Diving's Next Big Thing
Posted By Paul Kotik on 23 October 2005
The Bodner system, though, is decidedly less mockable. Compact, sleek, lightweight, exuding efficiency and sophistication…..hmmm, rather like your typical freediver. Even at this very early stage of the system's development, a Bodner diver might look something like this:
Still looks a bit like a scuba diver - the bubbles are there, sure, but that thing on the diver's back is a fraction of the size and weight of an aluminum 80. The diver in the sketch is agile, and has a hydrodynamic profile considerably less draggy than that of a conventional scuba diver.
But getting back to this breathing underwater thing - is there any way this can be reconciled with a millenia-old tradition of apnea as the proper state for a human underwater ? Can apnea and freediving be decoupled ?
Perhaps so.
If we are candid with ourselves, we must confess that of all the ocean’s creatures, it is the ceteceans who have always excited our admiration and, if I may be brutally candid, our envy. We wish we were dolphins, and we’re becoming less and less bashful about it. Note the Borg-like conquest of freediving by the monofin over the past few years – resistance to fashion is, indeed, futile. Face it – we get in the water and we pretend to be dolphins. Adult human beings with titles like "Doctor" want to be less like Sir Isaac Newton ( more on him anon) and more like Flipper.
This is just about the dumbest question possible where fashions are concerned, but my title and seniority grant me a licence to drool, so I'll ask it anyway: why dolphins, of all the creatures that swim in the sea ?
Well, I suppose they're cute, but who wants to be cute? More to the point, dolphins have the big brains going for them, and I suppose we'd all love to be seen to be clever, but aren’t fish the real masters of the oceanic realm ? Sure, ceteceans are better freedivers than we are, but they still have to come up for air. In fact, advanced human freedivers routinely get to depths that dolphins don’t seem particularly interested in reaching. Mayol and Pellizari have both described the problems they ran into getting dolphins to dive with them down to the depths they’d set up for their photography. So whence the dolphin–envy ?
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