Paul Vos (ATA team member) competes in Dahab/Sharm

Freedive Competition Sharm al Sheikh 20th to 22nd May 2010
A tale of the sword fish, lot’s of new friends and swirling barracudas around the Arch.

Oh, I nearly forgot: and collecting environmentally unsound little bits of Velcro from the end of ropes people seem to throw into the red sea.

Being part of the Apnea Academy competition team and signing myself up for an international free dive competition I guess I should be exited to compete, shouldn’t I?
“Well why then am I not looking forward to the competition” I was thinking as I boarded my flight to Egypt. This strange sport called free diving always surprises me. I still cannot predict my own feelings about any upcoming event or even a single dive accurately, let alone predict my performance until I’m actually in the water. I’ll come back to this later.

Off we went to Dahab on 14th May, arriving in time to drink way too strong Long Island Iced Teas in The Rush (The rush is pretty much the only half way decent tourist trap since they closed Tota the boat shaped bar 2 years ago), Saturday morning was rough, I was confronted by all my “brothers” apparently I had promised them all I would visit their restaurant when I was in Dahab back in November and now they were looking hurt. I would have though I’d be immune to this kind of Egyptian-ness after all the time spent in Egypt. And yes, Glenn is right, Dahab is becoming a bit of a free dive Benidorm too.
Having said that I actually don’t mind it that much. Maybe it’s because I live in Zandvoort which is a german benidorm.

Anyway, I had no worries, training for the competition was starting I two days so I took some time to try out my funky little HD underwater camera snorkelling near “the lighthouse” and ‘eel garden’ (see video impressions of Dahab). I planned to work on my personal objectives, which were:

1). Avoid getting squeezed!
2). Consolidate my of 49-50m PB CWT, this time around more control, no squeezes and no mouth fill swallowing, thank you very much.
3). Catch up with Sarah Campbell to do some funky Yoga.
4). Improve my streamlining and free fall, the Glide monofin gets very negative buoyant at +25meters and wants to over take me, I couldn’t seem to control my decent very well.
5). O yeah, wasn’t there a competition on too?

On squeezes:
Until now I was prone to getting minor squeezes on depth dives, once even at only at 24meters! Even though they never were serious it bugged me because I couldn’t predict or isolate what I was doing to cause it. At the back of my mind I was scared that I would not be able to prevent them which would mean for me that I really should stop depth free diving;-(
Taking Peter and Glenn’s advice I experimented with a few things:

I did shallower warm up dives at the beginning of the week and stayed down longer. Starting at 11 -15m with a dive time 1:00 - 1:30. Gradually increasing the depth until at the end of week in Egypt I did warm ups entirely comfortably at 20 to 25m (same dive time). This seems to work ...... (knock on wood) this time no squeezes at all! And dives are starting to get deeper again. Yee-haw!

I side with Peter and Glen; conditioning the lungs slowly (blood shift) is key to avoiding squeezes. Conclusion I haven’t found what makes me ill, but I have found the cure!
Problem solved, yipee!

On the Free Dive Dahab Competition:
There were to be 3 days of training followed by 3 days of competition in the blue hole. However due to Egyptian beaurocracy the diving school part of Free Dive Dahab has been shut down, and Linda and Lotta were not allowed to do a competition in the blue hole. The whole venue was moved by airco bus to Sharm al Sheikh where good old Apnea Academy would help host the event. Yeah!!

When I learned that you only do one dive the whole day I thought that entering a competition is a shame because I could have been training and snorkelling instead. But the company was good so whatever.

1st day, I announced a depth of 40m because I hadn’t gone that deep in training. In training I just couldn’t get focussed on performance and surface protocols, lack of focus, but why I have no idea.

The Sea was very rough and a few divers were sea sick. It was practically impossible to get into a good horizontal position to duck-dive correctly and my snorkel kept flooding [See video of yellow card]
Anyways, in the video you see me screw up the start of my dive by taking my snorkel out of my mouth before I release the rope, a yellow card! But I deserve a red card for the crappy duck dive after that. The dive itself went fantastic once I was away from the surface.
Somehow the free fall went great this time. I kept one hand stretched over my head and swam very slowly instead of freefalling to the bottom plate for stability; this made my descent much more stable and slightly faster too. I was disappointed to have reached the bottom plate so soon, my mouth fill went perfect for once and after a quick swim up through a school of blue fusiliers, I was feeling fresh ready for more. I had this feeling of “Is that all?”

I didn’t do the second day of competition because you spend nearly an entire day travelling and waiting for just one dive and I couldn’t be bothered.

3rd day of Competition the sea was as smooth as a dutch polder, everything came together, good duck dive, mono fin style less lousy than usual ( I must get back to basics to eradicate the bad mono fin technique) smooth decent, nothing was going to spoil my relaxation, nothing at all, not even my mask which started to flood on the way down at 30 meters, by the time I reached the bottom plate it was entirely flooded, so I scrabbled around with poor vision for the Velcro tag and made a mental note to experiment with diving without a mask, I felt so comfortable that I nearly cleared my leaking mask at 45m. It could have been the last stupid thing I’d ever do. so I swam for the surface which was kind of hard work and did a perfect surface protocol with more than enough air in the tank.

I was feeling a bit unfulfilled so I snorkelled a bit on the house reef when suddenly a massive sword fish passed very close by. It was breath taking, so beautiful probably close to 2 meters We tried to keep up with it but they can do over 100km per hour on sprints so that didn’t amount to much. I consider myself lucky, I have never seen them before.

There were a few National records, one diver worth noting is Yulia Maryevich from Latvia, She’s relatively new to the sport and now holds all Latvian depth record disciplines (FIM and CWT well over 50m), she has just become an Apnea Academy instructor the week before the comp. so she is very fit surviving that. Of course I am a great fan of hers because of the high fives I get for being the only Apnea Academy dude amongst the Aida’s and she gives me nice Japanese green tea. Linda told me to study her ass while mono finning because of her great style. Of course for educational purposes I’ll do pretty much anything, even ass studying.

Back to improving my dives, less (weight) is more:
Back in Dahab I still had a few days left before coming home, so I teamed up with Anne a Freedive instructor from UK so we could buddy each other in the blue hole.
We got there really early and were the only ones in the water, Anne borrowed Wendy Timmerman’s big buoy so down I went through a school of swirling barracudas, I swallowed my mouth fill but got down to 45meters. In the morning the blue hole is relatively dark but at 45 meters I could see a lot of light poring through the Arch diagonally below me.
This time around the way up was really hard too and I found out that I had misjudged the amount of lead used, I had 3kilos on me like I though I had last year but I checked and found out that I was neutrally buoyant at 7 meters!! No wonder my free-falls were going so smooth. I had been diving this way all week! I removed 1 kg and only used my 2kg neck weight, which really improves streamlining, everything went better after that.

Next dive I concentrated on NOT swallowing my mouth fill which I promptly did anyway so I rode my eardrums down to just past 50meters and wondered how much deeper I could go if I only would hold on to the mouth fill. While contemplating this I was looking at the Arch pretty much straight in front of me. I was bathed in the light that was poring through the greenish water, silhouetting 3 big groupers at the apex of the Arch. It was magical; I had to think of stained glass windows of a Cathedral. To bad I had to return to the surface.

Looking back I only seem to be interested in competitions because of the nice people you meet, Maybe it will change maybe not, I’ve only been freediving for 3 years now and so far I have been able to overcome the obstacles keeping me from progressing. I am really surprised at what I’m capable of,

if you are struggling with the same barriers as I am, good luck and I am open to hints.
In return I hope you can gain something from my experiences.

See you in the water,

Paul