This is a subject that has fascinated me ever since I began to have some understanding of the physiological similarities and differences we share with the diving mammals, particularly the Elephant seals. The latest information on their diving behaviour seems to suggest that they are capable of descents close to the depths achieved by the great diving whales.

The Elephant seal has 1 outstanding difference with us –a much higher proportion of myoglobin versus hemoglobin. We have a large proportion of hemoglobin and a comparatively small proportion of myoglobin. The Elephant seal has Continued…

Erika did pioneering work on spleen reaction in elite freedivers. She carried out ultra sound tests on nearly all the competitors in the international competition in Sharm in 2008. The spleen is a huge reserve of red corpuscles and her experiments demonstrated that after a series of 3 breath holds the spleen started to contract and release its reserve into the blood. This came to be called the “spleen advantage” and changed our understanding of the importance of warm ups before a maximum attempt.

In the 4 intervening years we began to ask the question if this reaction could be trained to react sooner. This was particularly important for CNF divers, who favour thinner suits in order not to incur the penalty of wearing any avoidable weight. Thinner suits and lighter weights have one problem – the athlete can get shivering cold if he has to spend time on a long warm up program and this can severely affect his performance. Today a lot of the top CNF divers and even CWT divers do no warm ups. Their first dive is the maximum dive, without any warm ups!

Erika was aware of this trend and even suggested that visualising the dive, by trained freedivers could instigate the reflex. It was great to hear what I believed possible was a belief shared by the authority on the subject.

In the next posts we will publish conversations from last week with Erika Schagatay, one of the worlds leading physiologists on Freediving.

It was a great pleasure to meet Erika again, the last time we met was at the International Freedive Competition in Sharem in 2008. We met her at the border and kidnapped her and took her to a restaurant where we had a long awaited chance to pick her brains. 🙂

The Sanskrit Sutra quote, and incidentally, the name I gave to my small freedivers boat , “Ishvara Pranidhana” , can be absurdly simplified to, “I surrender all that I am to YOU”, whether that be that your god, the universe, or the elements you perceive to hold that immensity. I feel the sea, the water, the air….

In many forms of Yoga, Ishvara-Pranidhana is considered the “final” step, stage, practice, observance or niyama.[2] … Compare the meditation and mindfulness exercises of Ishvara-Pranidhana with Zen. “Connecting to the Divine Within,” or attentiveness and surrender to the Divine within in Ishvara-Pranidhana, parallels the concept of connecting to the inner Buddha-Nature in Zen. Continued…

Walter Chivescu came out to join us on 28th Sept for 14 days training in FIM. I had met Walter nearly a year ago and was extremely impressed. Walter is the Master (Captain) of a very large tanker. Walter is a man of many facets, an old world Gentleman, an extremely educated man and an extremely nice one.

Walter had been to Eilat on 2 previous occasions for training with another instructor for periods of 10 days. He had not succeeded in mastering the Frenzel technique not withstanding intensive research on the internet and the ineffective efforts of his previous instructor who apparently couldn’t find a solution and actually Continued…

Dganit is an assistant instructor (scuba) in “Aquasport”. Normally from our experience freediving courses for scuba instructors are not necessarily a breeze, they tend to struggle with, surprisingly, correct finning technique and head down equalisation.

Dganit was a joy to teach! She is one of the 2% of very gifted people who can equalise easily with BTV. Her finning technique was basically good from the start and only needed a small amount of polishing. If every student was like this… Continued…

I had come across an article more than a year ago on Herbert Nitch’s experiences in diving with the skandalopetra, culminating with his 107 mt world record. So I was pre-warned about some of the main challenges. The first was the cold, only a speedo was permitted for this discipline, there were thermoclines to deal with, and sudden cooooold!

I learned that breathe up was done on the surface in either a sitting, kneeling or standing position. This was the easy part, then one bends forward and dives into the water. My anxiety, at first, was would my noseclip come off in the plunge through the surface. This didn’t happen, but in my first dive I dropped the stone on entry, luckly my handler (kolauzeris) detected this, stopped it’s descent so I grabbed it again and continued my descent.

When one reaches the preselected depth Continued…

 Before I begin this tale of our discovery of Skandalopetra and our understanding of the techniques required, just a brief word about our mentor Nikolas Trikilis, the Guru of Skandanopetra. Nikolas is one of those people who with great ease gets on with everybody, a person of considerable charm. If he was a politician it would stop there, but in his case it is far from stopping there, he is a person of enormous patience, an ability to emphatise that goes far beyond the definition of a great comunicator. He helped us before our arrival and had the patience to listen to and answer all my questions at even inappropriate times.

We learned exactly how hard a life this was for the Continued…

It was in 1992-3 that that I read Jacques Mayol’s book “Homo Delphinus”, it had just come out in French. In it was the story of a Greek Sponge diver called Haggi Statti (Hazzi Stathi), who had recovered the anchor of the Santa Margarita. The story is one of the great stories of freediving.

The Italian light Cruiser Santa Margarita (Regina Margherita) was paying a courtesy visit to Greece and managed to lose its anchor in the bay of Pigadia in the island of Karpathos. There were no available hard hat divers and the depth was extreme more than 70 mts. Eventually someone informed the Italians that there was a local sponge diver who regularly dived breath hold to those depths. At first they were skeptical, but Continued…