Team Sharkbait

This is a post by Jorg Jansen.

That was a good freediving session! Today we went for some outdoor freediving in Panheel. Weather wasn’t looking to promising when entering the water, but fortunately it stayed okay. The wind was pretty hard and there were even small waves in the lake!

Still, the visibility stayed pretty good and the first dives at 10 meter felt good. So we swam the long road again to the 23 meter buoy. Sanne was going to try to do some dives with his eyes closed and I planned to do a constant weight dive, competition style, to feel how my legs were holding up.

First dives went by pretty easy. Visibility at the bottom was even better then the last time! If the sun was shining you could lay down on a perfect beach down there. Instead we managed to do some bottom statics of around 10-15 seconds before coming up. Truly showing to each other that it’s time to go deeper again.

My last dive to the bottom was going to be an constant weight dive. Sanne counted from 2 minutes to official top and after +16 seconds I was down. Did a few kicks to around 8-10 meters and after that the freefall. I felt pretty perfect. No problems what so ever, but that was to be expected. At the bottom I did a shitty turn, totally not using swing momentum for turning. The way back up began!

First few kicks felt good, were it normally would start to fill with lactic acid, now it didn’t, probably due to the big freefall. But even after some more kicks, the legs stayed okay. They felt a little tired, but for sure not pumped up like the old days, where after a few meters of kicking they would be useless and I had to finish the swim by armstrokes alone.

After analyzing the dive it’s clear that equalizing isn’t the problem as is the o2. My problem is the low tolerance of Co2, but that’s probably the easiest part of getting used; just doing a lot freediving will change this big time already.

Next was FRC time, or in plain English diving with neutral lungs. You first breath in, and then you let yourself relax, including your lungs. So you exhale some air and your lungs are half full now and you dive down. Equalizing in this way is much more difficult, but it trains you big time! We both did 2 FRC dives. I got to 14 meters or something like that. Felt pretty good, without pushing.

We ended the dives with some no fins dives at the 10 meter buoy. Damn, it’s hard to have a good technique in this one. Duckdive was shit, first strokes and kicks were shit, everything felt like shit. But it was fun to do anyway! Practice makes perfect, so soon I will be trubridging my way down!

In total we stayed in the water for 90 minutes and it felt great again. Next on the agenda: making a buoy so we can start training with a lanyard and increase the depth 3 meters more until we feel comfortable doing statics at that depth as well.