I got hooked on freediving in December 2012. I had high expectations for the Level 1 course in Koh Tao, Thailand. After all, my brothers and I had ditched the Full Moon Party to do something a little more our style with the last few days of our Thailand trip.
Blue Immersion freediving school is run by Akim. Basically, the coolest guy you will ever meet. He was absent on the first day of the course, but we caught snippets of info about him: former muay thai fighter, former secret service agent, 100m+ freediver, and to top it off, all-round nice guy.
Kanthin lead the course on the first day. We were guided through the physiology of freediving, in particular the mammalian dive reflex. When mammals hold their breath underwater, bunch things occur to increase survival. Things like slowing of the heart and vasoconstriction to use less oxygen, contraction of the spleen to fill the blood with more red blood cells and blood shifting to the midsection so vital organs aren't crushed by water pressure. There's also a really cool reflex called bronchospasm that closes the airways if you blackout underwater, you don't take water into your lungs.
After a bit of meditation and visualisation, we did two static breath-holds. Brendan got a ridiculous 3'15". Lachlan and I squeaked 1'15" and 1'45" minutes respectively, bottom of the class. Whatever.
Into the water for a underwater swim test with long fins on. The minimum requirement was 30m. Having done two laps of a 20-ish metre pool without fins back in Phuket, I was pretty confident. One of technique requirements is to look direct down at the rope on seafloor as you swim horizontally. With no idea of how far away the buoy waiting at the end was, the test was much harder than I expected.
Out in open water for the fun bits, buoys were setup with a rope hanging a weight at 20m, the maximum depth for the course. Free Immersion is a discipline in competitive diving where you pull down the rope head first to a certain distance, stop then turn around and come up. I was nervous. The head first thing was a bit scary and, again, not being able to see how far you had to go was too. After a couple of turns, the Holmes boys all managed to get all the way down. My slowest dive to 20m was a very comfortable 1'30" - more than my breath-hold. My dive reflex had well and truly kicked it.
We learnt to duckdive, something that feels incredibly natural to do. After doing a very solid duckdive and ending up at -4 metres within a few seconds and without equalising, I quickly learnt to pressurise my ears before leaving the surface. With this skill, we were set loose to snorkel back to the shore. The amount of freedom you're given with a bit of knowledge about your body's capacity for diving underwater is incredible. Also, learning to blow bubble rings is pretty awesome too. :)
The next day we met the elusive Akim. Just as cool as the hype made him out to be. Even better, he took our group for the open water session. I was so nervous again. The first time I pulled out at 5m for no reason. At the surface, Akim is asked what was wrong. I didn't have a good answer and he is like "well, don't stop next time."! Tough love was exactly what I needed. After tweaks to my technqiue like tucking my chin in, relaxing my arms and pulling harder at the bottom, I managed to do a bunch of dives to 20+m with a comment from Akim along the lines of "that was a perfect dive"!
Owing to my dense bones and absence of bodyfat (haha!), I was pretty negatively buoyant at the surface, even without a weight belt. When it came to practicing buddy rescues at a depth of 10m, it was a massive struggle for my buddy to hold my airways above the water. I got water up my nose, down my wind pipe. I wondered how it could have been more of an ordeal if I had actually blacked out. haha!
Back on the shore for the debrief, Akim and Kanthin commented on how fantastic we were and whether we could stay for the next level. Whether or not it was genuine or just appealing to our egos to book the next class, I was pretty happy to hear it from my man-crush.. I posted on facebook when I got home asking if Akim knew of people freediving in Melbourne to link up with. No reply. Heart broken.
Saturday, February 16, 2013 0 Comments