Water firmly attached to the Gene pool - My Son Rody and Daughter Indy

On Thursday Bertrand, Sanne and I went in the water again. While Bertrand had seen plenty of water in the last weeks, it has been a while since Sanne and I put our heads below the water surface. To be exact, almost 3 months without any pool training.

After last weeks surprise of a decent dry static, I was pretty eager to go to the pool and experience some more freediving feelings like that. Arriving in the pool we set out our own private lane and I started with some neutral statics at 5 meter depth, the bottom of the pool. It felt pretty good to be under again and relax and look around at the scubbies and snorkelers.

Three deep statics later it was time to put some motion in it and I started walking across the bottom of the pool. Still fun to do and almost as relaxing as the statics. After that it was time for some dynamic without fins and wow, that felt really really bad. So bad in fact that after two tries my positive feeling was completely gone and I was thinking of going home again. I just don’t know, something felt really wrong after those dynamics. The breath hold crawls to test things out still felt the same as 3 months before, but this dynamic thing, I don’t know…

In fact two days later I’m still thinking what to do with it. Should I start training again, or will I just keep to some recreational outdoor freediving and that’s it. Lets see what next week will bring. Maybe I will only do some crawls for the rest of the year, or maybe just stick to some statics at the bottom. So yeah, got some motivational issues at the moment ;)

On another note, I’ve been pretty busy restoring the old posts on the Sharkbait website. Links to websites and other posts were wrong, pictures were missing, etc. I fixed everything from the beginning to January 2008 at the moment and my plan is to slowly fix the whole archive. Over the years we wrote already more then 250+ blog posts here and it’s sometimes very inspirational to look back and see what we did some years back. I’ll give an update when I’m completely done with the monk work

In the last few weeks Sanne and I have also been discussing about how to continue with Team Sharkbait and what to write about and slowly the ideas are getting clearer and clearer, so expect an update on that as well.

In the coming week we’re going to move  the Team Sharkbait website to our new Shark network server. While Shark Freediving was always about the world news about freediving, bringing news about records and competitions, this website was always about something else.

Team Sharkbait is about the personal freediving stories behind the people who are in Team Sharkbait. In the past we decided to break this up in a separate website, but  technology and social networking has evolved in such a way that it’s now possible to create communities that combine the best of everything.

With our new Shark network environment we will still bring the global freediving news through our frontpage but now the freedivers themselves can bring the personal stories as well. So the first personal stories we place at the Shark network is that of Team Sharkbait.

As it is a big move, you can expect a little downtime in the next week. We will keep both blogs in sync until January 1st. From then on everything will be up to date again directly from the shark network and the old sharkbait.shark-freediving.com domain.

Due to all the work that went into this work, the start of the free freediving lessons have also moved some days ahead. The first few lessons were ready, but instead of simply putting one big piece of text online, we want to present it properly to you, in a way that will benefit you most. We promise it will be something special! Just wait for a few more days. ;)

I deliberately used the ‘Read more’ for this article, so it doesn’t use up the website more than needed. I would really like to invite the people who read our content through RSS or mail to take a look at the website to see if they can find all information.

Goal
The goal with this re-design has more to do with structure and finding the right information, than the design itself. I’ve been trying to re-place all information in a way I think it’s easy for the readers to find their info. I used a nice clean template to achieve this.

Changes
Articles

I’ve picked up my articles about freediving (What is freediving, Philosophy, etc.), team, upcoming events, contact form, etc. and re-organized them under the fly-out menu bar at the top of the site.

Media

I also added the media to be fully integrated into the WordPress site, so now you can visit the picture gallery and the video-player directly from within the main page’s menu bar item » Media.

Sidebar

• The sidebar features the latest news about Sharkbait which I post through twitter, to keep you up to date whenever we’re on the road to go freediving or just finished a session and we would like to inform you about it.
• It also features the comments placed to different articles and the comments are easier to navigate to find the comment from a while back.
• The tag-cloud now actually is a cloud in 3D to spice up the way of searching for the tags used for different posts.
• I’ve setup a list of links to other websites/blogs we read and people we follow in the freediving world. If your link is missing and you would like for it to be in that list as well, feel free to contact us through the contact form topic “Site Related”.

Navigation

• The menu-bar is now a fly-out menu bar and holds more content organized under different labels
• At the bottom of the page you can now quickly skip through the older posts (yikes we already have 120 posts on 25 pages :S)

Avatar
If you would like an avatar to show up whenever you place a comment, please feel free to sign up at Gravatar‘s service with the e-mail address you use to place the comment here. Our website will check at the Gravatar-service if you have an avatar there linked to the used e-mail address and this way we can show it on our site.

Feedback
Please provide us feedback if you think it is an improvement, or if you are having trouble finding the information you want. You can either do this by commenting to this post or use the contact form. I’m aware that some areas do not fully show the desired information, but I’m working on that at the moment.

Also if you have any suggestions about what we could feature on our site i.e.: You could gather the useful information from this post and place it on a static page “How to use the website”.

2008-Summary
This year had it’s up and downs and showed me a new side of my way of the freediving.

I started out with the coupe des dauphins, I did solid performances on the dynamics (DYN & DNF), but had my troubles with the static. Overall it left me with a good feeling, new friends and tips & tricks.

After that I went into training with the monofin and getting into the technique of this new way of finning. My technique did improve, but isn’t by far what I want it to be. I put down the monofin for now, but will surely get into freediving with it again this year.

I switched my focus to preparing for my first ever depth competition at the Bizzy Blue Hole competition in Dahab (EGYPT), which was a really great experience.

Although I never improved my depth performances since the Umberto course I was very confident on improving my depth skills and performances. I’m very pleased with the results I booked and I can only say that I learned a whole lot about depth freediving and got to know new people and found new friends in them.

After my depth experience, I had subscribed to the CNF course with William Trubridge with the great guys from Apnea Team Amsterdam. William truely has a lot experience in this part of freediving. It has been very helpful and I gained a lot by attending his course.

The last part of the year really came down to my mental ability, or the lack of it, to find my true self in what my goal is with freediving. I realized that it’s best for me to take a step back from competition freediving. I am to find my true purpose in freediving again: having fun and enjoying the freediving again, no personal bests for a while and back to the basics.

2009 – This year
Last year I’ve changed  the back-end of the site and had to change the theme/template for the website to show all new widgets. In 2009 I hope to find some more time to fine tune the template integration again.

Futhermore I hope to enlighten you, the readers and visitors, with more blogging and in depth articles about our journey into freediving. This year for me personally will focus more on the coaching, re-finding my drive and I hope to direct & mount a few more freediving movies.

Statistics
Since we started blogging, we’ve written 114 posts (incl. this one) and had 95 comments. In 2008 we wrote 55 posts and had 40 comments.

Site Usage this year:

• 5,544 Visits
• 3,839 Absolute Unique Visitors
• 14,345 Pageviews
• 2.59 Average Pageviews

In comparison to last year we had a little decrease of visits, but an increase in absolute unique visitors, which indicates a wider range of readers. And the drop in visits is due to increase in RSS-feed subscribers, so these results have to be combined with the loyal readers who stay updated through the RSS feeds. We had an increase from 20 readers to 30 readers this year, which is good news.

Search Terms
Among the direct search terms, like Team Sharkbait, Sanne Buurma and Jorg Jansen, other search terms found their way to our site as well:

• monofin technique
• how to hold your breath longer
• pool cardio
• speedo breast stroke fins
• freediving tongelreep

Thanks
Thank you for reading the blog and our stories. Also a big extra thank you to the commentors, I really like the feedback and it lets me know people are around to read the content. So don’t be shy and drop a comment on what you think about all that we write.

As I really couldn’t find more time in the past few weeks, I decided to go with a nice clean lay-out which is able to show the different features and functionalities. This should make it better to read and easier to navigate.

If you find any errors just let me know through the contact form.

Ofcourse all of the sites are still located at their original locations, but now it’s integrated in the site it’s a little easier to find. Here’s an overview of the things I integrated and it’s original locations:

Picture Gallery Integrated
http://www.sharkbait.shark-freediving.com/media-pictures.html

Original Location
http://www.shark-eye.com/

Video Gallery Integrated
http://www.sharkbait.shark-freediving.com/media-video.html

Original Location
http://www.youtube.com/TeamSharkbait

Feeds into Sidebar

Other useful feeds I’ve integrated into the sidebar from the news-section, where stuff like; forum posts, youtube’s latest and Shark-freediving News have been columnized.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate and ask us here