Pete's Turkish Dive Diary (Days 1-3)
Posted By Pete Wateman on 17 July 2000
DAY ONE -- Arrival (Monday 17/7/00)
And now a quick impression of Turkey in July...(writer sweats profusely, fans face, mops brow, gulps water, looks for shade etc..).
Yasemin sure picked a good month to spend underwater. It's 40 in the shade and 24 in the blue. Where would you rather be? As those who read my last email will already know, I am a guest of freediving body F.R.E.E. (Freediving Record and Education Entity) for two freediving record attempts by 21 year old Turkish freediver Yasemin Dalkilic. Yasemin, or "Yas" to her team and trainer Rudi Castineyra, have gathered in Bodrum, Turkey to attempt to set new Women's World Freediving Records in the following categories:
1. Variable constant ballast freedive, where the diver pulls themself down, then back up a vertical line without fins,
2. Limited Variable Ballast category freedive, where the diver rides a sled to the bottom of the rope, then pulls back up wearing fins.
3. Unlimited Variable Ballast category
These records would later turn out to change in more then one way.
I'm met at Bodrum airport after flying across the plains and stone
mountains of Western Turkey and taken to the Club Med style Iberotel, the staging ground for Yas' attempts. Signs (literally) of her presence are everywhere: the world may not know ore care much about freediving yet but Turkey sure does.
I'm introduced to various members of the support and safety crew. Yes, they are at pains to make me feel welcome. And yes, I'm cynically sure that F.R.E.E. want me to see and tell how well organised they are. Which brings me to another issue I've been wrestling with: the ever proliferating list of different records. Various freediving bodies, usually the creation of a few individuals (after all, the freediving world does have a very small population) keep drawing up and announcing new records. Where will it end?
Where should it end? I don't know, but time will tell. Some will be accepted as more legitimate than others. And this will happen very simply: some will always be challenged, others will simply be ignored.
So what's legitimate and what's not? Perhaps the South Africans could come up with a "constant sealskin freedive" category for sharky waters? By a process of reduction, the one true category would be how far a human could swim down and return from without so much as the aid of a swimsuit. This however, bears little relation to what most of us do in the real world, whether spearfishing or freediving. I'm comfortable that record categories
will sort themselves out in the next few years. Egoists, stuntmen/showmen and try-hards will find an embarrassingly short list of challengers to their claims. I think the current list will keep expanding for a while and then contract due to natural attrition.
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