Carbon Based Life Forms Call Home
Posted By Paul Kotik on 21 July 2003
I prefer bifins. Always have, always will. We go back a long, long way, and while I've no objection to an occasional romp with my monofin, it just isn't me. Some of my very dearest friends are devoted monofinners. All perfectly fine, but it's just not what I do.
My earliest childhood 'flippers' were made of some sort of rubber, I think, and were open-heel. Elvis would have liked them, but he was too busy rising to stardom to have any time for me. Like Elvis , my rubber flippers were most notable for an extreme flexibility, an ability to be deformed into all kinds of amazing shapes.
Fast forward to the 1990's. By this time, the skin-diving of my misspent youth had been reborn as 'freediving', and several of the world's dive equipment manufacturers were in the market niche populated by the readers of this column and our less literary friends and colleagues. Everybody knew that freediving fins are supposed to have long, long blades, and most customers and manufacturers had figured out that the open-heel design isn't really the way to go. It all has something vaguely to do with power, or so we suppose. Freedivers need powerful fins, fins that make a lot of power.
Plastics had come a long way, too. Cheap, strong, easy to blow, mold, cut and shape.
By the year 2000, I was able to buy a pair of perfectly adequate longblade fins by a perfectly reputable manufacture at a K-Mart, and for less than $US 100.
Perfectly adequate. Black. Comfortable. Get you down, get you back up. Cheap, so one doesn't worry when they get a little scratched as one wriggles through crevices in the lava deep down in Hawai'ian waters (try that with a monofin, Bucko!).
It was impossible not to notice, though, that all of my top-end freediving buddies were on a different meal plan. They were going deeper, to be sure, and seemingly expending considerably less effort than I over the course of a 3- 4 hour session. Since I cannot make myself 20 years younger, and don't have Zeus's permission to actually train myself into good physical condition, I'm inclined to attribute 100% of my performance deficit to my equipment. I must need carbon fiber blades, I reasoned, just like the champions use.
I set out to study the properties of carbon fiber freediving blades.
The first property that made itself apparent was the price. Fellow divers and only friends, these things are not cheap. They cost a small integer multiple of their basic plastic counterparts. Ballpark is 2 -4 times as much.
So, the matter is reduced to a simple question: worth it, or not ?
- Bookmark with :
- what are these?
