Diving's Next Big Thing
Posted By Paul Kotik on 23 October 2005
Alon Bodner’s deal is for people who want to dive without bringing along those beloved (read: cumbersome, heavy, damned) aluminum 80’s or any other sort of compressed gas supply. That’s where Bodner's made common cause with freediving, and with Lady Astor’s gracious reply (" No tanks, sir!") to Mr. Churchill’s whispered proposition. In all fairness to Sir Winston, he was drunk at the time.
But Bodner’s thing is not freediving , either, since its essential feature is something most freedivers see as a fundamentally bad idea: breathing while underwater. As a freediver, I've not personally tried breathing underwater, so I can't speak authoritatively to the issue. However, I've noticed over the years that of those friends and colleagues who gave it a try, none had anything to say about it - or about anything else, ever again.
And now, as the Monty Python crew used to say, for something completely different: Alon Bodner has come up with a way to let people do what fish do, to wit, breathe underwater by extracting the vital gasses dissolved in the water and delivering them to the circulatory system.
There's oxygen in water, you know. As a matter of fact, ocean water is, by volume, roughly 1.5% - 2.5% dissolved air, and of the air in solution, about 34% is oxygen. That’s right, 34%, not the 20% portion of the gaseous air that’s all around us. The reason for the difference has to do with magic numbers called Henry’s Constants, which we’ll get to in a minute when we examine the workings of Mr. Bodner’s invention.
But back to the more basic question , the deep philosophical dilemma. Which Deeper Blue editor is going to have to take responsibility for this kind of diving as it grows in popularity and eventually conquers the galaxy ? Is this scuba or freediving? Who’s going to have to work harder, me or Sara-Lise ?
The underwater breathing thing - I'd argue that from a scientific point of view this stands as evidence for a variant on the scuba theme. An improvement, to be sure – possibly a revolution of the highest order of magnitude - on the method of underwater exploration pioneered during the last century by Cousteau et al.
We freedivers, despite my repeated calls for comity and respect, do tend to look down on this ubiquitous breathing fetish among our scuba brethren. It’s not exactly a big secret that we make fun of all the clunky, awkward kit required to supply our friends with their underwater puff, and we don't make much effort to conceal our disdain for the great noisy racket it all makes in and out of the water.
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