had turned my badges (being a funky judge gives you the right to multiple badges) into short messages to use in different occasions. As you know already, I had the "piss off" badge, which was obviously my favorite. Here you can see Herbert posing in it.

Herbert wasn't here for the comp, but just to hang out and have a look if there were some interesting chicks to pick up. Clearly there weren't any, other than me of course, but as soon as he approached me I made clear that unless he's willing to marry me on the spot he shouldn't waste his time, which made him run away very fast.
Now he's probably in St. Petersburg, where they're having some finswimming championships, to check the chicks situation there.

But back to the original topic, at some point I realized I was wasting so much of my energy to avoid Kimmo's monologues, so I made myself a "shut up" badge, which was a good idea, because it turned out being useful not only with him, but with several other people. Last badge was the "chicken" badge, which I showed to lots of lazy athletes who came up without a samba, and therefore way too early.
I wanted to have a fourth one, the most useful "what do you want" badge, but Maria the badge responsible at some point got annoyed and told me to fuck off.

Few people obviously copied the badge idea, but they wrote far too many words on their badge and nobody would read them and really, you're not hanging out with rocket scientists here, but with people that get themselves hypoxic for fun, and lost half their brain cells in the last 4 days: U - M U S T - S P E A K – S I M PL E !

Some source of excitement was the fact that I was going to be assigned a JIL, which means judge in learning, which is basically a judge slave, or bitch assistant. Great, I thought, I have my own pet to abuse, which is very useful when you are tired or stressed, so you don't let it out on just anybody, because it's certainly not polite.

And then I am given her, the same Ingela that was showing off her g strings during bizzy blue hole, and whose boobs are as massive as Copenhagen airport.
I did file an official protest to the jury, which unfortunately was not approved (you have to pay 50 euro when you file a protest, and I was low on cash), so I had to stick with her the whole time.

And then there was the theft, and they stole all cameras, laptops, and whatnot, for an estimated value of 50000 euro. Stavros was right when he said that it seems to be in Egypt rather than Scandinavia. By the way, if anybody knows anything about who did it, and how to contact them, I would be interested to buy a cheap video camera (with a big memory card and battery charger if possible). Shame that they didn't steal the underwater housings, since it would be nice to have a bottom camera for triple depth..

And then, as if it wasn't enough, there was the bomb.

It was found in the early morning in the media room, by Pim and Stavros, who courageously offered to disarm it while the organizer evacuated the building with the excuse of the group picture in the outdoor pool.

They didn't do a very good job though, since the bomb exploded later in the evening during the party, when we had the cookie world championships, where you have to stick in your mouth as many digestive cookies (the massive ones) as possible and taking them out again without breaking any. The previous world record was held by Stavros, with 3 and a half cookies.
Jakob did 4, and so did Bill, whose big mouth is no secret to anyone.
Lotta and I only did 3, which indeed sounds surprising, since i would have bet that we have even bigger mouths than Bill, but clearly i was wrong.

do not miss the awards for the most stupid freedivers faces on the next entry soon. please stay tuned, and vote!

free WC 2009- day 1

2009-08-19T12:21:00.010+03:00

BLOND EGYPTIANS

I'm in desperate need for drugs. Apparently Sebastian Naslund will be the official speaker of the competition, which means I'll have to listen to his monologues for hours and hours for the next 4 days. They even gave him a t shirt which was printed only for him.
If anybody has some good stuff for me, please drop it in room 1421. Or let me know the number of a dealer.

But I have to admit that I'm getting to like Sebastian. Of course he lives in his own world, but in the rare occasions when he connects to another human being, he is almost pleasant. If you have a very weird sense of humor he's even amusing.
Here below you can see us connecting

Another Swedish that is worth mentioning is Lillebror, Lotta's coach during the training days.
He was such a nice guy, and obviously had no idea what he was getting himself into.

Luckily I took a picture of him when he was still sane and happy, to show his children and grandchildren, because I don't think he's ever going to smile again.
Yesterday, after Lotta's last static training, an ambulance came, and they took him away to the psychiatric facility where they have been collecting Lotta's coaches since 2002 (her first WC). Sebastian is the only one who didn't end up there, because since he wasn't sane even before, he recovered very quickly from the trauma (see the report of his incident under WC sharm 2008).
Here Lotta, during her last static training yesterday.

And since we're talking about weird Swedish people, how about him?

Somebody suggested he might be the right husband for me, since he's obviously in contact with his feminine side, and he's not afraid to show it. And this is exactly the problem. I don’t want a guy with a feminine side. I don't have a feminine side myself!

The rest of the Swedish team is either deadly sick (Weine), or got a midlife crisis on their way to aarhus and found out that holding their breath in a snotty pool won't give them happiness (Peter).
Johan, who stopped being hot since I caught him wearing gay shoes, is apparently spending all his time running after women trying to prove he's not gay, and therefore not having any time to train.
Martin couldn't be here, because he's still home repairing the massive ear hole he made in his suit during bizzy blue hole.

There are a couple of Ulf's left, whom Lotta is going to drive hopelessly mad in the next couple of days.
Chances for a medal here are nonexistent.

The Russians are definitely aiming to get some medals.
Natalia has a secret weapon, but it's still not very clear what it is for.

Stavros says that the thing she carries behind her bum is definitely an anti nuclear bumper. We'll see.

Stavros is concerning me. He's becoming racist towards the Danish. He said that they are nothing less than blond Egyptians.
I guess it has to do mainly with the lack of organization that sometimes is difficult to ignore. Things do seem perfect, because they are delivered in their thin spotless Scandinavian layer, but they way far from perfection. For example, we all know how happy families look in the ikea catalogs, but we also know it's all fake, plus the furniture will fall apart in two months time.

As for me i keep being myself, always nice, helpful, and empathic with other people problems.
The identification card that i'm wearing when I'm in public might help minimizing the contact with needy annoying and useless people.

free WC 2009- more impressions

2009-08-18T21:16:00.018+03:00

THE DAY BEFORE THE BIG DAY

Early start. Judge meeting at 7.45. Every day 1 hour earlier.
So I don't know what it's going to be tomorrow. Just for the record, I don't do early mornings. It's not fashionable, and it's definitely not the right time of the day to look for husbands. especially when they want you to wear this blinding t shirt

Plus is even more freezing outside than any other day.

However, I obviously survived the first meeting (napping in between coffees), and I spent the morning shopping with Panagiota. Well, trying to shop, I should say. Thing is, out of 3 credit cards, none was working. This is what happens when you have Egyptian bank accounts. Those people, obviously, are only good to make pyramids and sphinxes, but for the rest just forget it.

Luckily I had enough cash with me to buy a funky purple computer backpack, which is matching my motorbike. My old computer bag is so old that it was about to fall apart, and the color so faded that you couldn't see the original color anymore. But since it used to belong to Alexey Molchanov (I paid him a FDD jumper for it, since there's no way to buy real stuff in dahab, unless it's drugs that you're looking for) I won't throw it away. Actually, you can make an offer, and I'll deliver it to you with his and Natalia's autograph on it.
Apparently, after hearing the story of my computer bag, Stavros (the funkiest head of the safety in the whole world) must have been a bit shocked, because accordingly to Giota, he woke up the next morning and the first words he uttered were: "how can you live in a place where you can't buy a computer bag?".
Obviously Stavros is easily shockable, just look at him here, after his twenty-fifth meeting with the safety staff: he's talking to his pen, which is definitely a sign of distress.

The day went through, and we had another few meetings (I totally lost the count), but I had the time to go around and put my big nose on other people private business.
Here's what I found out:

Ady, member of the uk team, will hopefully do something decent in the pool, since he's a desperate case when it comes to real diving in real seas: no matter how flat it is, he's getting sea sick. Actually he looks the kind of guy that could get sea sickness even in the pool. He's obviously losing the plot, and got some sort of identity crisis, since he's wearing somebody else fin.

Anna, whose picture you can admire here above, and who i greatly respect, and whatever i ever said about her was obviously never ever be meant to be mean, threatened me to write evil things about me in her blog after my tooootally silly joke about her inability-to-speak issues.
Now, not that I'm at all afraid of her, because I haven't been afraid since 1975, and besides, her blog is not half as funky as mine, but still, you don't want bad advertisement, especially when there are so many people around that are willing to get their revenge.
I'm aware they can't do a thing until I'm their potential judge and I can use my red card against them, but what about afterward? I know they are all waiting for me to do something embarrassing so they can take pics and put shame on my image.
For example, I know some of these evil snakes today tried to kidnap me and most likely keep me hostage and hidden in the Danish countryside until the end of the comp. And I'm sure they paid Pim real cash to help them out. He was supposed to drive me back to the hotel, and guess what, he's getting totally lost on the way, until there are less and less signs of civilization, at which point I get suspicious and threaten to scream for the police, so that he had no other choice than to pretend to find the right way and finally get me back at the hotel safe.

Here you see him while he's pretending to search the right way on the map.

Anyways, i should have known better than jumping in the car with him, when just few hours before he was shopping for matching handbags together with loony Ingela

i'm so happy i made it back safe, because finally, after all the loneliness, and the struggling to find a twin soul, my prayers have been answered, and i finally saw him. my future husband. he obviously doesn't know yet, but soon he will. a self confident mature man, who clearly doesn't give a shit about what others think about him and his sense of fashion.
here you can see THE MAN OF MY LIFE:

unfortunately he seems to be working for the safety team of the enemy, the CMAS people, who in order to save some money and organization efforts, decided to tag along and invite themselves to our WC. however, i'm not into politics, and whichever color he is (clearly very many)is fine with me.
tomorrow i will inform him that he's the chosen one.

.

free WC 2009-first impressions

2009-08-16T17:59:00.010+03:00

BAD, BAD START!

The weather is bad. Rain, temperature around 20 celsius.
I'm scared. I haven't been in such extreme conditions since at least 3 years, and I'm not well equipped.

But the worst consequence of that is that I'm losing my tan!
How am I supposed to find a husband while being pale? And fat! I'm swelling! I think it's some sort of allergy to the north, or to civilization, or to seeing Lotta again, after two months of peace and quiet.

And when bad luck hits, it hits hard. It turns out that Lotta has no room booked in the hotel, and she would have to sleep on the hard floor of the swimming pool. Now, I know people think I'm an evil bitch, but with the age I'm becoming soft and charitable (at times), so I couldn't let this old lady on the floor, and since I was booked in a single room, I upgraded into a double so that she could have a real bed. And make her usual mess into my room.

So, in order to reduce the swelling I went to the hotel's (micro) gym last night to do some running, but because of the bad luck again, since last week I fried my foot on my motorbike engine and i lost the first 15 layers of skin, I cannot really wear shoes. Oh well, I did yesterday, but after the run I had to scrape part of my left foot from left sock and shoe.
It must be some kind of curse: last year I just before WC in sharm I burnt my calf on the bike exhaust, and had to pack my leg into cellophane and vaseline every time before going in the water.

I miss home already: last night I dreamt I was walking around dahab with a buddy and we were happily carrying our shotguns, and I shot this evil guy, who wasn't armed, but he said something really nasty, and somehow my buddy also got shot, and it turns out that he was Denzel Washington, so I took him to the hospital to get the bullet out, and he was real hot, and just when we were about to fall in love (and get married) he disappears, and Lotta and Sebastian Naslund appear instead and I realized a wasn't in dahab anymore, but somehow I got teletransported in Denmark against my will!

However, back to the real topic: didn't eye any suitable husband yet.
So I guess I have to do some socializing while I'm awaiting for something to happen.

Some of the judges are here: Kimmo, who seems very hyperactive. He's complaining that he's out of red bull since a couple of days, but red bull must have a long lasting effect, since the guy is talking, and talking, and talking, and not shutting up a single second. He's sitting next to me right now at the restaurant table, and even though I'm totally ignoring him while I'm writing this he keeps going on and on.
Other judge is Panagiota who is a very sympathetic listener: at the moment she's sitting next to Kimmo, and doesn't seem to mind his hyper-ivity.

Here you see her relieving her frustration against a poor defenseless sandwich.

The last female judge is Ute, who's hanging out at the next table with safety Micheal (how come she has a husband and I don't??).
The others don't seem to be here yet. Jonas and Bill will arrive from Sweden together at some point (as late as possible I hope), and Martin should be somewhere.

Stavros is the head of the safety. He must have grown a bit since last year, because I remembered him being shorter. That might have to do with the fact that he's not really deep diving anymore and with the lack of compression? But why didn't I grow then? OMG! That might have to do with the ancient age???

As for the athletes situation:
-number of hot athletes in sight: NONE
-number of rich athletes in sight: EVEN LESS

So far I've seen little Betti, who knows everything about how things work and came prepared (she already delivered her bribe for me, salami and chocolate).White card.
Here she's at the pool coaching somebody.

Natalia and Alexey, who seem less and less Russian every time I meet them, and they socialize much more with the consumerist westerners than they used to. White card also for them. Every time Natalia sees me at a comp she asks me if I'm there competing, to which I always answer negatively, at which she looks horrified and she keeps reproaching me for the whole duration of the comp for not competing anymore. Obviously she has no concept that anybody would rather focus have fun (and husband hunting), than spending his/her time having contractions and dreaming about coffee.

The Finnish keep very much to themselves (except Kimmo and noisy Ingela), and spend all their waking hours at the restaurant, speaking their funny language.

The Swedish also have big magnets hidden under their shirts (you would think that they are so big because of their massive muscle mass, but it's not, it's the hidden magnets), and they all stick together like hooligans at the stadium. They even walk around hip to hip. I hope they brought one of their magnets also for Lotta so I get her out of my way.

And hey, there's a funky clip of Lotta on the net:
http://sydsvenskan.se/webbtv/article537520.ece
Is not that you can understand what they are talking about, but it looks cool.

Here you see her shiny ass during today's training.
And she didn't even cry at the end of any breath hold she did!

Blond Nanna was at the pool with a swimming cap with a massive print saying ASS on it. If she's trying to get attention that might actually work.
Sorry but i have no picture of that (yet).

German Anna was also there pretending to hold her breath under Elizabeth supervision.

I heard that she actually stops her breath holds not because of the urge to breathe, but because of the urge to speak. I will give her a couple of pointers about her warm up routine, which should be focused on tables, so that she could increase her non-speaking times progressively and at the same time she would have several more breathe-ups. Sorry, I meant speak-ups.

After assessing the safety team situation, Stavros first announced suicide, but then he got some time to think and he came up with the better plan. He ordered several inflatable dummies at the sex shop just around the corner, which Stig (who doesn't know yet) will be in charge to fix on every starting athlete just before each official top, so that the safety divers will know where to swim. I know it might increase buoyancy and decrease hydrodynamic, but if Stavros says this is what we need to do, it means that this is what we need to do.

Here you see the pool, which for the whole of the next week will home for over 150 athletes, and the theater of so many exciting performances, and possibly new world records. I need to remember to take a couple of magazines to read during the static of the +8 minutes guys.

By the end of the week there will be so much snot in there, that athletes will need heavier neckweights to stay down.

lazy dahab summer

2009-07-07T17:03:00.006+03:00

It's summer. you cannot fail to notice it if you live in dahab. there's only about 50 degrees outside.
not in the freedive dahab office, where the temperature is kept down by 2 powerful air con apparatuses which sleif the slave is in charge to keep at the more spring-like temperature of 25 celsius.
dahab freedivers keep popping by, not to spend their money here, but to have a nice cool break from the heat and use the free wireless. i'm gonna start charging them.
lots of people are on a holiday: lotta is in sweden dieting (so she says), training and teaching some freezing courses to some pale blond thin-haired Nordic guys.
katya is in ukraine to visit the family and shooting fish.
dean is in canada because i fired him. this is the reason why:

and whatever he says, whichever nasty thing I did or said to him, it doesn't justify the reaction.

so i surrounded myself (and the slave) with 2 replacements: marek, who you might remember from some previous blog entries. it was actually not true that i killed him during the instructor course, that was just a hoax. he did survive my course, and my coaching at bizzy blue hole competition, and my judging at the minicomp (he was so scared of me that he got a samba). all this living on the edge made him so self confident that he boldly decided to try and see if he can survive me as an employer (let me tell you, I know the answer already, and it's no). he's now spending his days teaching students the advantages of smoking shisha before breath holding; according to him it makes wonders to co2 tolerance. What does he know about that? He can barely hold his breath for a couple of minutes, and when he does it is only because I keep his head underwater with my foot. marek is a great no fins diver, and a decent free immersion diver, but as a breath holder he sucks big time. anyways, his students have survived so far, and in any case, we ask them to pay in advance, just in case.
here you see him getting ready for a friday night party.

and then we have wendy. she's a bit blond, but we like her. she survived the instructor course a couple of years ago, but the experience was so traumatizing that she left and ran on the other side of the world. she must have recovered, because she's back, and she is teaching for us. her students seem to be very happy. still not sure how much that has to do with her good looks and how much with her teaching skills; but as long as the customers are happy, and pay happily, why should i care?

here she's coaching the clown fish through a static session. this is how blond she is.

so, since i have a full set of slaves working for me, i thought: what the heck, i'm gonna have a lazy summer and have some fun. i took some trips down to sharm el sheikh, where my apnea academy friends are based (i'm sure many of you met rasta marco during the WC's in sharm or during our triple depths here; the guy who is either sleeping or running after some big breasted girl).
since the water is always so warm there, i carried my thin suit with me, got myself in the water and did some fun sled diving.

Now, that is fun. I did some tandem dives together with marek and Italian andrea, on the superfast brakeless sled they have over there.
andrea did a funky dive over 100.

The other day I was so totally narked on just 60/70 meters dives, that on one dive it took me 30 seconds to inflate the lift bag, while marek was giving me the "are you gonna get your shit together and get us up or should I start swimming and leave you here, you moron?" look. I didn't get the look really, and I didn't get we were down so long until I saw the dive profile on his computer.
however, i was having a great time.
but some fungus must have fallen in love with me, because the fucker has been stalking my outer ear for almost a month, and my attempts to ignore it failed, so i had to give up and listen to the doctor who ordered me out of the water for the next 10 day at the very least.
great, now i do have the excuse not to work, but what do you do in a place where there's absolutely nothing except beautiful sea and burning sun?
this is what you do: you sit in the office and release the frustration on your slave (if you have one), who is getting 10 whips every time I can find a half decent excuse to justify that, like when he doesn't wash properly my coffee cup.
today i sent him somewhere, and on his way out he asked me to be nice with the customers while he wasn't there. Excuse me? me? NICE? i'm not even nice when i'm happy, how can i be nice when i'm so pissed off?

oh well, maybe it's a good time to go looking for husbands. i spotted a totally hot guy cycling around on the promenade all the time. maybe he's looking for a wife.

freediving with FDD

2009-06-09T15:23:00.009+03:00

My time with Linda and Lotta
by Jeremy Meyer

I arrived in Dahab for the deep dive workshop to find that there was a competition running at the blue hole. Linda had suggested I go out and meet them there the day before the workshop. Cathy and I took a taxi, and I found Linda sitting down at the Aqua Marina restaurant. I stepped forward to introduce myself and said “don't get up”. She flashed me a look. The first of many. It is not always easy to gauge a look until you know someone, but this one crossed the rift of unfamiliarity with a single bound and firmly announced “do I look the kind of person who would actually fucking stand up to shake your hand?”

Our introduction was interrupted by one of her students who had just reached her announced depth in the competition and in a moment of mental aberration had forgotten to take the tag. Linda sympathetically commented that it was a fucking competition and it was all about taking the fucking tag, that is what the tag is there for. Having not yet learnt the subtleties of Linda's life philosophy or come to appreciate her deep empathy with all living things, I thought this was being somewhat harsh. How little I knew.

Our first session of the workshop was static practice and coaching for maximums. I worked with Lotta. It was obviously with some trepidation that I planned a coaching session with someone who was a world record holder in the static discipline. Naively I started writing notes on my scrap of paper about her breathe-up, the count-down, her first contraction and when to start the timer, how I had to shout when she was slipping into deep relaxation and went deaf, how not to worry when she jettisoned her packed air early on etc. etc. Soon I had covered both sides, with lines and arrows, annotations, comments and bullet points. An act made somewhat futile by the fact that we were practising the statics in the sea. The scrap of paper tucked into my wetsuit was an illegible smear of running blue ink in seconds, so I had to work from memory.

I thought I had done well, but after Lotta's first warm up, she surfaced, looked at me and said “Now how did you fuck up?”. And Lotta was supposed to be good cop? My own static, I thought, was not too horrible, with Lotta's expert advice, gently prodding me to show how tense I was, and explaining that my body seized up like a spider on a hotplate when I was deep into the breath hold. Bad cop came over to see what was happening and Lotta felt it beneficial to mimic my bottled spider look for Linda's amusement. I asked if perhaps we should include the other students, but Linda explained that this was individual humiliation only. I felt very privileged to be receiving such personal mockery from two of the world's best free diving instructors.

Encouraged by what I had learnt, I paired up with Sina for my second session, Lotta feeling she needed a break. Sina, also on the workshop, was a good substitute for Lotta, I thought, naturally quite relaxed.
So, I was good and calm.. until bad cop came over to see what was happening. In my beautiful, tranquil, trance-like state, I suddenly heard Linda's loud Italian proclamations to the effect that I wasn't relaxed, and look at the position of my arms. To demonstrate to Sina, she started prodding me and slapping me about in quite a rough manner.
Her argument evidently being that if I didn't put up any resistance, I was relaxed. I pointed out afterwards, jokingly, that it was slightly annoying. Look no. 2. This time accompanied by the explicit verbal elucidation that I had paid her money and flown thousands of kilometres to be trained by her and she thought that slapping me about was going to help then she would slap me about and if I didn't like it then I shouldn't pay her money and fly thousands of kilometres. She made a good point, and was of course right about me not being relaxed, so I resolved to be better at being slapped about henceforth.

On my maximum static I surfaced into a samba. I couldn't deny it, my facial muscles had definitely broken out a few bottles of champagne and had a little party with their friends. The shame! Linda shot me another look. This was look number three, and the worst so far. The kind of look you give to someone who farts loudly in a quiet passage at a Schubert recital. A look that condemns and ostracises in one go.
Fortunately I was able to share some of the shame with Sina, who in Linda's eyes must have done a shitty job of coaching if her buddy had a Samba. In my defence, Sina did keep tell me I was doing well, even though I was practically in fetal position 4 and a half minutes into the breath hold.

Finally we had a diving session. This was horrible. I hadn't been in the sea for some time, and having suit, weight belts and swell, was breaking my concentration and rhythm and making it impossible to pretend I could duck dive and glide effortlessly. Not to mention the fact that my inadequate and overpriced Hilton buffet breakfast felt the need to share itself with the myriad of little fish that frequent the reef.

Linda made constructive criticisms to the effect that my style was shitty, and felt I needed to take off my fins and do some variable weight training. I was pretty sure that usually the extra weights are attached to the line, not to my feet, but Linda seemed to feel that that was the only way forward and that lanyards were for pussies too.
(I had detected notes of this kind of behaviour ever since Linda had found out that I wore my booties over my wetsuit - and I was married anyway).

Apparently Dean misunderstood because he attached the weight to the line in traditional fashion. The ensuing variable session instantly improved my comfort, but my chest was still a war zone of pressure attacks mounted by some unknown force. Everyone gave me great feedback and support. Lotta felt I was trying too hard to equalise. Dean thought I might be trying to fight the pressure. Linda thought I was being a pussy. All constructive criticism that I gladly took on board.

After the first dive session, I innocently asked what the plan was for lunch (a reasonable thing to ask, I thought). Linda explained in no uncertain terms that she didn't like eating between dives, and if we were going to take ourselves seriously as athletes we weren't allowed to eat either. Later, whilst at the blue hole she carefully demonstrated to the group what eating between dives was, so that we would know not to do it. She did this by helping herself to fist-sized, rolled-up pieces of Marc Lenoir's chocolate drenched pancakes. It was a valuable lesson. Hypoglycemic and with a snorkel more full of drool than sea water, I dived that afternoon, visualising negative buoyancy glides through fathoms of melted Nutella.

I figured I would be able to survive on a good breakfast, and no lunch until later in the evenings, but when, after our Pranayama yoga session, we were told not to eat breakfast the next day in preparation for something more physical, I realised the stakes had been raised. I embarked on a strategy of clandestinely nibbling on Bananas when Linda's back was turned. My furtive attempts at self nourishment amused Cathy no end who was inspired to create the character “Freedive Monkey” (watch this space for further adventures of this loveable primate).

Yaron's somewhat pathetic attempts at subterfuge (sneakily having a cup of coffee delivered to him whilst in our yoga class at the hotel) failed in spectacular fashion. The surprised yoga teacher answered the door to a man balancing a turkish coffee pot on a tiny tray. Alarmed to be greeted by what looked like a coroner's office after a massacre, the hapless waiter then carefully stepped over 6 or 7 prone bodies, his navigation aided by Yaron's enthusiastic gesticulations and cries of “yes, it's for me!”. Such brazen infringement of the rules of the Linda boot camp could hardly go unnoticed. I was not in a position to observe what kind of look she shot Yaron, but I have no doubt it was fairly spectacular. Later Linda was to speculate quite publicly as to whether or not Yaron's parents were actually acquainted, and postulate that he did unspeakable things with farm animals. Certainly when Alexandra's fins disappeared, she unhesitatingly volunteered him as her prime suspect.

Our relaxation session was brilliant. Linda had us lie down on our backs and listen to her self hypnosis recording. Yaron (perhaps not realising is was a recording) heckled the hypnotist with jibes like “all I can hear is your stupid voice”. There was a distinct sense that he was somewhat missing the point, or perhaps he was suffering from cognitive difficulties caused by too much coffee, or too many statics. The hypnosis was good, but strangely I woke up half way through the session to find myself writing out a blank cheque to Freedive Dahab and chanting “I will devote my life to finding Linda a husband” again and again. The others seemed not to have noticed, and Yaron had been up making coffee anyway.

Linda announced that the climbing was cross training for diving and was compulsory. It certainly was brilliant fun, and Dean guided us up some fairly challenging climbs, shouting instructions and encouraging comments. He pointed out that I was probably over-thinking the climbing, which is why I got stuck. In Linda's absence, Mike, the one student who had a little bit of rock climbing experience, volunteered that it was probably because I was a pussy.
This was a hypothesis that was definitely starting to gain momentum, and I resolved to debunk it as myth immediately. Dean explained that Katya could climb the harder route barefoot, and I thought this would be a good way of proving my mettle.

(chickens on the wall)

Prove it I did, with Katya belaying and shouting useful advice. On the way down I suddenly came discovered why climbers wear shoes, sacrificing a very large piece of flesh from under my big toe to the mountain gods. Suddenly all of Dean's rigorous training at the hands of Linda leapt to the fore. He rushed towards me, with utmost concern in his voice. “Dude!” he shouted... “don't bleed on the rope!”. To be fair, he did have some bandages and I was able to hobble about quite successfully for the rest of the evening, with very little sympathy from Cathy who was vaguely surprised my injuries hadn't been more severe.

(here Katya and the slave belaying)

Lotta led the evening with sparkling conversation by the fireside, as we gorged ourselves on Bedouin fried chicken and gazed at the stars. (Linda was at home browsing www.ineedamanchopchop.com.) Altogether a successful evening. Perhaps only slightly marred by the fact that Mike pointed out I had ultimately achieved my climb by being talked up by a girl, and therefore had by no means reached necessary or sufficient conditions to debunk the pussy myth.

The rescues all went off fairly smoothly, with perhaps the hardest of all being rescued by Roman, the deepest diver of the workshop. After diving a magnificent and seriously deep pb earlier on, he had yet to do the rescue, and I had to be rescued from 15m by him whilst he was wearing one fin. The plan was that we would go down together. Perhaps the Czech meaning of together is different, but I certainly felt all alone down there for a few minutes until he sauntered down at a leisurely pace and started faffing with his fin. Finally he had it removed, passed it to me to hold, and to show his gratitude, grabbed me by the throat and dragged me upwards at barely perceptible speed.
As soon as we got to the buoy, I held on for dear life, whilst he tried to simultaneously remove my mask and push two fingers up my nostrils, whilst dunking me under the water with his other hand. To add insult to injury, Linda pointed out that I was doing a substandard impersonation of a blackout victim because I was clearly holding on.
Still, he brought me up in one piece, and he could have just as easily done it from 30m, and he is a wonderful diver, so who's complaining.

So, the week drew to a close, and on my final day, my body finally surrendered to Pharaoh's curse (suspiciously around about the time I should have been helping Cathy pack, she thought) and sad and aching, I trundled off to the airport.

Now I am back, 4.5kg lighter (nothing to do with the curse) on solid food again. Thinking about all the amazing advice I got: “For a perfect duck dive, lead with your arse!” - Lotta, “Don't wear your socks over your wetsuit, it looks stupid” - Linda

Now I am dreaming of diving, working out how I can get back to Dahab repeat the experience of a truly inspiring week with some fantastic people, and the most incredible freediving instructors in the world. And find a man for Linda.

FDD MINICOMP 2009

2009-05-15T14:04:00.012+03:00

2nd day, 30th may

The minicomp is over.

Results of today:

The miniwinners are:
Marek Apjar, with 146 points (he knew he had to if he wanted to stay alive)
and Wendy Timmermans, with 97 points.

Here you find the whole mini result list:

Apart for the beautiful prizes for the winners, some prestigious awards have been assigned to:
-Akim, who, after turning 4m earlier on his dive, came up, didn't do his surface protocol, and swam away right away (with the official computer still on his wrist). He was given the "sulky frediver" award.
Here you see him when he came up.

(photo courtesy of nanna kreutzmann)

Yes, i know, we also thought it was an alien creature coming up from the abyss, but then he started sulking and we knew it was him.

-Marc, who keeps forgetting doing his mouthfill on the descent even though his alarm is beeping loudly and consistently. We will ask suunto to make a computer with an alarm that instead of saying "beep beep" says "fill fill". He gets the "living on the clouds" award.

The smoke coming out of his mouth is all the frying brain cells burning every time he utters a sentence.

-Mike, who obviously turned also today, is definitely the "biggest chicken" of the competition. Unfortunately i have no picture of him, and i know he intends to blackmail me with some video he has, which i can assure you it is a hoax.

-Nanna: unfortunately we didn't give her officially the award, but I really think she deserves the "blondest freediver" award. Marc is actually very jealous of her, because he has this theory that smaller brain equal lesser oxygen consumption, and every day (after she's finished raking the garden) he measures her pulse and oxygen saturation with an oxymeter, and he might actually have a point, since her pulse is in the low 50's no matter how hard the raking was.

Other remarkable happenings:
Just one black out, which made the safety team very bored. English Mark announced 70 fim, but didn't work out so well, and switched off for a couple of seconds on the surface.

Last but not least: we (in the persons of Linda and Lotta)(here you can see our asses)

(photo courtesy of nanna kreutzmann)

As i was saying, we would like to thank the rest of the team who worked very hard (well, not all of them) and spent hours and hours in the water or cooking under the summer Egyptian sun. These people are (and I hope I'll remember all the names, after one bottle of Marc champagne):
-Katya, safety and judge
-Dean, safety (he actually got to rescue the only 2 black outs we had, so he had some fun)
-the slave (somebody just told me his name is Leif, but whatever, I do not care), who was filming and doing safety (not at the same time obviously)
-Nicky (the slave girlfriend), who also filmed and did safety (again not at the same time). It's great when your employees have a girlfriend/boyfriend, since they tend to come along and work for free. Buy one get one free, so to say. We decided that from now on we only employ people who are in a relationship.

(photo courtesy of nanna kreutzmann)
Here you see Nicky floating about on the doughnut playing with the camera.

29th may
result list of today:

my pupil Marek made me proud again and did a (almost) clean 71m fim. the poor boy lost his noseclip while he was doing the mouthfill and did the rest of the descent pinching his nose and wondering what was going to happen when he got to the bottom and had to let go to pull himself back up. he didn't really like all the water up his nose and speeded up taking 50 seconds to ascend from 71m, and he was a bit, like, confused on the surface. If he wasn't my favorite i would definitely post the video his funny exit, where he looked even more stupid than here:

Akim did a beautiful 75m cwt, but he must have been a bit distracted because he started the dive 7 seconds before official top, which gave him 2 minus points. we still don't know if that will be a valid tunisian record or not.

Miguel did an easy 70m fim with no fuck ups, so i have nothing to say about him, except that also in his case we don't know if that's spanish record or not, since aida spain is some sort of vague entity that is nowhere to be found.
his tv people where all over the place cheering and making it look like the bmw commercial we shot last year.

David who announced a NR, as usual showed up carrying his yalla yalla along (which is the slang for the dodgy egyptian belly), and therefore felt very weak. he took the wise decision of turning early, which was not early enough, since he started pulling on the last 5/8m. since by doing that he disqualified himself, dean grabbed him and brought him up, which saved David from having a underwater black out, and only had a mini black out on the surface.

Mike didn't do a new australian record, since he turned early for sinus squeeze.
Alon did a new israeli record with a successful cwt re-dive to 58m.the first dive he did wasn't deeper than 1 meter, since he cleverly got himself stuck on the surface anchor rope with his lanyard. he didn't take long to get smarter, and on the second attempt 1 hour later he didn't repeat the dumb feat.
Wendy did a dutch cnf record, with a dive to 43m.
betti did a swiss record with a fim dive to 53m within the competition, and less than 2 hours after that she did another record fim dive to 55m announced as a record attempt (don't ask why, it's more complicated than it is interesting).

French Marc turned early because as usual he forgot to do his mouthfill due to the extremely low number of brain cells he has left (even though he think himself smart enough to make blond jokes about Nanna).
Sara didn't show up. I think we are not posh enough for her. Hopefully tomorrow she will feel a bit sympathetic and will honor us with her royal presence. I'm gonna give her a yellow card just on principle.

starting list for tomorrow:

27th may

The minicomp will start tomorrow.
Tonight at 7 the mini meeting, with the mini announcements and the usual stupid questions.
Like "can I breathe oxygen before my dive?" or "why do I get a red card if I have a black out?"

Most of the athletes partied and got drunk last night because they were going to have a day off today.
French Marc brought champagne at Marek and Flavia barbecue last night. And when we run out of champagne we attacked the slivovitz bottle that Marek, being a proper chzek patriot, always keeps in his kitchen cupboard for when it gets cold outside (he pretends not to be aware that in dahab it never goes below 20 celsius).
Marc and I got nominated the king and the queen of the cool box (which is the cooling box for the champagne, which marc has on his head). Marc got upset because he wanted to be the queen.

(photo courtesy of nanna kreutzmann)

No news about Flavia, since I'm not speaking to her ever since she FORGOT to take the tag during the bizzy blue hole, one month ago. How can you be so dumb and make it through life?
You can see her here below together with akim, both looking smarter than they are.

Nothing new about English David: ever since I met him he keeps complaining over and over about the same 2 things: losing the mouthfill and finding yalla yalla on his troubled path toward being a freediving celeb.

Spanish Miguel, who just (surprisingly) survived the instructor course with me, snapped back from his acute laziness and decided to participate to the comp. He wasn't very happy to know that the first official top is planned by 10.30, since he normally wakes up at noon and goes training just before sunset. But he wasn't shocked enough to change his mind, and it looks like he's gonna show up. I think he's planning to change his lazy habits, since last week he was obviously late for his sunset training and he went in the water when it was already dark. The Spaniard stepped on a poor lion fish that was minding his business, got painfully stung by it and had to stay dry for few days. Here below just after he got stung.

By the way, just to add prestige to Miguel image, you should be aware that he's being followed by the Spanish TV since a month. Everywhere he goes there is a camera and lots of groupies and fans screaming and fighting for autographs. Seems like Miguel is a freediving celebrity (unlike David). Now, Sara is going to be very upset when she sees that the camera is there for him and not her...

French (or I should say Tunisian) Akim has been surprising everybody and making me proud (even though now he works with the competition!!). He jumped from being a pussy 50 meter diver to being a funky 80 meter diver in just a couple of weeks.

Danish Nanna is just figuring out how not to squeeze her ears every time she dives, and hopefully she will get up from her dive with both eardrums still in the right places (close to where she would have a brain if she wasn't blond).
These days she lives chez french Marc, who enslaved her and makes her rake the garden in between diving breaks.

(photo courtesy of nanna kreutzmann)

German Sina and Australian Mike, who also survived the instructor course, are hiding and doing all their training in secret. Some think they want to keep some big numbers from us. Now, I don't know about Sina, but knowing Mike is I'm sure the only thing he's trying to hide is his pussiness.

That one was Sina, and below Mike (just so you don't get confused)

Dutch Wendy is also very secretive about her training. Actually I've never seen her in blue hole. Being dutch she might have implemented her training with the use of dope. Like dry statics with last inhale on weed in order to increase her tolerance to deep narcosis. Will investigate on that, and maybe will use that with my students to improve relaxation.
Here while she practice her "relaxation techniques" with David.

Some of the people I don't know very well, so I cannot really say anything bad about them. English Marc is way too nice and polite, and I would feel very bad. Some other are in my untouchable list, like Betti, who always bribes me with huge quantities of salami whenever she comes to dahab. Untouchable also Sara, mini wr holder and icon of the minicomp, who is so unbelievably short that it seems unfair to abuse her.

Here finally, the starting list.
You might want to notice that it's 10 guys and 7 chicks, and it's not very common that the females are not so many less than the guys (and they would actually be almost equal if you count Mike as a chick, as it should be).

22nd may

Updates:
If anybody wants to compete go to another competition, since we're full.
Here's the more or less final athletes list:

-sara campbell, UK
-marek apjar, CZE
-flavia eberhard, BRA
-marc lenoir, FRA
-mark harris, UK
-sina schieweck, GER
-mike wells, AUS
-david tranfield, UK
-alon rivkind, ISR
-itay henigsberg, ISR
-wendy timmermans, NDL
-betti wolfer, SWI
-yaron hoory, ISR
-nanna kreutzman, DEN
-akim adhari, TUN

If anybody wants to come and stay in dahab, come and look for a job somewhere else, since we found our slave, who is young, cute and never complains.

If anybody wants to marry me, I actually only need a short term husband, so you don't need to be so scared about making a life time commitment.
If you are:
1.hot
2.rich
3.patient,
you can marry me, stay for free in my house (as long as you keep clean and do the cooking), go freediving every day, buy me expensive gifts, and bugger off in 4/5 years. After that I have a plan.

15th may

As if we didn't have enough to do with the shop and the courses and the training and the coaching of the FDD useless team and the designing of funky freedivewear and the production of hundreds of new instructors and the search for a husband, we decided to have a minicomp also this year, for the 3rd year in a row.

The list is quite full, and just a couple of places are left.
Here's the list of the athletes:

-sara campbell, UK
-marek apjar, CZE
-flavia Eberhard, BRA
-Itay Henigsberg, ISR
-alon rivkind, ISR
-marc lenoir, FRA
-mark harris, UK
-sina schieweck, GER
-mike wells, AUT
-david tranfield, UK
-seamus murray, AUT
-wendy timmermans, HOL
-betti wolfer, SWI
-yaron hoory, ISR
-nanna kreutzman, DEN
-akim adhari, FRA

These funky athletes will fight for fame and glory during the days of 29th and 30th of may, obviously in the deep and snorkellers infested waters of blue hole, dahab.
They will have the chance to chose between the 3 depth disciplines (fin, cwt, cnf), and the bravest winners will get lots of respect and maybe a "I'M NOT A PUSSY-ANYMORE" t-shirt.
Somebody will go for a national record, somebody else will be an embarrassment for their nation.

linda and lotta will be the judges (bribes are allowed as usual) (btw, I'm running out of proper coffee), katya will be the sexiest safety diver but don't look at her too much or dean will get upset and forget to switch on the surface camera and the athletes will have to dive again and get all pissy.

If anybody wants to come down here and help with the safety or just to watch the back outs, you are most welcome.
If anybody wants to compete, we still have 3 spots left.
If anybody wants to marry me, choppy chop, I'm running out of time.
If anybody wants to come and stay in dahab, we're looking for a shop keeper/counter person/slave.

THE FDD TEAM 2009

2009-04-06T13:43:00.020+02:00

26th april

Finally it's over with the jokes and the snorkelling competitions, and we got to the real stuff.
I got to blue hole a bit late, since i was coaching the proper athletes and not the beginners.
When i arrived flavia had already dived (coached by lotta), and she obviously fucked up.
She announced 50, but turned at 45. mouthfill problems, she said. Sebastian curse i suspect.

I went in with marek 45 minutes before his official top, and while he was warming up i was looking around and cursing the other athletes.

I could see crazy frenchman marc starting his fim dive to 54 and coming up smiling and with the tag. I'm happy for him even if he isn't in my team, because i trained him myself. When he came to me he was a specialist in the fws discipline (fucking weird shit), which translated in the real diving was the dodgy combination with all the disciplines but executed with the worst technique.

Dave tranfield, who is another of my creatures, was going for 57 fim but his lanyard got tangled on the rope breaking his descent, and turned at 50. for the first time ever he didn't blame the mouthfill for not making the depth.

finally was marek's turn. He did his dive to 57 meters, making it look like it was very easy, and impressing everybody with his 3 strokes down.
As soon as he resurfaced and did his sp, lotta pulled out a couple of vodka mix drinks from our buoy, and we celebrated right there.
Somebody was screaming how not serious that was, and that was hot johan, who 14 minutes later got punished with a red card for his sarcasm.

Actually i was quite upset with him for his bad dive.
the story is the following: at the meeting i volunteered to do the official safety for the hot athletes. johan, who obviously considers himself being hot, rose his hand and said he wants me as safety. obviously enough i agreed, since i'm still waiting for the chance to give him a proper kiss (you might remember how sad i was when i missed the chance during wc in sharm when he woke up in the middle of his samba). i would have been also happy with a clean dive, which would still have given me the chance to kiss him to congratulate for his new cnf swedish record (he announced 60). and what does the dumb swedish do? again having a dodgy samba, which means, again, no kiss.

Half an hour after we celebrated jakob with a beer (he doesn't like vodka mix, he says it's for pussies).
He did successfully a super easy 65 mt in cwt. It's a shame that we had to stay so conservative with his announcement, since he did so much better in training, but because of sebastian vodoo rituals, jakob spent 3 days with high fever and yalla yalla, so we didn't know how he would feel the day of the comp.

anyways, sebastian is getting his evil back to himself, or he's simply a chickenshit, since he turned earlier during his 60m cnf.
also, i would like to make public that he tried to steal fdd oxygen tank, instead of renting one for his competition.

about gossip, i have an upsetting one, that doesn't need any comment.
johan being touched by another woman!!!! nanna, the sneakiest bitch on the planet. it's in the family. last year her brother sofus promised me to marry me, and then i found him with somebody else.

i cried the whole day, until i saw him walking around with outrageously gay shoes, and since then i don't fancy him anymore. check them yourself.

24th april

short update, i'm busy looking for husbands today.

sebastian announced on the deeperbue he would try to annihilate my team.
and all of a sudden jakob is in bed with fever over 39.
flavia started losing her mouthfill and she seems to be always exhausted.
now, sebastian might claim that's pure coincidence, and that he didn't do any voodoo magic against us.
but then today marek got obviously and openly sabotaged by sebastian during the ufc. apparently he and his funly organization couldn't find more than 45mt for today comp, which means marek couldn't announce any funky depth for his dive. now, how do you fail to find 60 mt in any given part of the red sea? this is inexplicable, other than outrageous.

daan has been officially appointed the sluttiest freediver of this comp. actually i should say the sluttiest, full stop, since these days nobody every see him freediving at all. he just runs after all girls.
they don't even have to be pretty, as long as they breathe.
i'll only put the pretty ones here, since i don't want to devastate completely that little bit of reputation he has left.
here with clara. i swear i saw them tongue kissing in blue hole in front of everybody, but i wasn't quick enough with my slow antediluvian camera.

here with naughty hanli (she comes first slut in the female section).

and here hanli with another of her toyboys.

here below you see martin and his beautifully done ear holes.

now, everybody is taking the piss obviously, but i was genuinely interested to know how he got the idea of making such a horrible act of vandalism against his suit.
i asked him why he did that,and he said he likes big holes, and he said that in front of lots of other people, so nobody can say i'm a liar.

clara will give me the full video of sebastian samba tonight, so i can post it here.
for the moment i only have one pic of it.

wish me good luck for my husband hunt:-)

22nd april

sebastian is upsetting me.

not only he wrote on the deeperblue that my bog is vulgar.
on top of that he tried to kill me today.
the other night he sold me a mask. it's one of these dodgy sphera lookalikes, with this spacey look to it. the problem is that when you stick your head underwater your vision become like after 20 vodkas.
so today i got my new mask on, swam to the reef to attach the surface rope, and because of the mask's vodka vision i didn't see a scorpion fish that was minding its own business right on the rock where i usually tie my rope. i literally brushed the deadly fish with my hand before i could realize what it was.
to prove myself and others that it was just not me being blind (or drunk)i gave the mask to dean (one of my slave instructors)and i told him to go look for the scorpion fish next to the rope, and guess what, he couldn't find it. ok, he's a bit of a slow guy, but still.
here you have a pic of him

however, as for the mask, no big deal. it's great to use as riding goggles for my bike rides in the desert.
as for sebastian, he will get what he deserves.
now he's out the in the bay on top of his duck judging some silly competition, so i cannot get my revenge.

and i do have this picture of him coming up from his static yesterday with a very funny loud samba, which i'll post as soon as i get hold of it.

as for yesterday static, it was a head to head challenge. all the participants were holding their breath at the same time, each one competing against another athlete, and the first giving up would be out. 8 started, which became 4 on the second round, and the last 3 coming up would go in the final. 8 guys and 8 girls.
flavia had one of her (rare) successful days.
i gave her a highly motivated speech before her performance (see below)and it must have worked, because she ended up winning. she must have been very scared, poor soul.

since she made me so proud, i promised her not to abuse her today, and she even did a very very easy personal best in constant.

marek also did a easy pb in cnf, after which he ordered a shisha. i lost it, again, and we don't know how bad the damage is, because he didn't wake up yet.

jakob keeps having a problem with his mouthfill. but what really upset me is his static yesterday. that after working so hard to get him to the final, he chickened out against sebastian and josef. now, nobody questions the fact that josef deserved to win, but i really wanted jakob to beat sebastian.
he could have done it, and he was nowhere close to the samba area, but he was just lazy. i don't tolerate laziness. but maybe it's my fault, since i didn't give him the motivational speech i gave flavia.
here's me coaching flavia.

here's lazy jakob before his lazy static

20th april

let's start with the sluttiness section:

here you see hanli making clear signs. i won't tell you who she's doing it to, unless you're willing to pay. and i can assure you she's not practicing equalizing as she might try to convince you.

here's daan, caught in a very dodgy shot during foreplay with akim. as you see i wasn't lying about his slutty nature.

lotta keeps hiding in her half of the shop during the day, but at night she gets all wild. you see her here caught in a clandestine moment with marek.

and the next day you can see marek giving boobs showers to flavia as if nothing had happened. and then we're all wondering why he sucks at diving.

lotta got very upset when she saw this, so she went to funny mummy and drowned her sorrows in a milk shake. that's acutally her 25th milk shake, and she got so fat that she cannot get out of the shop door anymore, so now we're opened 24/7. now you can buy a noseclip at 4am on your way back from a friday night party.

and here's ingela, who's been ditched by daan, and she obviously has something else going on, since she's wearing see through micro underwear.

it's getting harder and harder to get good pictures, since people are now very careful when i'm around. i do have a couple of secret spies that are helping me in my paparazzi mission, but they are being a bit useless also at that other than at freediving.
actually soon i might have to stop this, since i know that more and more freedivers are planning to get some embarrassing pictures of me.
so far the most they could get is this:

but i'm sure nobody really cares about all this gossip. so, how's the diving going?

mmmh, my teams suck again. daan got lost on the way. i can see him now and then hanging on elizabeth and ingela buoy. i don't think he can really concentrate about diving there. women and latex is a very distracting combination.

hanli was jealous about all the other bloody freedivers, and decided to give herself a middle ear barotrauma. she stayed dry today (actually i think it was an excuse to go around showing more of her tongue).

jakob had a mouthfill issue. seems like he doesn't have full control over his tongue. apparently lots of other guys share the same problem...

flavia is very lazy. she didn't get out of bed. sore muscles, she says. i wonder if there's any connection with her boob shower...

marek is the only one that keeps me motivated. he did a very nice cnf, and now he's probably going around telling everybody that he dives deeper than me! i don't think i've ever seen anybody doing as little as 3 strokes before freefalling.

sexy johan seems to be doing very well. he wasn't diving today, which upset me so much, since he's the main reason why i go to blue hole every day.
yesterday i got a shot of him and his noodle, and i want to share it with you.

tomorrow more pictures for the banana hammock contest.

18th april

OH MY GOD!!!
hot johan is here!!! i got to blue hole this morning, and there he is, pale as the moon, but sexy as ever!
i wasn't prepared, so i started shaking like a leaf. i hope he didn't notice that.
i ESPECIALLY hope he didn't notice my hairy legs!!!
today i'll have to spend the rest of the day waxing, so i can flash him with my old but still shapely legs.

come on, don't you just want to jump him?

however, i'm really upset. i happen not to have a useless team anymore.
a-team lost its captain today. what am i gonna do now? i wasn't born to tell people "hey well done! you are a winner!". so i just felt very disappointed when hanli came up from her CNF having done the depth, and a pb. i gave her a very fake affectionate smile and told her that she's useless at being a useless freediver.
marek seems to have sorted his dodgy equalization, and flavia keeps doing pb's.

well, at least i still have daan on my side, who doesn't even bother anymore even getting wet. now he spends all his time trying to get the nerdiest suntan in history. he managed to get badly sunburnt in both his inner calves, and only that, while everything else is as pale as when he arrived. don't ask me how he managed to do that. only if you are truly nerdy you can do this sort of things. luckily he's also spending some time taking pictures, which is good, because now we have a deal: he provide me with gossip material for this blog, and i promised i won't abuse him anymore. which he was naive enough to believe.

in particular we're on a mission to find:
-the sluttiest freediver
-the sexiest banana hammock

these are ingela and daan. it looks like a tender romantic moment, but they seem to have tender romantic moments with lots of other people, which definitely applies for the slutty category.

and here jakob, the first contender for the sexiest banana hammock. i definitely vote for him; i don't think i've ever seen anything better than that around.

stay tuned for much more...

17th april

sebastian should really reconsider the name of his competition. Bizzy Blue Hole is kind of nice and original.
but Bloody Blue Hole is far more appropriate.
i'm trying to keep track of:
-all the freedivers who burst their eardrums or have severe middle ear squeeze (tons)
-all the freedivers who have a lung squeeze (many)
-all the freedivers who bump their head into the reef (that's easy, only martin do that, once every day)
who has more details information and precise numbers please contact me.

as for our FDD team, it is now expanding.
flavia and marek are now part of the B team, because they are not so useless anymore, and they have been kicked out by hanli and daan, who took their place and were nominated the most useless freedivers in history, and therefore they are now members of the A team. jacob has been diving with both teams at alternate days, because we're still unsure about his usefulness. some days he fucks up big time, some other days he does very well.

today for example he was with the B team, and all of them did a personal best.

marek in particular is impressing me so much with his CNF style and his amazing efficiency. his equalization sucks though, and this is why he's only allowed to do CNF.

flavia is thinking too much, and what she needs more than a coach is a psychologist. and obviously i cannot do anything to help her, since i need a psychologist more than she does. even lotta with her social worker skills is not going very far with her.

jakob is just a guy, so he doesn't think. he goes for it, and if it works it works. if not then not.

as for the competition i have no gossip yet. everybody is quietly minding their own business. doesn't look like anybody is doing anything out of the ordinary. no partying, no clandestine couples, not even a black out (at least while i was there).

just tons of dodgy bubblemakers wearing very colorful outfits and hanging at our ropes, and the usual millions of italian snorkelers coming from sharm, paying lots of money to sit on a camel back while wearing high heels and micro skirts.

10 april
things are not working very well.
flavia and marek are useless. it sounds evil, i know, but fact is that there is no other way to say it. any other adjective would not make the point.

i thought it might be my fault, maybe they are scared of me(and they should).
so i gave them to lotta for a little while, but not much better results were reported.

so i went on a pilgrimage to saint katherine, on mount sinai, you know where moses bunrt the bush and built the ark, or something like that. however, there is a monastery there, not that i would go as far as becoming a nun to pursue my dream to be a successful coach, but i thought i could say a little prayer for my hopeless case.

god told me that unfortunately not even him can do anything for me.

so in order not to waste the trip i decide to pray a bit for myself instead. i asked god to help me find a husband, and he said that it's more likely that my team will win the next comp, than me finding a husband.

i guess i did waste my time.
but i took some cool pics, plus the bike trip there was quite enjoyable :-)

03 april
since lotta and i have become people with a real job and are too busy to put our face in the water for pure pleasure, we came up with the fantastic idea of putting together a team that will represent freedive dahab at the upcoming competitions.

now, who could be the selected ones that would represent us best?
after a lot of thinking under high exposure to vodka, we came up with names.
-marek, the most useless freediver in the world. a winning card. the guy who will be in bed sick during every competition.
-flavia, the woman that all women hate because she's so bloody skinny without being on a diet.

fact is, these are the only two who accepted being in our team because they are the only two that can handle being abused by me. in fact i think they really like it. actually i'm afraid they'll be uncomfortable with lotta's understanding behavior and good manners.

here's me during a dry session with marek. the lanyard on the neck is to control the blood flow to the brain, in order to make him more tolerant to hypoxia. the stick is to beat him up when he starts breathing again, which is always earlier than it should be.

here marek getting ready for a hypoxic apnea walk to the supermarket to buy doritos for flavia. i want to see cellulite on her skinny bum, because i'm always feeling fat when i'm around her.

here's lotta training flavia. she's way too skinny, and therefore she needs to build some muscle. since we need to save on the gym entrance fee, we do it the cheap way. this is also good training for lotta, who needs to get more abusive to make herself respected (you can't see that in the picture, but behind them there's me with my stick, ready to beat up the first of them giving up).

MARCH/APRIL 2009

2009-03-21T13:09:00.025+02:00

1st april

finally the instructor course is over!
we lost marek on the way, but the rest made it to the end and they all (barely)passed.
here's marek last moments.

i really didn't mean to hurt him, but i lost it, and i'm really sorry. on the other hand he messed up big time, and i know that he would agree with me if he was still here.
this is how i like to remember him...

now, enough with the sad stuff.
the last night of the course we went celebrating to the desert and had barbeque. and lots of booze.
memories of the evening are a bit blurry...this is and all i can remember, and don't ask me what it is.

today back at work with a 4*. my student seemed to be unaware of my reputation, but i soon updated him. now he's probably home thinking about quitting the course.
so now we're all here sitting around socializing for the official opening of the freedive dahab shop.
here's some pics

some happy customers shopping for funky freediving clothes

here's agnes looking even more grumpy than me...now, is she trying to copy the master?

here's hanli hiding behind our christmas lights. yes, i know it's april, but in egypt you don't make a party without christmas lights.

here's hanli again, posing for our FDD t shirt

more people posing. here ben guyat and his friend richard, in funky indian pants. ben is also wearing a blue FDD jumper short cut, ideal to show a bit of your hairy belly

here's richard again, not doing anything to hide his feminine side...

UPCOMING EVENTS:

4* course, 31st march until 3rd april.
i will be so stressed, tired, edgy, that you will enjoy my evil self at 360 degrees.
if you make it to the end you will get a special survival award.

this is me during class.

easter combo week, 9th to 14th of april. for who is scared, or simply don't want to dive with me (i know it can happen: sometimes even I don't want to dive with myself), come to the easter combo week. 2* and 3* courses, + training, under lotta's and katya's motherly wings. they are going to be the sweetest and most understanding instructors.
wow, doesn't it sound cheesy enough?
i promise i won't be around. in fact i'm gonna have a little holiday.

march 26th

here the proof of marek and josh freakiness.

i just found out that marek has indeed a official boyfriend, who he refers affectionately to as "the silver guy". i met him in the past, but at t he time i was not aware about the romantic implications. as he made it public right here, in front of his fellow wannabe instructors AND the 4 guinea pigs 3* students, josh didn't look quite pleased. i can see how he's trying to hide his tears behind his big fashionable diva like gucci sunglasses.

now i don't even know if silver guy knows about josh. well, if he reads this blog, he does. he will be here soon doing a course with me, and i'll do my best to find a suitable and less useless replacement for him.

since i promised to be mean also to flavia, here's what i have. the only picture in the world where she looks ugly. she's obviously the one on the right, while the other is kate, josh' mistreated girlfriend.

but, since i'm not nearly as evil as everybody seem to believe, here you get a pic where she looks much more gorgeous than she is. what makes her look so good here is the bikini she's wearing, which is one of the many you can find in our shop. buy one, and you'll look like this!

march 16th

4 new aida instructors are slowly growing.inside freedive dahab round and swallen belly.
soon they will be invading dahab's streets, rio's streets and indonesia's jungles.

the candidates, all of unknown sex (and you will soon see what i mean!), and low neurons counts, are struggling to stay awake during the long monologues of their instructor trainer.

here you can see the whole bunch of them pretending to be interested.

marek, who used to be a uselessly sick all the time, and for this reason he attended even more 4 star courses than i did, finally got back to drink healthy coffee instead of his gay mint tea.

josh, who came all the way from indonesia accompanied by his beautiful girlfriend kate, now is never more than 30 cm apart from marek, the two of them being far more gay than they want to admit.
he is also the one accumulating more minus points during the IC. for being late, for ass kissing, and generally for being the one that i like to pick on just for principle.
but the other day he offered as a guinea pig for science and held his breath for 8 and a half minutes on oxygen, which gave him he only plus point he will ever get.

little kate, struggling to get josh attention away from marek, also volunteered to do a static on oxygen, ending up with 7.30 and making it look a much lesser big deal the josh, which impressed everybody except josh, who is still all over marek all the time.

there is very little to say about marek, who apart of being permanently sick is doing nothing impressive. What marek is best at is NOT doing static. he always has an excuse for not holding his breath.

as for flavia, she's too beautiful and too sweet to say anything abusive about her. but since I never say anything nice about anybody just for principle, I will make an effort and find something evil to say about her.

here you can see marek and flavia doing nothing to hide their puzzlement.

FDD NEW SHOP!

2009-02-27T16:59:00.007+02:00

2009 FDD COLLECTION

finally some pictures of the 2009 FDD collection. check out the freediving celebs that posed as models for the shots.

here you see alexey molchanov, young raising star, almost a local in dahab, doing very little training and always hanging out with the girlfriend. it was actually very hard to convince him to wear the jumper, since he's well known for his bare chest style, even in the winter.

here you see lotta and akim. oh, don't they look sweet? no, don't worry, lotta is not crying (for once!). akim is wearing the same jumper that you saw on alexey (after we sprayed some deodorant on it), while lotta is wearing the 3/4 sleeve also available in orange, and with the triple depth logo on the back.

here pim vermuelen in red, sporting the triple depth t shirts male cut. i tried to convince him to wear the female cut, to which he agreed to, but it was too short and showed too much belly, which didn't look too bad, but he felt it undermined his masculinity.

here lotta and akim again. these 2 look like they love each other. i told lotta that she can be cheesy only in her half of the shop, and obviously she's taking every chance she gets. however, akim is wearing the new unisex black jumper with the light blue logo (my favorite), while lotta is wearing the long sleeve red polo female cut.

and finally me, in a "keep it simple" long sleeve shirt (from a notanx original design) (no, we didn't steal it, we have an agreement with notanx!), and matching indian style pants, available in many colors and fabrics, ideal for yoga, fashion events, and to cover extra winter fat.

oh, i almost forgot. soon the male FDD g-strings will be ready. david tranfield insisted that he wants to be the one posing in them for the official picture. soon you can admire his hairy butt here.

below more pics of the shop.
first the cheesy side (lotta's half).
lotta has been nominated "theofficebitch" by the majority of the partners, which is true, they are only 2, but my vote counts more than hers. that means she does all the boring paperwok, takes care of the shop and eats lot of cheese cake from the close-by german bakery while the real freedivers are in the water.

here you see the original pagallina design of shelves and ropes. that took a lot of work, and swearing, but i'm happy with the result.

here's the monofin wall. you can try the fins in the water, see which size and stiffness is best of you, and we can order for you what you like.
oh, by the way, we can also help you order your elios suit. we have a wide range of neoprene samples, and linda is taking all the measurements you need to order your tailor made suit, especially if you are a single, good looking guy. please wear your best underwear, and have a shower before.

now the other side, linda's half, where the real stuff is taking place (including the measurements).
cheesiness is forbidden here.

this is where the old monofins retire and spend the last years of their lives, remembering the old, wet days. and here more retired fins.

the coffee area.
students get their caffeine shot before the dry breath-hold session. soon we'll have the shisha corner here, to train a better CO2 tolerance.
since this happens to be in my half, lotta has to pay when she wants a hot drink.

the classroom. it does actually look too comfortable. is that the reason why students tend to fall asleep all the time? i'm going to replace the mattresses with wooden planks with rusty nails sticking out.

THE SHOP

yes! we moved, again!

we like changes, otherwise we would be sitting in italy or sweden in a boring office, looking at clouds and fog.

so, this time is a real shop. it took us two months to put it together and to arrange things the way we wanted, not only because we were busy diving, but especially we were busy having fun :-)
(in the specific, lotta did a lot of drinking and socializing, while linda did a bit of drinking too, and a lot of running in the desert, and some desert trips with her new funky enduro bike. and i never fell! yet!)

however, here you can see some pics. didn't have the time to clean properly around, but it will be shiny and polished in a couple of days.

the funky purple bike in front is my baby:-)

we spent days to build the sun shade. and we grew new muscles handling the ton of rope that went on top!

in order to attract the customers, we decided that for the first month Lotta will be posing naked in the window, every morning except on Fridays, since we have a big mosque in front, and we don't want to steal their customers :-

CALENDAR 2009

2008-11-29T18:27:00.002+02:00

JANUARY 2009
AIDA **** FREEDIVER COURSE 6/1-9/1)
AIDA INSTRUCTOR COURSE (only for Russians) 26/1-7/2
AIDA** AND/OR AIDA*** (Only for Russians) 30/1-4/2 SPECIAL PRICE

FEBRUARY 2009
6/2-11/2 GO VERTICAL- FREEDIVING AND CLIMBING

MARCH 2009
16/3-30/3 AIDA INSTRUCTOR COURSE
23/3-28/3 AIDA** AND/OR AIDA*** SPECIAL PRICE

APRIL 2009
9/4-14/4 EASTER COMBO WEEK
9/4-14/4 EASTER TRAINING WEEK
27/4-2/5 DEEP DIVING WORKSHOP
27/4-2/5 TRAINING WEEK

MAY 2009
11/5-16/5 BEGINNER FREEDIVER AND YOGA WORKSHOP
11/5-16/5 TRAINING WEEK
25/5-30/5 TRAINING WEEK + MINI COMP CWT/CNF/FIM

JUNE 2009
11/6-14/6 AIDA** IN Örebro, SWEDEN
25/6-28/6 AIDA** IN Örebro,SWEDEN

JULY 2009
23/7-26/7 AIDA*** IN Örebro, SWEDEN

SEPTEMBER 2009
1/9-7/9 TRIPLE DEPTH
10/9-30/9 AIDA INSTRUCTOR COURSE
14/9-19/9 COMBO WEEK
21/9-26/9 AIDA** AND/OR AIDA*** SPECIAL PRICE

OCTOBER 2009
12/10-17/10 COMBO WEEK
12/10-17/10 TRAINING WEEK
19/10-24/10 GO VERTICAL - FREEDIVING AND CLIMBING

NOVEMBER 2009
2/11-7/11 COMBO WEEK
2/11-7/11 TRAINING WEEK
9/11-14/11 GO VERTICAL - FREEDIVING AND CLIMBING

DECEMBER 2009
7/12-12/12 COMBO WEEK
7/12-12/12 TRAINING WEEK
14/12-19/12 GO VERTICAL - FREEDIVING AND CLIMBING
29/12-3/1 NEW YEAR COMBO WEEK

Carlos Coste FIM WR attempt

2008-10-01T14:22:00.002+02:00

Lotta is in Venezuela as a judge for Carlos attempt. Here's her report:

After one and a half nights at home (stayed too long at the WC party in Sham), of I went on a 30 hour trip to Venezuela. Crazy timing, but it wasn’t up to me to decide the dates, since I was chosen as one of the AIDA judges for Carlos Coste’s WR attempt in Free Immersion.

Well in Caracas (the capital of Venezuela) I was relieved to finally have arrived without any major issues… but i wasn’t there yet! Still one flight to go and I realized that even Egyptians can do things better than others … sometimes… If you want to keep your peace of mind, NEVER take domestic flights in Venezuela! If you need someone to help you out, which you most certainly will, ask another passenger, NOT the airport staff, they might send you to the wrong destination, even after having seen your boarding pass!

Finally in Barcelona (no I am not back in Europe) both Gabi and Carlos was there meeting me. It was wonderful to see familiar faces! We went straight to a sailing boat where some of the people involved in the record event stayed. It showed that the captain, Peter had started a dive centre in Dahab a couple of years ago (I will not name it since it is Freedive Dahab’s biggest competitor in Dahab…) Small world as usual. There I also met Carlos’ two safety divers, Enrique from Venezuela and Alfredo from Canary Islands.

After a well needed full night sleep I woke up and started exploring the huge luxurious villa we all stayed in. It is situate at a “lake/canal system” with connection to the sea so all houses have their own pier. We just need to cross the garden, jump in Carlos boat and go diving!

Unfortunately we will not stay here all the time. On Thursday we all have to move to a hotel. The good news about this is that I finally will get Internet…

On Tuesday it was time for Carlos last training dive. We spent the whole day at sea meeting dolphins 3 times and enjoying the sunshine and the 30 degrees clear water… until a thunderstorm started with heavy rain! Luckily Carlos training was done when the weather was still pleasant.

Today, Wednesday, is a day off… for everybody but me... I am also here to teach an AIDA Instructor Course, so there is not much time to rest for me… or my candidates… Alfredo, the safety diver, I met before in the Worlds in Hurgada 06 and Sharm 07. And now he will be my student for the IC… this far he is doing well, even though his English sucks! Fortunately I do understand a lot of Spanish and I have Iru, the other IC candidate for translation… I also met Iru before in the WC in Nice 05 and Hurgada, so I felt like I am amongst friends! (Enrique I never met before, but he made it his task to make me beautiful coffee every morning, so he won my heart quickly!)

Last night the other Judge arrived, Nicolas Laporte, so besides teaching today, we will also check out the official counter ballast system and have a meeting with all the staff. But before this Gabi and I will invade his room at the hotel to use the Internet! We promised him that if he behaves we will let him stay in the room…

18 september

The first record attempt day started off with beautiful weather and good spirits. The judges, scuba divers and other staff set off one hour before Carlos, so that all would be set up and ready at the dive site when he arrived… Did not work… (for a while I thought I was back in Egypt)
We started with looking for the mooring for 45 minutes… two big white buoys at a depth of about 5m. Normally very visible. Eventually the even asked if Iru could go in the water and swim around an look. She did, and I was getting too frustrated to stay in the boat, so I went too, despite my fear of deep waters… And we got lucky, no sharks came and eat us even when we were far far away from the boat… But no, we did not find the mooring. Finally Carlos arrived in his boat and it shows that we were in the wrong place… the mooring was half a kilometre further away…
Now there is only about 30min to “official top”, and this is when they start trying to figure out how to attach the camera arm for the bottom camera to the rope! Carlos could not start his warm-up until the official line was in the water, since he does all his warm-ups there. So when everything finally was in place it was almost noon, and “official top” was at 11am…. Luckily it seemed that nobody (but me) got stressed about this…not even Carlos.

There where quite a few people that had come to see the attempt, even if this one was supposed to be more “private”. The big show should be on Saturday, where Carlos hopefully didn’t have to do a record for real. There were media from all the big TV channels, radio stations and news papers. (Peter, the captain of the sailing boat, whose task was to bring out the media, actually had to leave some people behind since the boat was already overloaded with 35 people!

Unfortunately Carlos didn’t make the dive this day. He blacked out at about 22m. The safety divers did a superb job! He was up in 20 seconds, they started with rescue breath after 10 sec and within 30 sec he was at the emergency boat. Within 45sec from surfacing he was in the boat and under care of a very professional paramedic. He woke up shortly after this, waving and smiling to the media as he left with the boat. His positive attitude paid off in almost all media, except for one radio station that said Carlos was dead!

The Saturday attempt was cancelled to give Carlos more rest days, but he will try again on Monday 22/9.

Until then we have 3 days off… well, everybody else have, not me and my candidates… We start 8 o’clock every morning no matter how late we went to bed. I think they are going to hate me at the end of next week!

WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS 2008- THE END

2008-09-13T18:11:00.013+02:00

IT'S OVER!

We are very tired, but now we can have some rest.
Half of the safety divers have got an ear infection. The other half got sunburnt to alarming levels.
Stavros' nose is falling off his face.
One is still unusable because of the countdown syndrome, one got a middle ear barotrauma.
Some other got lost on the way. If there was one more competition day, there would not be safety divers left to cover that.

This is me, doing laps in between official tops. The doctor told me at my age i should move a bit to fight the advancing arthritis.

I’m not going to speak about results since I’m sure everybody know them better than me.
But the most amazing news i have today is that i caught Sebastian laughing. Not only: he was laughing reading my blog!! And since i agree that it sounds unbelievable, i took pictures of the event, so i can prove it.
Come on, how many people on the planet can claim they can make Sebastian laugh? Somebody give me a medal.

These last days i noticed people were behaving very strangely with me. They either run away as soon as I approached them, or they were very nice to me (which is not normal, because there's no reason to be nice to me).
I think those are signs of the Blog Syndrome, who affects those that don't want to be mentioned in my blog.
I wonder why.

We collected some data, and we found out that the chance of a BO is bigger if you were diving in line and lane B. I did all my safety in A, and we had no BO in CWT, and as for DYN we had one BO the first day and two on the second day.
Overall, in CWT, there were only 2 BO and 2 heavy sambas, all in line B.
In DYN, 8 BO, 5 of them in lane B.
All in all i only got to rescue 1 diver in 4 diving days! I would have had one more during DYN, but since it was a pretty girl (Liv), Stavros invaded my zone and took her.

Mandy had a BO after the 150m turn.
Russian Alexey came up at 175 and lost it before he realized.
Kiwi Ant keeps trying to make me cry, and got a BO at around 210. I didn't cry, because at the same time i was watching a bad exit on my lane, so i didn't see it happening.
Kiwi Will tried 200, but had a massive samba and messed up the SP.
Even Martin was very close to pass out after less than 160m.
Athletes claim that the hot pool must be blamed for the dodgy exits. Some said they had very late contractions, but then it gets very ugly very quickly and it's already too late.

Hot Johan had a very heavy samba. Being hot in a hot pool doesn't really help i guess.
Is this why most of the hot guys had bad exits?
Anyways, I was next to him ready to take him, and as he was all shaky and trying not to lose it, he looked at me, and immediately snapped back to life.
Now one might think it is a good sign; he saw me, got impressed, and woke up.
But what if instead he woke up when he realized i would have been the one kissing him if he passed out? Which is definitely not a good sign.
However, he got a red card for late SP, and i'm really sorry for him. Even if he doesn't want to kiss me.

The other hottie, Juraj, came up clean after 170. I'm sure he could add an extra 25 mt with no extra effort just by waxing his back thus eliminating some extra resistance. I know waxing is painful, but i'm against shaving: makes the hair horribly thicker, grows back immediately, and it's a real turn off during the romantic moments.
Next year I'll take with me loads of wax, and offer free treatments to the hot single guys. The others will have to pay.

The Italian team was a bit of a shame for the Italian nation, but then came Federico and did a easy 175 with no training whatsoever.
Davidino came up after 100m saying "sorry, but i don't like it!". That was why i suggested he did his DYN holding a speargun, and that we put a big fish on his lane. He could do a WR like that. But they didn't listened to me.
Ilaria, who sometimes doesn't behave very smart, had one of her nonsmart moments when she surfaced.
While she was waiting for the judgment she must have got bored, and decided to take off her fin. Dipping her face.
Dumb syndrome?
Judge for yourself:

Oh sorry, that was the one where she looks smart. The next is the one.

Sofus, after seeing David king walking around with nail polish on his feet, got jealous, and showed up with women shades. Big dark lenses encased in a brown and golden frame. Stylish.

Thank God Weine doesn't have a dick on his back anymore. He must have got back to his senses. Now he behaves very manly again. He screamed like a wrestler before his dive to pump himself up, as he did after, to scare his samba away. It worked.
Weine got very upset with me because i didn't put his picture in the hotties section. So i put one here now, hoping to make him happy. He deserves respect, because he's the only person i know that wants to appear in this blog.

Oh, I almost forgot. Kiwi Dave did another WR. He seemed completely bored as he was standing there on the pool edge waiting for his judgment. Everybody is wondering what secret he's hiding. What did he find out that we didn't, damn it?

Overall i had a very good time. If they take the static out from the next team WC i will apply to be in the safety team again. If not, I'll compete. Or i can apply to go there as the official reporter, if somebody want to sponsor me.

Strangely enough I'm still single. But luckily i didn't lose any member of the Spinsters Team. I post another picture of the team here, and maybe somebody will volunteer to take one (or more) of us out of spinsterhood.

I suggest on the next edition the organizer provides extra medals. For the hottest guy, for the dumbest freediver, for the funniest samba, for the best freediving tan. And I want to be the judge.

About Judges, here pics of the evil lot.

Judge Bill. He's pretty evil, but if you are a girl with a pretty bum, let him squeeze it, and you'll buy yourself a white card.

Judge Grant. Try corrupt him with a doughnut.

Judge Kimmo. Incorruptible.

Judge Marcello. I don't know him very well, but being originally from southern Italy there must be several ways to buy his "protection".

Judge Susan. She's nice, and seems very straight. But being Dutch you can try bribe her with good pot.

Last but not least, Ute. She is very German, and definitely not corruptible.

As for the real gossip, like who slept with who, and who got embarrassingly shitfaced during the party, you can request them by mail at this address:
linda@freedivedahab.com
Charge is 5 euro a piece.

Thanks God this is over, because i don't have any friends left to lose :-)

TEAM WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS 2008- 7TH/8TH SEPTEMBER

2008-09-09T15:21:00.008+02:00

HOW BORING!

What did I say about enjoying so much doing the safety instead than competing?
I take it back. Safetying at a static competition is the most boring business I’ve ever been involved in. I even had more fun in school, during the math classes.

The only few highlights consist in the (unfortunately few) sambas and bo’s.

Danish Sofus had the funniest samba I’ve ever seen. If somebody has pictures or a video about that, please send it to me. You’ll be rewarded. He still got a white card.

Teammate Henning also had a samba, a cute one, but not as funny. Another white card.

Kiwi Ant had a black out, throwing the chance of a medal. I was co-judging his performance (it’s just a funky way to say I was a timekeeper), and since I have a soft spot for him, seeing his BO filled my eyes with tears. But I restrained myself from crying, since I still have a reputation to maintain. I’m a well known unsympathetic bitch.

Sweet Liv had a red card for doing the protocol to the coach Rob. In a way I can understand why she’d rather see his friendly smile than Judge Bill Nordic frozen stare. But she should have restrained herself for few seconds.

Italian Davidino, also known as the Bimbo, did a happy 5 thirthysomething on what looked like a passive exhale. Here you see him just before his top

Lotta entertained the whole pool (except the athletes that were trying to prepare for their performances) with one of her famous pre-performance breakdowns. For unknown reasons she got very upset with her coach Sebastian, and everybody could hear her yelling and crying until 2 minutes before her official top. She resumed the yelling and the crying as soon as she did her SP, after 5.30.
Coach Sebastian handled that very well. He stayed, and didn’t run away as many would have done. But later on he displayed post-traumatic shock symptoms.
Doctors feared he would develop a condition that affected most of Lotta’s coaches in the past years, known as the Ericson Syndrome, of which the scientists didn't find a cure yet.
Sebastian cured himself the day after with a static performance done as opener, after which he had his usual samba, which burned few of the short memory cells, thus forgetting the traumatic episode, and now he looks happy again.

Speaking about syndromes, Safety Alex got one too. It’s called Countdown Syndrome, and it’s affecting those that soon after their Judge course are put with a microphone at the side of the pool, doing the official countdown for the competition. His very first countdown. He did look a bit worried. He was briefed properly, but something must have happened, and he messed it up completely. He was quickly replaced with Judge Susan, and since then he’s been seen walking aimlessly around the pool mumbling numbers to himself. Sometimes he snaps back to consciousness and he sits at the restaurant eating a hot dog.

Here you can see him after one of these rare moments

I wish I had a result list here with me, but I don’t so I have no clue about most of the other performances, and especially about the overall results. The only thing I know is that the Greek are first, 23 points ahead of the French.
I just sent Rob the King to look for a list to steal. Knowing the guy I doubt he can get himself to steal anything. But since he’s a lawyer, I’m hoping his real nature kicks in, and he’ll finally get mean and sneaky like any worthy lawyer.
Actually this reminds me that I already broke the promise I made him less than half hour ago. I promised I was going to be nice to him for the whole day today, since he allowed me to use his computer and his aircon to write the blog.
On the other hand, he should know better than expecting me to be nice.
Oh well, since I started this, I’m going to add something. Ever since Greek Stavros left Rob’s room and went in the other hotel with the rest of the safety, Rob, feeling very lonely, has been sleeping with a wetsuit placed on one side of his double bed, unfolded in a human-like figure. I’m not the only witness to it. Guillaume saw it too (and don’t ask me what Guillaume was doing in his room, because I do not know).

The swimming pool, which temperature is probably above the mid thirties, to which we refer affectionately like the pissing pool, is a soup of human fluids, snot, spit, body hair, toenails (Sara and Anna have been spotted pedicuring on the pool edge) and bacteria. You look at it, and you get an ear infection.
I had this conversation with some people, and I found out people pee in the pools. I couldn’t believe that.
Call me naïve, but I didn’t know that people are actually relieving their bladders in swimming pools. I always believed the story of the chemicals that make the water red if you pee in it. Once I even had a nightmare about that: I was in a pool with my waterway model 2 (good old times!), and I couldn’t hold it anymore and without being able to control it, I did it. The water did become all red. I wanted to die. Everybody noticed and wanted to hurt me, so I got out and started running. I got on the street with my car key ready to drive away as fast as I could. And my car wasn’t there. Somebody stole it. I woke up all shaky.

About the pedicure, here's some proof

And guess who's foot is this

Yes, it's his: British David King, the most famous transexual in the freediving community.

The French coach saw him and got all excited. Here's a pic of him while is "coaching" Guillaume before his performance.

In order to deal with the pool temperature, the Nordic athletes (Finnish, Danish and Swedish) all showed up with dozens of water bottles containing half frozen water. The coaches were pouring the water on the athletes’ heads during the performances, and obviously it worked, because they were still able to do their usual good times.

One thing that doesn’t have anything to do with the static competition: yesterday morning I was out diving, and after a while British Stuart (member of the UK team, and former student of mine), showed up with not one, but two noodles. Was that a new technique to impress girls?
Oh, now I get it! It must be one of the symptoms of the Noodle Syndrome!

Swedish Hot Johan has apparently the same condition: Swedish team mate Weine has been walking around all morning with a big dick drawn on his back by Johan. It all happened in their room, on Weine’s bed…
Johan, if you read this please contact me. No, it’s not because I want one of your drawings, but remember you want a better picture for your Hotties Challenge? Don’t worry, I have the epilady for you.

Well, enough for today, I’m off diving with Rob and his noodle. Maybe I’ll get to sit on it for a while.

LATER...

Finally i got a better picture of Johan. here we go

Ops, sorry, i got confused. I meant to put this one:

TEAM WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS - 5th sept

2008-09-05T11:05:00.006+02:00

Today is a day off, hamdulilllah. We’ve been trying to sleep late this morning, but somehow the body went in automatic and I woke up at 7 again.

Plan of the day:
-sneak around and take pictures of the hotties
-eat like a pig
-look for some gossip

I also want to find out who are the hottest girls here. In my humble opinion, I would say the two girls of the safety team (both Freedive Dahab members), and also all the Spinsters team members but maybe I’m not really impartial here. So I’ll go and ask the guys.

By the way, if you want the phone number of any of the Spinsters’ team, drop me a mail and I’ll be happy to comply.

Here 2 pics of the official team (not considering Paoletta and Sara, who are only the reserves)

As for the trend of the year, I noticed all the vulgar jokes about mouthfills and swallowing have been dropped, and instead the most popular line you often hear when you are safetying or coaching is “can you grab my noodle?”
The one who say it more often is definitely Robert the King. He asked me many times. I don’t know if he does that with every other girl.
Yesterday I heard Kirk saying that (or better, screaming it) to safety Katya, in front of everybody. Mandy watch out.
I also heard guys saying that to each other… The other day I was distracted and forgot to grab Rob noodle’s as he asked me, and he gave it to Ricky instead. He said that when he's "in the zone" he doesn't really care who take his noodle.

I really think is a great ice breaker. Not only for a guy to use. Say you (girl) like this guy, you go there and say “do you mind if I seat on your noodle?” or “can I borrow your noodle” or, simply “mmmh, I like your noodle!”
Well, don’t forget he has to be a freediver, and he has to have a noodle (the floating one), or otherwise he would run away quick. Or maybe not.

Ok, let’s get back to the important things, like the real diving.
I’ve seen so many dives these last days, that I remember it all like a blur.
But for sure I remember the more remarkable ones.

First of all, I’d like to remark, once again, that very few freedivers know how to do a proper duck dive.
Next year (and I announce it here officially) Freedive Dahab will organize a half day workshop about duck diving at the WC 2009.
20 euro per person. If half the people who need it sign up, it’ll pay for sure our accommodation for the whole stay.
Also, there are a lot of freedivers that should consider taking a course before showing up at a competition, especially if it is a World Championship.
We give special price for groups.

German Barbara announced the shocking depth of 12mt.The plate was so shining that it blinded us all. Even she told the judges to “please put it at 12, at least”, looking a bit offended, like they were taking the piss.
Apparently, they say, she has so much trouble equalizing that she takes ages to get down. Well, not during that dive. With her powerful carbon fins she rocketed down and up quite fast. Maybe she should slow down and relax a bit; that might help her equalizing troubles. I’m rather sure that was the shallowest announcement in a World Championship.

Deepest dive was announced by Dave (Mullins), with 104. He went just after Ryuzo, who turned at 92 for equalizing problems, I think. Also Dave turned at 92, but because of the deepest announcement he lost more points.

The Kiwi team was actually the favourite, but because of this dive, and especially because of the 33 points penalty of Will, they ended up 5th in the overall result. Ant, my favourite kiwi member, announced “only” 82, and he did a very nice clean dive. His depth is only limited by equalizing, since he keeps losing his cheekful (as he cutely calls it).

Lots of 100 mt dives this year. One was delivered by Martin. One by Greek Manolis, who I think is ripe enough for a WR, but I thing he’s too humble and shy for fame, which I find a very sweet thing.
One more 100 was announced by Guillaume, who chickened out and turned at 98.5, losing 5 points. I can understand if you chicken out at 70 on the way down, thinking is still a long way to go, but Guillaume, 150 centimeters before the plate is silly! On the other hand he’s French, so normal logic doesn’t apply to him.
The last 100 was for Slovak Juraj, who, maybe knowing he was going to win the Hotties Challenge, got distracted and missed the rope on the surface before falling face down unconscious. Pity. But he delivered a very hot smile to the jury when he woke up. He should al least get some points for his perfectly white teeth.

Italian hottie Federico (he’s not on the Hot List just because he’s married and has a kid, just as Ant is, and therefore they are of no interest to the Spinsters team), delivered a beautiful 90, which is the new Italian record. The plan was to share the record with Davide Carrera, who did the same depth the day before, but did the SP half a second too late. Shame: who knows him a bit knows how much he deserves it.

The Italian Men Team is completed by Ilaria, who’s definitely not a man. She did a super easy 60 mt dive, with virtually no training at all. She’s back in competition after a long break, and I’m really happy about that, because she’s good, and because if we find a third member (and if I feel like competing again) we plan to kick asses on the next team competition. The only complain I have against Ilaria is that, like most freedivers she’s not fond of air condition, and she’s forcing me to sleep with no less than 29 degrees.
Why you people don’t like air con? It’s with no doubt the greatest invention of the last century. All these stories about how bad it’s for the sinuses are just myths. Wake up, and enjoy the artificial weather!

Other deep dives were the ones of French Christian (85), Greek Dimitrios (85), Hot Swedish Johan (85), Slovak Martin (81),Finnish Antero (80), French Morgan (80).

Russian Alexey announced 95, which he did very easily, but he got 10 points off for rope violation. Actually he scared me to death, since apparently he did have a BO during the warm-up, and the judges let him dive anyways. As soon as he duck dived I screamed for Stavros to come on my line and to go deep together in case he had a problem. Poor Stavros was still trying to catch his breath after the deep safety for Federico, and he wasn’t looking too happy about the possibility of a deep BO. As it turned out we never made it deeper than 15mt, since there was some mistake on Alexey divetime (which we expected to be 3.15), and he was much quicker than we thought. He came up looking very happy and relaxed. Until he got the yellow card.

The deepest female divers were Natalia (unsurprisingly) with a easy 85 mt, followed by Mandy with 8o mt.
Third deepest was Chzek Jarmila, who already won the Gold last year for CNF. She did a clean 70mt dive.
Other females in the 60 mt range were Brazilian Carol (67) and Russian Natalia (Avseenko) (65) who got both red card but then protested and won (many expressed doubts about the change of the jury decisions). Japanese females all between 60 and 63, all white cards. French Julie (62), American Annabel (61), Italian Ilaria (60), Danish Maria (60), Swedish Annelie did 60 with an almost broken foot.
British MT did 60 but got 50 points for rope violation. American Jessica announced 62 but turned earlier, German Anna announced 60 but turned at 55 disturbed by a cramp.

Now i'm off for some pic hunting. Will get back as soon as i have some good material.

LATER

Got the pictures of the Hottie Challenge!!

This is winner Juraj

And this is winner Johan (I have to admit he doesn't look at his best here, will try to get a better shot)

TEAM WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS - 4th sept

2008-09-04T20:56:00.008+02:00

As usual, things happen, and I’m always late with the updates.
Fact is, I’ve been so busy enjoying myself that I forgot all about my plan of keeping a daily diary on the blog.

The first person I met when I arrived was Guillaume, who finally found out and read my abusive pages about French people on July’s blog, and thought of avenging his fellow countrymen honour by disgracing the Italian population. He threatened me to write an article and reveal some of the things he is witnessing during his stay here in Sharm. Very embarrassing things. And to take pictures to prove them.
If you’ve ever been in a holiday resort for Italians (such as the one we are staying here during WC) you will know immediately which embarrassing things I’m talking about.
Anyways, I thought that was the brightest idea a Frenchman has ever had. I begged him to do that, and promised I’ll post it myself here on this blog.
He said he would work on it, so I’m waiting.

here's a pic of Guillaume with Gianpiero, the shortest safety diver in the world.

This year, the biggest change for me is that I’m here not as a competing athlete, but as a member of the safety team. And it’s being such a blast, that I decided this is all I want to do in a competition from now on.
When I’ve been competing I was always super stressed. When I’ve been judging I was often very bored. But being here as safety is just very funky.

First you get to see every single dive.
You get to see all the black outs and sambas.
If you are lucky you even get to kiss the unconscious good looking freedivers (the ugly ones I leave for the second safety)

Other minor advantages include:
-working on your lactic acid tolerance when you come back from 30 meters with bifins trying to keep up with Ryuzo or Guillaume
-get to congratulate first with every diver (especially the good looking ones)
-kick all the intruders out of the official zone (makes the safety diver feel powerful and important)
-wear the beautiful lycra t-shirt that Marco and Ricky designed for the safety staff
-not having judge Bill checking your lanyard (and invariably breaking it) the night before your dive
-getting to look at the hot Tec diver (the fit one) sitting on the boat edge all morning (waiting to dive in case of a deep accident)
-not having to pay attention during the boring meetings when everybody ask the same questions every single time (and every single year!)

here some pics of the meeting, with various people falling alseep or looking totally stoned

On the other hand, there are some disadvantages.
At the moment, the only one I can come up with is to float in the sea for 5 hours a day with such a rough weather that you risk banging your head against the platform and die.
But then again, it was very funny when the platforms were swinging so wildly under the staff ass to the point several of them fell. My favourite falls were Judge Bill, and rope boy rasta Marco.

here a pic of the safety team 2008

and here one where Ricky is showing his skills as a sinchronized swimmer...he was even wearing waterproof make up, but unfortunately you cannot see it here

The Italian spinsters’ team (of which I am an honourable member) had a votation today to decide who is the hottest Freediver of this year. (Other members being Angela, Silvia-better known as Pina-, plus a married one, Sara and a wannabe spinster, Paoletta)

We came up with two names, Swedish Johan and Slovak Juraj.
I will take pictures of the two and post them here.
If somebody want to file a protest you have 15 minutes.

i just got the team results after the CWT.
Males:
1.France, with 260 points
-Nery 98
-Maldame 85
-Bourchis 80

2.Greece, with 257 points
-Giankos 100
-Chatziaslan 85
-Tzaveraliz 72

3.Chzek Republic, with 247 points
-Stepanek 100
-Zlatuska 75
-Vala 72

Females:
1.Russia, with 205 points
-Molchanova 85
-Suryakova 55
-Avseenko 65

2.Japan, with 183 points
-Matsumoto 60
-Hirai 63
-Kitahama 60

3.USA, with 171 points
-Wilson 57
-Edwards 60
-Russell 53

I'm afraid for today this will be it. Tomorrow is a day off, so i hope i'll have some time to write some gossip :-)

ACTION ACTION ACTION!!!

2008-08-04T17:16:00.014+03:00

“EVERYBODY IN FIRST POSITION…STAND BY…AND ACTION ACTION ACTION!!!”

I think I heard this sentence 300 hundred times a day, during the 3 days we were stuck with a filming crew on a boat in the middle of nowhere for 15 hours a day.
But at least they gave us a lot of chocolate and chips, and sunscreen…

Here you can see the Sinai sunrise as the boat leaves the pier (which means it was veeery early in the morning!)

Here's the meeting before the shooting session

So, the filming crew came from South Africa to film a commercial for BMW. No car in the commercial (it wouldn’t have fit on the boat), just a freediver. More than that: a cool, metallic looking (and sunburnt) freediver, who, with the splashiest duck dive you’ll ever see, swims all the way to 113 meters, comes up, and with the coolest mach look in his eyes smiles at the camera and shows the tag.

The model was Guillaume Nery, who was flown in from France, thrown in the water as soon as he arrived, and left there until 3 hours before his flight to Greece.
It’s a shame we didn’t call the people from the Guinness book, because I’m sure he would have won the world record for the most freedives anybody can do in a day.

Here you see Guillaume in pain after his feet have been squeezed in his tight monofin for 15 hours. On top of that he got a small infection (he must like pain), so the doctor is trying to fix him for the next shooting session.

The director obviously was told that freedivers don’t need to breathe (ever), because as soon as he broke the surface there was somebody there screaming in his ear “ACTION ACTION ACTION!” and the poor guy would dive again.

Here you can see how they're playing with the lights (to make him not looking sunburnt?)

At least he wasn’t requested to do repetitive 113 meters dives (I’m sure it’s just because they didn’t have the right scuba gear to film so deep!). he was diving between 10 and 30 meters, in what can be considered the longest and hardest CO2 table in the freediving history!

Lotta and I were there to provide the knowhow, equipment and being the safety divers. And eat the chocolate.

I don’t think I’ve ever been in the water so much in my life before.
Once in a while we would be allowed to climb on the boat and put a new layer of sunscreen, while the director was already screaming after us “TIME TO WALK THE PLANK!!”.

Here a picture of the director :-)

But hey, on day 2 we had a whale shark visiting us 3 times! Lotta was even caught on film with him. The last time he showed up we all took off and swam after him, while the director, totally unimpressed, was screaming “IF YOU WANT TO SEE A FISH YOU GO TO A FUC***ING AQUARIUM!”
The whale shark must have heard that one, and obviously got very offended, because he never came back again.

Being in the TV changed my little simple life. I feel a much more sophisticated being now. I think I’ll leave the countryside and make my way to Hollywood, in the hope of hearing again the magic words “ACTION ACTION ACTION!”

Here you see the final commercial. 45 hours of water, for a minute of movie.
And hey, i do appear there for about 3 seconds!!! (obviously i'm the one with the funky yellow fins).
Sorry, i'm not advanced enough to post directly the video in here. Apparently i'm ineligible to register to youtube :-(

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bmw+free+diver&search_type=&aq=f

THE GOSSIP OF THE YEAR

2008-07-29T14:35:00.014+03:00

A French friend of mine (yeah, I know what you think, but he doesn’t speak English, so he doesn’t know anything about my francophobia) just sent me this article that appeared a couple of weeks ago on this French gossip magazine, “la gazette Nicoise”.

I am personally very ashamed for its content, but I do feel that the world needs to know, and for this reason I translated and you can find it here below.

“Last week many VIP’s were spotted in our beautiful French riviera. At the same time when Angelina and Brad were giving birth to their 25th and 26th children right here in Nice, two VIP’s of the freediving scene, Lotta Ericson and Francois Gautier, were photographed by some paparazzi while strolling in the romantic alleys of Antibes, a place where several secret love affairs are consumed every summer.

Below you can see the two walking casually beside each other pretending to be friends.

But as soon as they think nobody is watching, Lotta slips a cheeky hand on Francois’ behind.

And here you see the clandestine couple trying to hide from the cameras, as they step out of a romantic little hotel.

And then they get caught in the car, while he’s smelling her underwear!!! (Gosh, underage people, please, cover your innocent eyes!)

Francois lives in Nice since long time, and he was the organizer of the world record event of French freediver Guillaume Nery. Lotta was in Nice for the same event, being the nominated judge together with Linda Paganelli.

Did the two just met there, or they had an affair since long time and this was just one of their many clandestine meetings?

We contacted Paganelli and asked her if she knows anything about the sordid affair.

“I know nothing” she said, “every day Ericson would lock me in our hotel room and order me to scrub the floor, do her laundry and the emailing, and she wouldn’t tell me where she was going. I did notice the underwear disappearance though. Once she forgot the door open, and I escaped and went to the Irish Pub to have a break, and when she found me she slapped me just like Naomi Campbell did with her maid. I felt so very much like poor Cinderella and i cried a lot.”

This episode casts a new light on Ericson, known by many as a selfless and loving wife and mother of one. And the poor Paganelli girl surely doesn’t deserve all this abuse from her business partner.

GUILLAUME NERY WR ATTEMPT

2008-07-01T15:48:00.010+03:00

GUILLAUME 113!

Ok, the news is already a bit old. I admit I have been a bit sloppy with the blog. Many things to do, a bit of celebration, a lot of bureaucracy, paperwork, and finally a rest day.
Now I’m back on track.

As a first thing, the picture of Guillaume after his dive:

Ops, sorry, that was the wrong one.Here we go:

Sorry, another wrong one.Let me try again:

You can see the dive video here

http://guillaumenery.over-blog.com/article-20995594.html

For the French speakers here you find also updates from Guillaume. If you don’t speak French, than is your business.

As for the various parties following the record, the first one was in a pretty restaurant with apparently very nice food, but nobody remember that due to the big amount of champagne flowing in everybody’s glass.

Actually that has ben the first time for me to drink champagne. I know it sounds difficult to believe, but I could never stand even the smell of wine, so I’ve always been suspicious of every beverage related to it. I have to say I enjoyed the experience very much!

More parties are planned for tonight and tomorrow, but I won’t be there reporting that, since I’ll be travelling to Italy tomorrow to see some friends and family.

Yesterday Lotta and I had a blast in the Decathlon in Cannes. We bought so many things we don’t even know how to carry them out of the hotel.
We bought a huge massive buoy for free immersion which is going to make many people happy, especially Robert the King (even though at this moment he’s in Greece and I’m sure he cannot care less).
We also bought a special sled for variable weight, we’re going to take some funky pics and you’ll see what I’m talking about!

When Francois came to pick us up after our shopping orgy I realized it was the saddest moment of my life. I could see myself back in Dahab, without a Decathlon, without an Ikea, no Carrefour, no shops and sales, no shopping. I don’t know if I want to go back. Maybe somebody here wants to adopt me.

To make me feel better, Francois took us to Antibes, which is a very pretty village on the sea, packed with lots of rich rich people. Our plan was to find a rich (part time) husband for me, so that I could stay here few months a year, and go to Decathlon every day. They even have a coffee machine there.

The plan didn’t work quite the way we hoped, so we came back with no husband, and I’m slowly accepting the fact that I’ll have to leave. But Francois promised he’ll keep looking around.

As for the French habits:

Bread update: it is indeed true that when they buy bread, they carry it in their hands. What I didn’t know is that they roll a napkin around their baguette, so that they don’t make it too dirty with their hands (but they don’t seem to be bothered by poisonous gas spat out from car exhausts, or pigeons falling shit, or whatever other aerial bacteria is infesting the place).
Now, what happens if you buy 2 baguettes is that you have no more hands to carry anything else. And this is when you can have 2 more baguettes under your armpits (this is how you make the aromatic bread, and you don’t even pay extra for it). Guillaume though must have found an Italian baker, because I’ve seen with my eyes that they have a proper paper bag for the bread, like in all other civilized countries (actually also in third world countries like Egypt).

Another very puzzling French habit is this kissing business (nothing to do with the French kiss). So, this is how it works: you go to a place where you don’t know anybody, and you have to kiss on both cheeks every single person is in there. Not only: if you meet the same person several times a day, you’ll have to kiss him/her every time. I find it very stressful and time consuming. What was wrong with the old good handshake? Or with the classic oral greeting? (I don’t mean the other kind of oral!). Ok, it might be useful to break the ice when you meet a potential part time husband, which is not very often anyways.

But this just makes me sadly realize why French Patrick (now living in Dahab but not behaving less frenchly than any other French) was kissing us so much every time we met. It was not because he particularly liked us, as we were convinced of. Strangely enough I never saw him walking around Dahab with baguettes under his armpits!

Now I’d better stop, because I just got a mail from a friend who’s going to visit us in Dahab soon, and said I should stop writing these things when I’m still here in France if I want to leave the country alive :-) (thanks for the advice Daan).

2nd JULY
THE DAY BEFORE THE ATTEMPT

So, I’m in Nice all by myself, sitting in a Irish pub (don’t ask me why) (the answer is that I saw enough French people today) all by myself. The head judge ditched me for some old Danish friends, and she ordered me to write the blog and answer the mail, so this is what I’m doing, while I drink Baileys trying to forget how miserable I’m feeling now…

The big dive is planned for tomorrow. We’ll meet the staff and Guillaume at the pier, and around 10 we’ll have a new WR (we hope).
Guillaume looked chilled and rested today. Hopefully the sea will still be nice and flat tomorrow.

Yesterday we were out on the boat, trying the safety system, which seems to work quite well. We did many dives, to see how the human counterballast was working. There is no big weight to drop, but people pulling up the rope from the boat. I also did a dive to try, and during my descent I felt like I was gonna freeze. It’s SOOO cold! But it’s kind of funky. I’ll dive some more if there is time. Apparently it does miracles to the blood shift. I think the secret is that it freezes the brain, which in response doesn’t burn any oxygen. My doubt is: will the frozen brain cells get back to normal once back on the surface? Looking at all these Nordic freedivers I know, my answer would be no. Guillaume looks pretty normal though. Maybe he’s just pretending.

Today was a day off for everybody. The head judge and myself went on a shopping mission. A very successful one. Lots of new clothes! The problem is that they don’t fit. We’re eating like pigs here, and bellies and buttocks are growing to enormous dimensions.
I’m trying to burn the calories in excess by swimming along the beach every day, but the risk of
-getting run over by a 100mt ferry,
-or by the kayak national team,
-or to be fished up by the dozens fishermen throwing their fishing rods on my head,
-or to be smashed towards the bottom by the many kids diving down from the big rocks
-or to be shot by the few amateur spearfishers swimming around with their weapon (I think they are not so many because they regularly shoot each other by mistake on a regular basis),
-or the kids throwing rocks from the cliff
is very high. Actually I’m quite surprised I’m still alive.

As for my research about the French people, this is what I found so far.
As for the table cloths: I would say that majority of restaurants use them. I don’t know what people do at home though, I’ll have to investigate a bit more on that.
As for the bidet: they definitely don’t have a clue what they are for. My conclusion is that they just don’t wash.
As for their knowledge of any foreign language: they don’t even know that there is such a thing as a language that is not French. When I try to speak English, or Italian, or even Arabic, they just look at me like I have a terminal form of Alzheimer, and they ignore me. This is also why I’m here at the Irish pub. Unfortunately I don’t understand them because they speak some version of English that is too advanced (or too prehistoric) for me.

1st JULY
BACK TO CIVILIZATION!!!

Just after finishing our 5th Instructor Course, Freedive Dahab jumped on a plane and started a 30 hours trip towards civilization, in the place of Nice, France.
30 hours! You might wonder, did we swim? No, we flew with Alitalia, which is the most unorganized airline in the world (and we know what we’re talking about, since we flew with Egyptair a lot in the past few years!)

some of the survivors of the instructor course

But apart from that it took long because we had a very pleasant 24 hours stopover in Rome.
So, we checked in into a hotel, put on our miniskirts and high heels and went exploring the town. The high heels turned out not to be the smartest idea, since now our feet are covered in un-fashionable blisters, and even more un-fashionable electric tape. Well, the only excuse I have to justify that is that I didn’t quite realized how much bigger than Dahab Rome is, and that it takes a lot of walking to move from one place to the other.

Anyways, the bright side of it is that we got to see St. Peter’s Square, and the Trevi fountain (and nothing else, because we couldn’t walk anymore!). Also, a recommendation for who is planning to visit St. Peter: do not go there with short miniskirt and micro tops, they won’t let you in! Obviously we weren’t thinking that far!

me at trevi fountain, pretending not to have blister pain

Since the blister accident, the other half of Freedive Dahab (Lotta) is happily sipping red wine at every corner, thus forgetting the pain and discomfort. But I’m not worried, we cleverly bought some vodka at the duty free, and now I’m feeling much better, too!

lotta in st. peter, (when she was still sober!)

We landed in Nice on Sunday, and Julie (Guillaume girlfriend) picked us up and delivered us to a pretty hotel with a fantastic view on the bay.
The reason why we are here is that we are the nominated judges of Guillaume world record attempt in constant weight (-113 mt).

Lotta, being a B judge, is obviously the head judge, which means that she can finally boss me around as she pleases, and I have no right to answer anything else than “yes sir”.
We measured the rope straight away, since Guillaume was planning an official training dive the next day.

So yesterday morning, at 7 am our alarm started screaming, miss head jugde kicked me badly out of bed and ordered me to get her some breakfast (ok, I’m exaggerating a bit here, but I truly do feel treated like a slave).
Some more slaves came to take the rope, which was sleeping with us in our room, and carried it down to the pier (Lotta was nice enough to save me from doing this job, since my neck and back are being very dodgy these last few days)(yes, I know, it’s the age), where Francois (Gautier) was ready with the boat and the set up. Everybody else arrived and got ready, and at 10 Guillaume was ready for his dive.
All went well, except that the bottom camera didn’t record anything because it wasn’t turned on! Luckily it was only a training dive.
Since I’m a very discreet person and judge, details about the dive won’t be reported here.

As for the weather conditions, the atmospheric temp is quite high (30+) and quite humid. Sea is flat and friendly. Visibility is not very impressive though (10+), especially for me, since I ever only dive in the Red Sea. Surface temp is around 23C. What is shocking is how much colder it gets at depth! But I was being very cool about that, pretending I wasn’t really noticing the hibernating temperature drop below 20 mt.
Very surprisingly Lotta wasn’t as cool about it, despite her countless scary tales about dives in 4C Swedish waters.
Was she lying the whole time? Maybe she’s not even Swedish after all! Or she’s just getting old and wimpy.

I’ve decided to use these days to dig into the French culture and see if all these prejudices they teach us Italians in school about French people are true. They tell us they are barbarians.
For example, we are taught that they don’t use a table cloth when they eat (only when I started travelling I found out that Italians are the only population to ever use table cloths). Also, we know they don’t have the bidet (or the water pistol). What do the wash with after they’ve been to the toilet? And apparently when they go and buy bread they don’t use paper or plastic bags and they just carry it in their hands.
I want to know how much of it is true.

For example yesterday I found out that here they make cappuccino with coffee, milk, and chocolate!!! How shocking is that?
I will investigate more and keep you updated with more dodgy French habits.

TRIPLE DEPTH - BEHIND THE SCENES

2008-06-15T13:57:00.012+03:00

Ok, so this will be the last thing i'm writing about Triple Depth 2008, because we are all tired and we feel it's time to move on with our lives.

Lotta and I are going to be very busy during the next few weeks, with an Instructor Course starting tomorrow, and soon after we'll fly to Nice to be the judges for Guillame Nery WR attempt.

Hopefully the rest of July will be a quiet time so we'll have time to rest and sit home in our air con knitting and cooking :-)

But what I'd like to do here now, is to thank all the staff that worked in TD, and try hard to say something nice about each one of them :-)

The safety

Let's start with the lazy Spanish safety, Miguelito and Alex. They weren't lazy because of bad intention, but just because it's written in their spanish genes. This is why we love them anyways.

The only thing i blame Alex for is his bad smoking habit. He smokes way too much, even though he cut to half his original dose, and as punishment he's always being sent out of Aqua Marina restaurant every time he is seen with a fag in his hand. We are going to abuse him more badly during the Instructor Course, so hopefully he will stop completely.

As for Miguel, he is the antipode of punctuality, and this is why i was so surprised to see him arriving in time for his safety shifts. Maybe that's because he was scared of me, remembering those times when, as my student, he was continually screamed after, especially for showing up late in the mornings (every single one!), using as an excuse the fact that he had to cycle against the wind.

As for Patrick, his bigger fault is being French, but since there’s nothing he (or us) can do about that, we decided to accept him as he is. The good thing is that he’s becoming very funny when drunk, especially when mimicking me during the party.

Marco the Rasta is actually even lazier than the Spanish crew. And on top of that he’s so easily distracted by any female presence, to the point where he only wanted to do the safety for the female athletes, and one time I had to do the safety myself for Liv dive, since Patrick missed an equalization and couldn’t go down, and Marco was looking at bikinis swimming about, missing completely the whole thing. Despite this, and the fact that he admittedly doesn’t wash his hair with shampoo since 1998, everybody loves him, and I have to say I miss him very much, because he’s very funny and nice with everybody.

The official surface videograper, and much more

Dean, our Canadian rock climber instructor(the one on the right in the picture) got caught into the freediving business when he fell in love with beautiful Katya, few months ago. Now that it’s to hot to climb he always comes diving with us, and our favorite pastime is to challenge ourselves in races for the faster rope puller at the end of the dive sessions. He still didn’t beat me, but I know he has a pull up bar in his place, and he’s training hard. He’s been working so hard during the competition, and we thank him from the bottom of our hearts, because without him we would have been in deep trouble.

The land coordinator

Peter Ericson, who can be seen standing in Aqua Marina restaurant with a binocular trying to understand what’s going on inside the Pyramid, and informing the athletes when it’s their time for the official warm-up. He’s also the one in charge of being polite with the tourist police anytime they come over (about 10 times a day) and ask the list of the athletes and nationality (yes, it’s the same every day!). Luckily it doesn’t have to be me doing that, because I’m well known for my short fuse, especially when confronted with useless bureaucracy and inefficiency.

The judges

Obviously I’m not going to thank myself, also because I’ve been a bit useless (I got flu 2 days before the comp). I’d like to thank Katya, who was also uselessly sick, but she’s been there, sitting in the sun the whole day in spite of feeling so weak. And thank you Lotta, for taking charge of everything and not making me feel bad about being absent when there was so much to do.

Judge Lotta wearing her Judge uniform

Next one is Judge Katya in her charming hat

This is me being silly, in a shot of Richard.

The drivers

I’m thanking the drivers only out of diplomacy (which as many of you know, is one of my best qualities :-) Thing is that our bright Bedouin driver Mohamed, got married just few days before the comp, and the wife didn’t want to release him from the bridal bed. So the poor guy had to co-ordinate from home some less bright relatives of his, who were often late, or lost, or didn’t understand, and whatnot.

The Scientist

Dr Erika Schagatay has been sitting on the platform taking measurements of every athlete after their performance, to see how hypoxic they were at the end of their dive (for some of them you didn’t need an oxymeter to see that, believe me), and how long they took before getting back to normal levels (some of them will never go back to normal, I suspect). Hopefully all this research will give us more information and open new doors and shed some light on the mysteries of this beautiful hypoxic sport :-)

THE STATIC COMPETITION

2008-06-15T12:54:00.008+03:00

Hey, i almost forgot about the coolest static competition in the world!

It all happened at the Octopus hotel pool, where 9 worldclass athletes fought for the title of the "dahab' best breath-holder".

Since Natalia didn't compete, not surprisingly Lotta won the comp. She managed a 5.53 with basically no training, which is not so bad.

Here you see her, after her winning performance, together with Liv and George.

On 9 performances, judge Katya and i gave 8 white cards and 1 red.

Here we are, with Natalia being our safety surface camera, since she rescued us after our official camera's battery died :-)

Unfortunately coach George touched Liv before the 30sec window, disqualifying her 5.01 performance

2nd place went to Richard Wonka with 5.27

3rd place to Yuri Shmatko with 5.22

Ben Guyat almost got disqualified for showing the wrong finger (the middle finger!!) as an ok sign.

After the competition everybody went for breakfast, or so they said. I suspect they all went to the alcohol shop to get ready for the closing party :-)

TD - THE PARTY

2008-06-15T10:58:00.013+03:00

Yes, the party was 2 days ago, and i'm late with the updating, but we were all comatose yesterday, especially me, and i only woke up at 7pm...

I didn't do anything special to be so wasted, (or i should say that i don't remember having dome anything special...) It's just the advancing age, and i think last time i partied until late i was still in my teens...

Anyways, Dean had my camera, and was supposed to take pictures of the ceremony with medals and the rest, but he got severely confused by the events and didn’t take any. So, the only pics I have of the party are the drunken ones (which I think everybody agree being the most interesting ones anyways).

Here you find some:

Me and the winner Rob the King

Lotta dragging people on the dancefloor

Liv and George with the drunk camera crew

Lotta had a lot of fun. She also got electrocuted when she got out of the pool and stepped on some electric spot. Apparently she found it very funny, and kept stepping on it just to get extra buzzes. Last night Ben (Guyat) was imitating her over dinner and I almost died laughing!

Richard has been photographed dancing wildly with Lotta, and several people jumped in the pool several times. They tried to throw me in the pool, but without success.

Lots of people have been telling me funny things that I did or say, but since I don’t remember any of it, I won’t report it here, because what I really think is that they just made it up with the intention of putting some obscure shadows on my stainless reputation :-)

As you can see from this one together with my italian posse, i look fresh and in control!

This is safety Marco after he finally managed to kiss the russian girl that apparently every guy is dreaming of (the same one with the pink wetsuit). He definitely looks happy enough. Paoletta the girlfriend seems not to mind Marco running after every decent looking girl, probably because she knows that unlike all other italian men, Marco talks a lot and does nothing.

Richard and Patrick being very happy

This one is for Ben's mum, just to prove that he's still alive and doing well. Don't worry Mrs. Noble, we're taking good care of Ben, and hopefully after the instructor course he will lose a couple of pounds :-)

If anybody has some good pics, please send them to me :-)

TRIPLE DEPTH DAY 3- SECOND PART

2008-06-13T13:10:00.004+03:00

This is the Triple Depth headquarter, the Aqua Marina restaurant, where athletes meditate, stretch, get dressed and undressed, eat their egyptian breakfast (if Ibrahim remembers), fall in love (not very often), get tanned, feed the cats, and admire the cool snorkelers walking up and down with their fins on, stumbling on them, except the more advanced ones, who walk backwards, stumbling anyways, and all looking like a less evolved species of penguins.

National records of today were for:

-German Anna, who luckily made it to 40 without swallowing.

-Egyptian Ashod (35mt), who came up with a new goggle style. He did his whole dive with his goggles parked on his forehead. His excuse was that it was too dark with them on… (I really think he just didn’t want to admit that he completely forgot to put them on, like yesterday with his snorkel :-)

-Croatian Karla, who with a very original style (which has much to be improved) did a easy 47 mt dive and came up looking as pink as a rose (as we say in Italy).

-Croatian Slaven, who did a 43mt dive and new NR, broke few minutes after by Tomo who topped it with 2 meters.

These Croatians did so many NR these days they almost got boring. Jakov is the only entertaining one. Even if today he impressed all of us with a penalty-free performance! The judges were very happy to finally give him a white card!
Croatian Vedrana decided to turn half way down, and I do understand that she’s getting quite tired of setting national records just to lose them a hour later :-)

Poor Portuguese Mafalda has been sick ever since she arrived in Dahab, and finally today she felt a little bit better and tried a dive. She wasn’t as well as she thought, obviously, because she didn’t have a very easy exit. Had a samba, and dipped her mouth in the water before she could manage the SP.

Liv did a beautiful 40mt dive and came up happy and smiling. At this very moment she’s sitting here in the El Salam restaurant (second favourite restaurant of the TD athletes), having some dodgy conversation (too dodgy to report here) about Natalia Molchanova pee, which she’s supposed to bring back with her to UK and send it to the lab in Germany… yes, yes, that Liv, the polite and shy one! (I’m awfully shocked!)

American Rob of course did a very clean and very easy dive. On the other hand he announced 35 meters…the chicken. Obviously he was aiming to secure for himself the 1st place and win TD 2008.

Here's another beautiful pic from Nanna. It's of the laziest of the athletes, Ben Guyat. During the whole comp he showed up only for CWT. And he doesn't have any yalla yalla excuses (dodgy belly). I think that he spent too much time in Egypt, and got transmitted some egyptian genes into his DNA.

Italian Andrea (yes, the one that pretends to be Swiss) felt very lazy and announced 10 mt less than his own Swiss NR, but that was enough to secure him the 3rd place in the overall points.

As for Aussie Ben, I’d like to say to his mum not to worry, and that whatever happened with the safety divers is in the past, and that everybody loves him and that he’s still alive and happy and well fed :-)

Here's a pic of Natalia during her final preparation just before her final countdown. And yes, believe it or not, the one on the right is a woman wearing a PINK tailormade wetsuit, and if you could zoom in you would also see that she has a personalized mask with strass on the frame...Sorry, I'm not going to comment on that one.

TRIPLE DEPTH DAY 3

2008-06-12T16:20:00.010+03:00

It’s over!!
The pyramid is already on a truck and the Blue Hole looks exactly like any other day of the year!

Here’ the result list of today

1 Ingela Karlsson 14mt ok
2 Martin Wikstrom yellow card (early turn)
3 Sofus Kreutzmann 42mt ok
4 Mafalda Oliveira 23mt yellow card (dip mouth)
5 Richard Wonka 28mt ok
6 Jakov Kastelar 30mt ok (hamdulillah!)
7 Angela Ambrosi red card (SP)
8 Ashod Papazian 35mt ok (NR)
9 Robert King 35mt ok (chicken!)
10 Vedrana Vidovic yellow card (early turn)
11 Ben Noble 40mt ok
12 Anna Von Boetticher 40mt ok (NR)
13 Liv Philip 40mt ok
14 Andrea Zuccari 41mt ok
15 Slaven Cubric 45mt ok (NR)
16 Tomo Vrdoljak 45mt ok (NR)
17 Veljano Zanki no start (yalla yalla)
18 Karla Fabrio 47mt ok (NR)
19 Natalia Molchanova 60mt ok (WR)

As for the winners, ladies and gentlemen, i have the pleasure to announce the following:

As for the boys, the winners are:

1st place Robert King 176 points

2nd place Slaven Cubric 156 points

3rd place Sofus Kreutzmann, Andrea Zuccari, Tomo Vrdoljak, all with 145 points (which is awfully bad, because we don't have 3 bronze medals ready!!)

And the girls:

1st Karla Fabrio 165 points

2nd Liv Philip 151 points

3rd Natalia Molchanova 142 points

This one is of the warm up lines, with Natalia during her preparation.
Oh, by the way, i forgot to say she did another world record today! she dove 60 meters CNF, beating Natalia Avseenko record of 3 meters. It looked like a very easy dive (and very long), and again she made a big smile as she broke the surface, as to confirm that she was feeling very fresh.

Unfortunately my camera died the very moment Natalia came up from her dive, but hopefully somebody will send me some pic that i can upload...

This beautiful pic is of Sofus (shot by his sister) (she shot the picture, not her brother) (unfortunately), who promised to marry me and then he showed up with a girlfriend... bad guy, and i forgot to give him the red card! Sorry Ingela, but it's time you know who you're dealing with :-)

Sofus, Ingela and Martin were the first diving today, because they had a flight early in the afternoon, so they had a taxi waiting for them in Blue Hole, jumped in the water, did their dives and jumped in the car with their wetsuits still on (almost).

Ingela did a very impressive dive to 14mt, and she even managed to get the tag! There was a lot of tension during the 2 minutes before OT, but she was very focused, and she did it! Safety Miguelito impressed everybody, since he dove with her the whole way!!

(She's not very fond of CNF, so i guess she just decided to have some fun.)

Martin had his lanyard on his wrist, which appeared to be a bad choice, since it got tangled all around his arm, making the breast strokes almost impossible to perform. He wisely made the decision to turn (which surprised many!) and came up 10 meters too short but clean.

Sofus had the same set up for his lanyard, and it also got tangled during his descent, but he wisely started swimming only with his legs, having the time to fix the lanyard before the turn.

As for the rest of the daily report, i'm now running to the meeting, so i guess i'll find some time later...

TRIPLE DEPTH DAY 2

2008-06-11T14:56:00.002+03:00

CONSTANT WEIGHT

So, it’s 3pm and I just got back from Blue Hole.
Here you find the result list of today:

1 Ingela Karlsson 33mt ok
2 Jakov Kastelar 41mt yellow card
3 Georgina Miller 43mt ok
4 Rahel Zemoi 50mt red card
5 Tomo Vrdoljak 50mt ok
6 Olga Suryakova 50mt ok
7 Angela Ambrosi 50mt ok
8 Richard Wonka 51mt ok
9 Andrea Zuccari 52mt ok
10 Ben Noble 53mt ok
11 Vedrana Vidovic 55mt ok (NR)
12 Anna Von Boetticher 50mt yellow card (early turn)
13 Liv Philip 57mt ok
14 Martin Wikstrom 57mt ok
15 Yuri Shmatko 58mt ok
16 Karla Fabrio 61mt ok (NR)
17 Slaven Cubric 63mt ok
18 Sofus Kreutzmann 60mt yellow card (early turn)
19 Ashod Papazian red card
20 Ben Guyat 67 mt ok
21 Robert King 72mt ok
22 Veljano Zanki 80mt ok (NR)

Thinking of all the dives i’ve seen today, the first thought that comes to my head is: how difficult can be to do a duck dive?

On the platform poor Dean and Katya (and especially the surface camera) have been splashed and showered quite regularly every 8 minutes.
Twice I risked to be decapitated (or at least severely injured) by a monofin, but luckily I saw it coming and moved away, and the blade missed me of just few centimeters.

So, next year we’re planning to have a one day “duck diving course” before Triple Depth, which hopefully will benefit the athletes diving and especially will preserve our lives :-)

Today was again very windy so not many snorkelers were out there. The few that attempted an invasion were kept away by Vedrana, who took the charge of the surface patrol :-)

Natalia Molchanova wasn’t diving today; our spies reported that she’s resting for tomorrow big dive.

By the way, some people are wondering why Sara Campbell is not competing this year. She is in the UK now, taking care of some personal stuff. We hope things will be sorted soon, and that she’s back in the water soon :-)

Today, again, no black outs. Judge Lotta is becoming very restless; 2 days in the comp and she didn’t kiss anybody yet!!

Like yesterday we had only 2 LMC (Swedish Martin and Russian Yuri). Which is a shame, because is well known that sambas and black outs are all people want to see in a comp;-)
In any case, they did the SP in time and both got white cards.

Andrea (he’s Italian, but pretends to be Swiss) will get the medal for the quickest dive: 52mt in 1.09. I think he was showing off for his photographer, with the result that he was so quick that she missed him and didn’t take any picture of him :-)

Jakov will get a medal for the one that collects more penalties. Also today he did an early start, plus grabbing at the start, and grabbing at the end.
It’s funny to see how some people go to a competition ignoring completely the little rules that cost them red cards and minus points.
Rules are on the internet, so please, download them, read them, and ask questions to the judges when you don’t understand something!!
(some judges might not know the answer, but at least you tried:-)

6 national records were announced today, but only 3 were successful, and all of them are Croatian! You will think: how’s that possible?...one male, one female, and what else?
Like yesterday, Vedrana does a record dive, and short after Karla adds few meters on top of it. So Vedrana today had her record for a whole one and a half hour :-)
As for the guys, Veljano did an 80 meters dive, beating his own NR of 4 meters (if I remember correctly)

Rahel got confused and forgot to put her noseclip on. She realized when she was about to duck dive, and she managed not to touch the water and to put it on before the 30 seconds window, but then she turned very early. It was definitely not an ideal start to attempt a pb.

Anna as usual swallowed her mouthfill, missing the chance to add one meter on her German record. It’s still her record anyways, and she didn’t seem to be upset.

Ashod was trying a 65 meters and had problem equalizing. The funny thing is that he dove with his snorkel in his mouth, forgetting completely to leave it on the surface :-)

Judge Lotta was in the water wearing a pink cowboy hat on top of her metallic blue suit, not looking very fashionable at all. Hopefully some kind soul will send me a pic of that, so I can post it here.
I’m planning to wear my Chanel hat tomorrow, and I’m sure I’ll look much more posh than her :-)(apparently Italians have the fashionable cells in their DNA)
Katya (despite being Ukrainian) has very good taste, and was wearing a big black hat with charm and elegance.

Marco the Rasta safety diver (many of you will remember him in Sharm during the WC) is getting very easily distracted but the bikinis swimming around the competition area, sometimes forgetting it’s his turn to do the safety. Tomorrow we are going to have somebody patrolling the area and forbidding all the half decent looking girls to enter the water during the deep dives :-)

Tomorrow is CNF.
Stay tuned for the updates and the final results.

TRIPLE DEPTH DAY ONE

2008-06-10T17:06:00.003+03:00

FREE IMMERSION

This year Triple depth turned out to be a small and chilled competition, since we have only 25 athletes.
So we celebrated this by starting with the first official top at 10 am.
The staff got to the Blue Hole quite early anyways, since every time we think everything is under control and we relax too much, something bad always happens and we make it JUST in time for the first official top!
(Just like that time when Lotta and I were so early with the preparation the day before the comp, that we decided to go shopping at the second hand shop, and we spent 3 hours in there, ending up measuring the rope at midnight!)

Luckily the wind was quite strong, so that the billions snorkelers were too scared to paddle about and the situation around the competition area was more or less under control. The platform has been invaded only once by a scary looking woman with 2 inches of make up on her face, and poor Dean (the official videographer) was too polite (or too afraid?) to tell her where she should move her cellulite.

Judges this year are Lotta Ericson, Linda Paganelli (that’s me!) and Katya Smirnova. We are 3 because Katya and I are so sick that the two of us put together barely make one functioning person.

As many of you might know already, the Russian machine, also known as Natalia Molchanova, did a new world record today, with an 82mt dive. Dive time was 3.47 (she’s taking her time!), and she did a very lazy ascent during the last 15mt, since she let herself very slowly floating up to the surface. She did a happy and perfect surface protocol in 9 seconds, and judge Katya showed her the white card. Natalia had the WR in FIM since 2005, but Sara took it during last year Triple Depth with a 81mt dive. Now she finally got it back, and despite the Russian self control she looked happy enough.

Another remarkable news is that there were no black outs today :-)
The only one not being happy about this is judge Lotta, because she is well known in the freediving world to be the one that always likes to kiss the blacked out divers (especially the boys). Truth is that she must do it so well that they wake up so fast after the kiss :-)

Finnish Ingela had a LMC and didn’t finish the SP in time so she got a red card.
The only other LMC was of Swedish Martin, but he managed the SP in time, so he got a white card.
Another red card went to Croatian Veljano who was a bit confused with the SP and made a little mistake. Otherwise he did a nice 67 mt dive, ascending unassisted (at least in the last part, because I saw his dive from the surface).
Jacov was also DQ’d for the surface protocol. We noticed Jacov does everything way too fast: he started 5 seconds before OT, he announced a divetime of 2.30 and completed the dive in 1.30, and did the fastest SP I saw. So fast in fact, that he didn’t have the time to locate the judge.
Sweet Rahel got a yellow card for early turn and for starting 1 second before official top!

Everybody else was doing fine and made us all happy.
6 new national records were set.

German Anna did an easy 53mt dive beating her own national record. When she’ll stop swallowing (her mouthfill!) and she’ll work a bit on her technique, she’ll dive much deeper :-)
Another national record went to beautiful Croatian Karla, who dove to 57mt, and took Vedrana’s NR of 47mt, which the latter had the pleasure to hold just for around 1 hour (since she just dove shortly before Karla).
Egyptian Ashod did a 52mt new NR (well, he’s the only Egyptian freediver still living, no wonder he’s holding all the records!)
Ben Noble did an Australian record with a 52 mt dive, and Mario took the Portuguese record doing 45mt.
Ben managed to upset the lazy Spanish safety crew, so if I would be him I wouldn’t attempt a deep dive tomorrow…you never know.

Rob King from US did a beautiful 69 mt dive and came up with a big smile (he only does it because otherwise I hassle him for not looking happy enough!), and his tag “velcroed” to his neckweight. Since I’m a bit evil (and some people might think that BIT is not quite the right word) before he had the chance to do anything, I screamed “he doesn’t have the tag!!”, and you should have seen how quick his sweet smile got replaced by a horrific look :-)

Here's the results of today and the starting list for tomorrow (CWT)

FIM results

FEMALE
1st Natalia Molchanova 82
2nd Karla Fabrio 57
3rd Liv Philip 54
4th Anna Von Boetticher 53
5th Angela Ambrosi 50
6th Vedrana Vidovic 47
7th Georgina Miller 34
8th Ingela Karlsson 0

MALE
1st Rober King 69
2nd Martin Wikstrom 55
3rd Ashod Papazian 52
3rd Andrea Zuccari 52
5th ben Noble 51
6th Sofus Kreutzmann 50
6th Slaven Cubric 50
6th Tomo Vrdoljak 50
9th Mario Albunquerque 45
9th Richard Wonka 45
11th Veljano Zanki 0
11th Jakov Kastelar 0

And for tomorrow:

CWT Starting list (11th June)

1 Ingela Karlsson 33mt
2 Jakov Kastelar 41mt
3 Georgina Miller 43mt
4 Rahel Zemoi 50mt
5 Tomo Vrdoljak 50mt
6 Olga Suryakova 50mt
7 Angela Ambrosi 50mt
8 Richard Wonka 51mt
9 Andrea Zuccari 52mt
10 Ben Noble 53mt
11 Vedrana Vidovic 55mt
12 Anna Von Boetticher 56mt
13 Liv Philip 57mt
14 Martin Wikstrom 57mt
15 Yuri Shmatko 58mt
16 Karla Fabrio 61mt
17 Slaven Cubric 63mt
18 Sofus Kreutzmann 64mt
19 Ashod Papazian 65 mt
20 Ben Guyat 67 mt
21 Robert King 72mt
22 Veljano Zanki 80mt

Announcements and official things

2008-06-07T15:01:00.002+03:00

The official meeting will take place in Octopus Hotel at 6.00 pm on the 9th of june.

The announcements have to be made before 5.00 pm at Octopus Hotel reception. There will be the wooden box at the reception. You will find the papers for the announcements next to the box (hopefully :-)

Remember to bring your medical certificate and your passport with you. If you don't have them you cannot register!!!

The first official top on the 10th will be at 10.00 am (and the first official warm up at 9.15)

Be on time at the meeting or you'll get penalty points :-)

See you soon

TRIPLE DEPTH UPDATE-THE TRAINING

2008-06-04T18:12:00.008+03:00

TRIPLE DEPTH UPDATE-THE TRAINING

Most of the athletes are already here and training every day.

The Blue Hole is packed with pale Nordic freedivers, buoys, funky monofins, colorful wetsuits, and a big group of very confused Russian freedivers.

While all this happens at depth, on the surface the snorkeler's army coming daily from Sharm el Sheikh, formed mainly by brave and courageous Italians, who are fighting for their life, drowning in their life jackets, crashing in our buoys, stepping on the corals, screaming in their snorkels, kicking our heads with their sandals, walking on the shore with their fins on, showing the cellulite collected during a winter of lasagna and pizza, drifting away taken by the current, all this just in the hope of seeing some colorful fish, which they won't even see, because their masks are so totally fogged, and they don't have a clue how to clear them!

Anyways, careless of this dangerous environment, the freedivers keep training, sun tanning, eating Egyptian breakfast, and feeding the animals living at the Aqua Marina restaurant.

Today Rahel learnt how to do a mouthfill, el hamdullillah (thanks God), because she was being a big pain on everybody's butt with all her swallowing sad stories.
And Sofus learnt what the soft palate is, and everybody was making faces trying to move it, looking very stupid, and burping up their falafel.
On another table Anna was telling tales of equalizing with a noseclip, and how vital is not to swallow in your stomach, if you don't want to get these massive burps on the way up. By the way, i heard that if you burp in the judge face in the middle of the surface protocol you might get disqualified!!
Rob is the only one not causing any trouble, always being calm and nice, and too polite with everybody, especially with who doesn't deserve it!
For the moment nobody seemed to have touched the bottom of the Blue Hole on a single breath, except some of the snorkelers that perished during their incursions at our buoys.

During the afternoons everybody is getting very lazy, and have long naps. Not Natalia Molchanova, who is still in Blue Hole doing who knows what. We need to send some spies and investigate.

In the evenings the meeting point for dinner is of course the Funny Mummy restaurant, where everybody tries to have some healthy food, except Martin, who is eating like a pig, and has 3 apple crumbles with vanilla ice cream for dessert. He thinks all this ice creams is good for his equalizing problems, and he won't listen to anybody contradicting him.

Here's the list of the athletes:
Vedrana Vidovic -Croatia
Tomo Vrdoljak-Croatia
Jakov Kastelan-Croatia
Veljano Zanki-Croatia
Richard Wonka-Germany
Rob King-USA
Ben Noble-Australia
Sofus Kreutzmann-Denmark
Martin Wikstrom -Sweden
Karla Fabrio-Croatia
Slaven Cubric-Croatia
Anna Von Boetticher-Germany
Livvy Philips-UK
Georgina Miller-UK
Ben Guyat-UK
Ingela Karlsson-Finland
Natalia Molchanova-Russia
Ashod Papazian-Egypt
Rahel Zemoi-Eritrea
Mario Albuquerque-Portugal
Mafalda Oliviera-Portugal
Angela Ambrosi-Italy
Andrea Zuccari-Italy
Alma ? -Russia
Yuri Shmatko-Russia
Olga Suryakova-Russia

More updates during the next days...

Triple Depth - 2009

2008-03-29T07:09:00.005+02:00

TRIPLE DEPTH 2009

1st to 7th spetember

Maximum athletes 40
Maximum depth 90m
World record status. (There will be only one official surface camera and no bottom camera.)

SAFETY
We will use a counter ballast system as the main safety system, and there will be only one official line. There will be 3 warm-up ropes with official safety on the competition days. The warm up ropes will be 30m with bottom weights of 10kg. The competition rope will have an 18kg bottom weight.

The Doctor will be stationed on shore 30m away from the competition area. At the competition area there will be oxygen available. There will be a stand by vehicle for emergency transport to the Hyperbaric Medical Center in Dahab.

SCHEDULE

1-3/9 Official training: one dive session each day at Blue Hole. We provide transport, buoys and ropes and we do the set up. The athletes will have to help out safetying each other. We will have minimum 2 persons available for safety during these days.

3/9 Official registration For Triple Depth and Official registration and announcements for Freedive Dahab static competition

4/9 Freedive Dahab Static competition. (included in the total week price)
Official registration For Triple Depth and announcements for FIM

5/9 FIM competition
Event committee meeting

6/9 CWT competition
Event committee meeting

7/9 CNF competition
Event committee meeting
PRIZE CEREMONY and DINNER PARTY

!!!!!NEWS!!!!

TEAM COMPETITION
This year you can compete not only for yourself, but also as part of a team!
A team has to consist of 3 athletes of which at least 1 HAS to be a girl.

WE ARE CURRENTLY LOOKING FOR SPONSORS FOR PRIZES!
If we get any nice prizes or even money, this is how we will distribute them….
1st priority is the winning team! (3 people)
2nd priority will be the overall winners, men and women. (2 people)
3rd priority second best team. (3 people)
4th priority the second places in the overall comp, men and women. (2 people)
5th priority third best team. (3 people)
6th priority third place in the overall comp, men and women. (2 people)
7th priority winner of static competition. Men and women. (2 people)
8th priority World records
9th priority National records
10th priority The sexiest freediver

THE PRICE FOR THE TRIPLE DEPTH IS:
FULL WEEK: 165€
ONLY THE COMPETITION DAYS 7-9/9: 120€

!!!EXTRA!!!!
We can provide SLED DIVING during the 3 training days at Blue Hole.
If you already are joining the full week that price for a sled session is 20€
If you only participate during the competition days the price will be 40€

ACCOMMODATION
We can arrange hotel rooms or camp rooms close to Freedive Dahab where all the meetings will be and from where the transport to Blue Hole will leave.
Camp price 7€/night single room and 10€/night for a double room.
Hotel room from 18€/night single room and 26€/night double room, including breakfast and AC.

We can also arrange transfers from the Airport in Sharm, 30€ one way.

For more information contact us!
info@freedivedahab.com

TRIPLE DEPTH 2008

9-13/6

Blue Hole, Dahab, Egypt

INFO ABOUT THE COMPETITION

THE PYRAMID IS BACK!!!

We tried a new system last year, but nothing is as good as the “original” Freedive Dahab Pyramid!(after all we are in Egypt...the perfect location for a pyramid :-) So it is renovated and got its job back!

As always it will be the three depth disciplines; free immersion, constant weight, and constant weight no fins, in this order.

This year we will also offer a Static competition on the last day, for those who want it. This result will not be included in the TD result, but will be on the AIDA ranking list.

The competition takes place over a period of three days, 10-12/6 at the famous Blue Hole.

On the 13th there will be the Static competition and in the evening we'll have the dinner and closing ceremony at Rush restaurant and club. (they made us a marvellous buffet last year!)

Depth limit is 90m.

We will use a counter ballast system as the main safety system, and there will be only one official line. Bottom weight for FIM will be 18kg (counter ballast 60kg) and for CW and CNF it will be 10kg (30kg). There will be 3 warm-up ropes with official safety on the competition days. The ropes will be 30m with bottom weights of 10kg.

There will be only one official surface camera and no bottom camera.

The Doctor will be stationed on shore 30m away from the competition area. At the competition area there will be oxygen available. There will be a stand by vehicle for emergency transport to the Hyperbaric Medical Center in Dahab.

The official site where the athletes have to be minimum 45min before their official top is the Aqua Marina Restaurant in Blue Hole. This is also where the athletes will be dropped and picked up by our cars. This is a safe place to leave belongings while in the water and there is space enough for relaxing and changing.

TRAINING

This year the Triple Depth will be 4 days (including the Static), and there will be no official training.

But there will be the chance to train in Blue Hole with Freedive Dahab anywayJ.

We are offering 2 training weeks, 26-31/5 and 2-7/6. The price for a training week is 220euro. This includes 6 days of training at the Blue Hole with 2 dive sessions every day, the transport to and from BH, buoys, ropes and bottom weights and 7 nights accommodation in double room at the Freedive Dahab House or at the Octopus Hotel. (For single room add 35 euro/week). Every training day Lotta, Linda or Kate (the newest Instructor in the Freedive Dahab “family”) will be there to organize, and help with safety and coaching. We will bring out enough buoys and ropes so that there will be never more than 3 divers on each rope at the same time.

HOTEL AND ACCOMODATION

We will use Octopus Hotel as official hotel also this year. This is where the registration and the meetings will take place and also the Static competition. It is located in Mashraba area, on the main street, and it has nice rooms with A/C and a swimming pool. Breakfast is included.

The Freedive Dahab House is located right on the beach and there are three rooms for customers (two double and one triple). If you would like to stay there you need to book soon. Here you have your own kitchen so you can cook you own food.

The Octopus Hotel and the FD House are the official pick-up points during the training weeks and during the competition. If you stay somewhere else you need to get to one of this pick up points.

CONTACT

info@freedivedahab.com

REGISTRATION & COSTS

As last year there is only room for 40 athletes. To be guarantied a place you need to register and pay the competition fee by doing a bank transfer.

Send your registration to info@freedivedahab.com. You can transfer only the competiton fee or the total amount including training weeks and or/hotel. If you transfer only the comp fee you will have to pay the rest at the registration on the 9/6.

Below follows the price list with all the different options you can choose from and the bank details for the transfer.

TD Competition Fee 100€

Static Competition Fee 10€

Training Week 26-31/5 220€ including accommodation

170€ excluding accommodation

Training Week 2-7/6 220€ including accommodation

170€ excluding accommodation

Octopus Hotel Double room 20€/night

Octopus Hotel Single room 15€/night

Freedive Dahab double/triple 18€night 25€/night