Safety in Cyprus
Posted By Sam Kirby on 1 July 2003
Howard Jones' welcome speech in at the Sony Freediver Classic in Cyprus, once it had stopped being a tirade against lateness, had one major message. Regardless of who would end up "The One", priority Number One was safety - no argument. It needed to be - the first major international competition for a while where competitors did not have to think about preserving their score for their team's points, with a large number of entrants who had never competed before, a higher than usual percentage of problems were predicted - and those predictions proved correct.
Safety procedures followed the standard pattern of both freediving and technical scuba safety teams backed up by a couple of novel additions - the oddly named FHOF (Freediver Hook On and Forget) System and lanyards attaching each diver to the line in the Constant Weight competition.
Let's look at each of these in more detail and see how it went....
Lanyards
Lanyard, leash, bit of string - whatever you call it most people arrived in Cyprus inexperienced in their use (if they had one at all) and angry at being made to dive with it. Monofinners argued that they limit the amplitude of their fin stroke. Bi-finners get caught up in them. No-one had a clear idea of what made a lanyard good, bad or legal. It seemed that the only divers who really liked them were those, such as myself, who had trained with them in Nice where anyone attempting a performance dive is routinely attached to the line.
Questions buzzed around - which is better, straight or curly? Long or short?
Heavy or light carabiner? Stretchy or boring rope? Thick or thin? Belt or
wrist? A petition was discussed to have the rule requiring their use revoked
but never got printed. Eventually the judges gave some more information -
lanyards had to be a maximum 1m long (at full stretch if it was a curly or
elastic) and the carabiner had to open wide enough to easily clip on and off
the rope, which seemed sensible. Still no-one believed theirs was ok and
this meant the judges had to take a look at all 160, or thereabouts. The
definition remained unclear with the threat that if a diver arrived in the
competition zone with an unapproved lanyard they would have no extra time to
find an approved one. One lanyard was shown to three different judges, one
said it was ok, one said not, the other said she didn't know. There is
definitely room for a firmer definition next time they are required. As it
happened, on the competition day no one seemed remotely interested and no
checks were made.
Those proposing the petition against lanyards had various points to offer up. Firstly, of course, the lanyards were causing entanglement problems - with the line, with the freedivers arms and legs and with anything else in the vicinity. These problems seemed to clear up after the training days with no one reporting any real entanglement issues on a competition dive. Secondly, seeing as the definition of the lanyard from AIDA was so unclear, it seemed that some may offer a competitive advantage. A suggestion was made to keep an "approved" lanyard on each competition line so that every diver used the same one but as no-one could decide what the definitive lanyard was, this could not happen!
With the tide running later in the mornings, it was almost impossible not to dive with the lanyard at full stretch and this could be clearly seen to be slowing divers down. The resistance from the plaited rope caused quite a judder acting as a braking mechanism on the diver as soon as the lanyard came taut.
So why use a lanyard? The arguments are that it keeps you near the line and that should "anything happen" you are attached to the line and could therefore, in theory, be hauled up with it. In practise, an experienced freediver will stay close to the rope anyway. Anyone who has ever needed a bit of a helping hand to pull back up will not stray far from that white line that takes you home. With 45m horizontal viz you are hardly going to lose it! As for pulling someone up, it took several rugby player sized Monkeys to haul the ropes up as they were, with an inert body at the bottom this may well have proved impossible. Ultimately if the lines are weighted as heavily as they needed to be in Cyprus to combat the current, a lanyard in the case of an emergency would sure act almost solely as a body location device. On the other hand - no-one headbutted the barge, everyone came up within video shot and safety divers knew exactly where to look for you. There are arguments both ways and no doubt they will continue.
FHOF
It's got a stupid name and really it's not that much of an innovation, but
the Freediver Hook On and Forget system was one of the Cyprus competition's
big selling points.
More a change of use than a new invention, the FHOF is basically a standard delayed surface marker buoy with its own mini cylinder that can be hooked on to the freediver and cranked open sending them shooting to the surface. In tests to 30m, the FHOF comfortably lifted two inert bodies to the top slightly faster than they would have made it finning.
In Cyprus, all divers were fitted with a wrist band and D ring as they entered the competition zone. Should they have a problem in deep water, the safety scuba diver could hook on the bag and send them up. This had not been tested below 30m but the maths behind it said it would work. Jeanette Copeland, deepest safety diver and DeeperBlue.net Technical Diving Editor, took two down to 93m thinking one might not be enough to get Martin or Herbert back from that depth. The device had also never been tested with a lanyard on the "victim"- would the FHOF'd freediver float neatly up the line, or would entanglement result? Luckily we never found out as the FHOF was not required.
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