Vertical Blue 2008 - It's Happening Beneath the Surface - Part 2
Posted By Peter Scott on 6 April 2008
For a wrap up of today's official results and tomorrow's schedule, please visit http://www.verticalblue.net/news/
Update for April 6th: William Winram turned early again on his last attempt before leaving the Blue Hole. He said he feels like he has the training and preparation to make the dive, but he is experiencing unnerving contractions, possibly pressure contractions on the descent, which mess up his equalizations. He attributes this phenomenon to the fact that he no longer lives in Hawaiin where he can dive all the time. Now living in Switzerland, his year round water time is greatly reduced.
Karol Meyer conquered some demons with a moving dive to 53m in CWT. Kerian Hibbs coached her to breathe during her recovery and she held on to make the dive successful. She had become very discouraged over the past few days, but as the visibility had improved to the point where the whole edge of the Blue Hole was visible from the platform, and some reassurances from her fellow competitors, Karol made a comeback.
Now we return to our regularly scheduled programming....
Kathryn McPhee: The Next Mandy-Rae Cruickshank?
Kathryn McPhee has been diving competitively for three years and suddenly she finds herself fast approaching world record depths in constant without fins. I spoke to her this afternoon, following her national records of 41 and 44 metres over the last two days and today's surface blackout on her 50 metre attempt.
"I told my friends that I would either become obsessed by freediving or decided not to do it at all," she says as we begin the interview. With a laugh, she indicates that a freediving obsession won the day. She skipped her intro course and went right into training. Now Kathryn is sponsored by Orca and aiming to mature into a world record threat faster than she expected.
Kathryn swam competitively up until her mid-teens but didn't do anything seriously athletic after that, she says. However, she has taken up competitive freediving with a single purpose that reminds me of Mandy-Rae Cruickshank in her early years.
Like Mandy-Rae, Kathryn talks about wanting to achieve one goal after another - a world record in CNF and a strong Kiwi team at the world championships - and seems irritated by missed dives. She admits her desire to achieve better results has lead to overtraining in the past. But she says she is learning to back off quite a bit.
At the 2007 Indoor World Championships in Maribor, Slovenia, Kathryn had a horrible competition. Kathryn says she was severely jet lagged but given her exhaustion from training too hard, she didn't really notice and suffered blackouts in the pool.
"Now I train with max attempts and then follow that with technique. I don't do as much as I used to do."
Kathryn hails from Wellington, New Zealand, where she works as an architect. Although her home town is surrounded by water, the deepest she can find for training is twenty metres. To dive deeper requires a five-hour drive to Lake Taupo, which has up to 90 metres of depth, but sharp thermoclines that she does not enjoy.
In the Blue Hole, she has shed her wetsuit and dives down straight as an arrow. As she says on her blog, she is now finding the descent much easier than the ascent. There are no thermoclines here, the sun is warm, and there is no bottom.
It took Mandy-Rae Cruickshank several years to turn her iron determination into world record-breaking results. Kathryn McPhee seems poised with a similar potential given the relish she has for achieving better results.
Megumi and Leo: Under the Sea
Today, Leo Muraoka came within six metres of setting a new national US record in Free Immersion. Tomorrow, he attempts 72 metres, narrowing the gap. Megumi Matsumoto, set a national Japanese record in free immersion yesterday, gliding up the rope so slowly that I began to wonder if I would need to abort and surface ahead of her.
Both Megumi and Leo dive with a poise that you rarely see among young divers. In their own words, they want to enjoy the process as much as possible. When I spoke to them at dinner this evening, I learned that the ocean has been a lifelong l ove affair and one that brought them together.
In 1980, at the age of twenty-three, Megumi brought her daughter to see an underwater performance at Japan's version of Sea World. She was so entranced by the underwater swimming, the actors playing mermaids, the open sea shell and kelp forest and watching everyone swim around like they belonged that she saw the manager backstage after the show and got herself a job as an underwater dancer and performer. She did this for ten years and her daughter later joined the show, as well.
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