Vertical Blue 2008 - The Blue Hole is Alive with the Sound of Music
Posted By Peter Scott on 9 April 2008
“I felt lost in time and space. At the end of a challenging dive, I look for something visual to bring me back into the real world of judges and surface protocols. I have to prepare to return to the world above me.”
This dive has special meaning for Natalia beyond the tag and the athletic challenge of going down and back up on one breath. The freediving students she teaches believe in her, she says. Getting to the Bahamas in the first place was a challenge. She couldn’t obtain visas in time and in order to make it work she had to change her flight to a more expensive ticket. Natalia’s students pitched in to cover the difference. They told her that if she has a dream, she should do her best to achieve it.
So this one is for all of them.
Natalia will decide tonight whether or not to go for 60m in constant weight without fins.
William Trubridge’s Life Aquatic (no red cap, sorry, Steve Zissou!)
William Trubridge is the organizer of Vertical Blue, one of the longest, if not the biggest, competitions in AIDA’s history. Yet, when he shows up at the Blue Hole in his truck every morning, he seems pleased to see everyone and looks relaxed, Bahamanian style. Relaxed enough to announce world record and 100m+ dives every few days.
William described his start in the world of freediving with a grin. “I was sort of a drifter and then I settled in Sardinia a few years ago. I learned Italian, it’s a mathematical language, and I took to it easily.”
Soon after that he met Umberto Pelizzari and was impressed by Apnea Academy, Pelizzari’s freediving training organization. Eventually, William was tapped to translate the Manual of Freediving into English.
Constant weight without fins is a special obsession for William. While he calls freediving “movement through liquid,” he waxes much more poetically on the topic of diving without fins.
“Diving without fins involves whole body; it’s a dance with the water, pure without any additions or artifice.”
He likes how diving without fins allows you to distribute the effort evenly over all four limbs. And when I watched him rise up from his 84m world record dive a few days ago, I could see that this is an art form for him.
Will says that his performances in free immersion, which he hesitates to call a pure discipline since he feels like he is “still connected to the surface,” have prepared him for equalizing at greater depths and are for the most part a warm-up for deeper no fins dives.
Yesterday, I was safety for his second world record of the competition, a free immersion dive 107m. As he pulled himself toward the surface, he flared his legs out and did a breaststroke kick a few times on the way up. “I treat myself to one of those every ten pulls or so,” he explained later.
The world record did indeed seem more like a training dive, but we could all see that William was pleased with the result, even if it took an official protest.
In the last few months, the most important change that William has made has been to taper off his dry training and focus mostly on making deep and consistent dives. “And then I eat a lot and sleep.” Apnea training is demanding and especially diving near to maximum effort requires a lot of recovery time.
I asked William if he had any advice for freedivers starting out in constant weight without fins. William teaches an introduction and advanced courses in the discipline. The starting point for most people is to get their buoyancy right, he says, since it is so vital not to fight too much buoyancy on the way down and too much negative buoyancy on the way up. It can be quite a fine-tuning process that can take some time and includes deciding what the right lung volume should be for a dive to a certain depth.
In his advanced course, one of the more high-end techniques that William teaches is a way of delaying or blocking contractions to heighten the dive response through a yoga-inspired lock or bandha. He found that doing this at the end of the dive vastly prolonged his dive time and when he released the lock he would run out of air much more quickly.
While he has made a detailed study of the no fins discipline, William trains hard, and seems designed for this mode of diving. He has hands and feet that seem to be more largely proportioned than the rest of his body. When he ascended from his record constant weight dive, I had to do strong dolphin kicks to keep up with him. When you see someone swim like that, you give up on the idea for good that diving without fins is a disadvantage.
When we talk about the future of Constant Weight without Fins, William doubts that there will be any significant equipment developments for the discipline even though he is working with Orca on a commercially available suit for freediving. Primarily, he is banking on the idea that as he matures, his hypoxic resistance will increase naturally over time, as will his ability to train at higher levels with less and less foundation.
He gets most excited about developing better technique. “Working on technique never ends,” he says.
Most of all, beyond the business of running a competition and establishing world record dives, William is obviously having fun. He has avoided all the health problems that plagued him in his record attempts in Egypt in the past year or two.
William’s bright future is in the Blue Hole. He is planning a freediving centre that would host athletes for training and competitions, research projects, and wants to sponsor initiatives to raise the profile of ocean conservation on Long Island. One unfortunate feature of this sport is seeing the human impact on our oceans. A great variety of plastic flotsam inundates the Blue Hole every few days or so. It was very bad during the spell of weather last week and as William and the other freedivers did an impromtu clean-up operation, some of the locals seemed somewhat surprised.
William would like to see more no-catch zone marine parks developed in the Bahamas and an attitude shift among the locals about sharks. He says that the fishery on the island may be more or less sustainable, but he’d like to bolster that trend.
It’s worth it because this part of the ocean has a treasure, a treasure that is connected to all the other corners of the ocean. Yesterday afternoon, after the activity in the hole had died down against, several of us stood and stared at it as the water calmed and the sun shone.
I’ll let the photo speak for itself: Joy, Eric, Kerian, and Dave Mullins, all in deep contemplation it the Hole's Blueness and Deanness.
Next update: The Long Game
- Bookmark with :
- what are these?
