http://www.deeperblue.net/article.php/833/22 | More articles like this can be found at http://www.deeperblue.net
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.
Leo, meanwhile, had moved from Japan to Maui in 1981 and took up spear fishing. In 1991, Jacques Mayol spoke at a conference about dolphins in Hawaii. Leo went to the reception and met Mayol, and more importantly, he met Megumi.
Now, Leo is a US citizen and lives in Kona, where he trains with Andy Norlander, Bill Graham, and Annabel Briseno. He runs a tour guiding operation with trips to Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea, introducing visitors to the volcanic features, the eight climate zones on the mountain, and the stars at night. Leo also showed me a beautiful hand-made monofin that he made from scratch, telling me that the design took him over ten years to refine. It is a thing of beauty made with more than just a desire for the ultimate fin. It is a piece of art.
Megumi started teaching freediving at her scuba shop in Japan. In 1999, a young college student by the name of Ryuzo came to visit Megumi and asked to be taught how to freedive. Now Megumi teaches about one hundred freediving students each year. And she and Leo has recently become Watsu (water massage) practitioners, combining underwater and body awareness disciplines into one program.
It seems that it is no accident that Ryuzo shares the same poise and mental control that was so evident in Megumi and Leo. William Trubridge told me he was impressed by how prepared and collected all the Japanese divers have been at Vertical Blue.
Tomorrow, both Megumi and Leo look to extend their depths, "to better ourselves," in their own quietly confident way.
Update: Both Leo and Megumi made their dives (unofficially). Leo hung on to a tricky recovery at the surface and had white cards for his 72 metre free immersion dive. Megumi tried a faster style and made her CWT dive to 54m blazingly fast.
Eric Fattah: The Man Who Wants To Sink The Whole Way Down
Yesterday, it was 58 metres; today, 62 metres. Not only is Eric is starting to amaze the other freedivers at the Blue Hole, he is also finally proving that his theories have been sound all along.
"I'm finally accepting that I can sink for so long and still make it back up."
Today, William Trubridge was the primary safety diver for Eric. William looked impressed when Eric finished his surface protocol after a deep hook breath and then swam back to shore as if he had done an easy recreational dive.
A lot of the things Eric has done in the last few years has become second nature to him, although they still tend to surprise those who hear of them: FRC diving, no suit diving in cold water, apnea mountain hiking, his exacting equalizing and mouth fill methods (and standards)- but I can tell he is very happy finally to bring them all together with these dives. Eric is someone who gets excited most by discovering new paradigms in training and diving. He'll try anything ten times to be sure and to extremes that would frighten most people away.
Just during his few days in the Bahamas, Eric has rid himself of most of his gear. He makes his dives with only my new Chen Bin monofin, a snorkel, a foam noodle to support him on the surface. It looks very weird to see him without the usual gear on. For sure the Blue Hole has given him an idea venue for trying out the minimalist approach.
I asked him how today's 62 metre dive compared to the previous dive and he replied that it felt no different at all. The only thing was that he was even more blood shifted so that he couldn't kick as quickly on the way up from the bottom.
There is also something a little incomprehensible about these dives that most people won't know. Eric has been working hard on Liquivision Products, Inc., the company he runs in Vancouver with his wife, Margaret Malewski. So hard that he and I have only been diving once or twice a month this winter. He has been working harder than he ever has before and has been sick for many weeks before arriving at the Blue Hole.
This is Eric Fattah at his baseline. And today he had a full mouth fill of air when he made his turn at the bottom.
Tomorrow, he takes a rest day, and then after that, we may see him try 67 metres in constant weight FRC. That depth has special meaning for him.
Back in September 2000, Eric dove to 67 metres in 2'20" and it was one of the most important dives of his career.
"It changed my relationship with the ocean," he remembers. "It was important in several ways. It was the deepest monofin dive to my knowledge at the time. I asked Claude Chapuis just before the dive what the deepest dive was. Both he and Pierre Frolla had done 65 metres that year with monofins, since several French divers were using them. Going deeper than 60 metres was something that you did with special equipment, like scleral lenses, not with a stock mask and snorkel, and never in competition. We also had poor conditions in Vancouver, compared to the clear Mediterranean Sea. Cold, dark and bad visibility. I wore a 6 mm top and 3mm pants. I hadn't trained for years and years like those divers had. It didn't make any sense."
Sitting on the rocks on the shoreline of his dive spot, Eric stared in the water and asked himself what it all meant. Only 14 metres away from the world record at the time, he realized that with a few changes it could be within reach.
Dean's Blue Hole has seen the deepest FRC dive to his knowledge and Eric is wondering what comes next.
Next article: In-depth interview with William Trubridge about his life aquatic; Natalia Avseenko - the Singing Mermaid; and Frank Pernett, who knows what his residual volume is, do you know yours?