Shark Freediving

Freediving is getting less and less popular. I know, you don’t think so, and I would like to see it the other way around as well. But the fact is that less and less people are searching the internet for freediving. You can take a look yourself at Google Trends and look for the word freediving.

So, what are the most popular freediving regions and cities with regards to freediving? Take a look at a not so surprising list.

So what can we do about it? Do we want to have a more popular sport? Or do we like being  that strange guy that holds his breath for fun?

Freediving is an extreme sport. Extreme sports never become main stream sports. Sometimes extreme sports become popular to watch, which brings sponsors. But let’s be honest, freediving competitions are only interesting for freedivers themselves. Even family and friends who come to watch are getting bored pretty quickly with all the waiting, oh yeah and some more waiting.

Then you have static, the most boring thing to watch. Dynamic, which could be interesting, is ruined for the public because there are 4 people (judge, safety, assistent judge, video) walking on the side of the pool blocking the view of the freediver doing his thing. Then you have the stupid waiting for 30 seconds before getting an applause, which no audience will understand. Let alone all the rules why a good performance can be disqualified from the ‘as big as the formula 1 rule book’ AIDA regulations.

Depth disciplines aren’t better. The best attempt to date to make it interesting was the world championships in Vancouver, Canada. They did had some live video streams on a big TV on the barge where everybody was diving from. Only problem was that the logistics to bring this audience on the barge was conflicting with the limited space for the freedivers themselves.

What do you think? Should freediving become more popular? And if so, how are we going to do it?

Your Editor Jorg Jansen

Hi everybody!

This time a little post about Shark Freediving and how it’s run. What started as a small hobby, is now a website being visited by hundreds of people everyday. I try to deliver articles about all the latest freediving competitions, record attempts, gossip, training, materials and in short everything related to freediving.

As you probably can understand this cost a lot of time and money to keep running. So to make sure it keeps running I’ve made this part of my new publishing company I’ve setup. My main work was always writing about management and IT, but I’ve decided to set some time aside in my company to run this website professionally.

So resources will be set aside for making sure you will receive all the latest news here by writing, visiting competitions and events, calling and interviewing freedivers. This all cost some money, together with the technical part of the website. So it is that after all these years I’ve decided to start with ads on my website. To be honest, I’m not really experienced with this kind of monetizing, but I give it a try. I also put a donate button at the top right on the site, you probably can guess what you can do with that?

I really appreciate all the comments and visits to this site and I’m honored about the feedback I get. Now it’s time to take a next step with Shark Freediving and I will need your help. So thanks in advance for whatever you can do to help!

All in all every financial help I get will be invested back into Shark Freediving. First visit I’m going to do is visiting Sandi Bitenc’s 24 hour dynamic world record attempt. On the planning, but depending how things are going, I will also attend the world championships to cover it for everybody. Taking photos, interviews, etc and making sure you get the news as real time as possible!

Thanks again!

Besides running this freediving website, I’m also part of another freediving related website: Team Sharkbait. Team Sharkbait is about our training group of freedivers and our own way of doing things. We started some years back and the last year was a little bit slow due to circumstances. But as you can read over there, we’ve picked things up pretty well in the last month or so.

We’re filling the websites almost daily with our stories, training routines, reviews of material and much more. Sanne is doing a crazy amount of work with his video equipment. He just posted the first video equipment for freedivers review and put online a very nice video about it.

Today we did some outdoor freediving and Sanne collected some very good material. So he promised to make a very nice video about today as well. Besides that I’m at 90% finishing our special free freediving course that will be published over there, so keep an eye on Team Sharkbait!

Djeeezzz… Just found a big error in my Wordpress script, which explains some of the strange emails I got from some of you. Some people were emailing me asking when the next update would take place. As I’ve quite extensively updated the website in the last two weeks for almost every day, I was wondering what was wrong. I took a look at my website and I saw all the latest articles, but that was when I was logged into the website! After doing a logout I saw that the latest item was already a week old! Strange stuff, but fixed for now. So enjoy a week worth of articles!

As this has already happened two times before it’s time to fix it. I’m going to upgrade the website to Wordpress 2.3 which will give a load of fixes and extra options, and maybe I finally find the time to but the new template online in the next week that I already have lying around here for some weeks.

I’ve got many many articles and items already lined up for the coming days and weeks, so you can expect almost daily updates on the site. Keep in mind for the next few days/week it’s possible that the website will have some short down time. Just try an hour later and it will probably be up and running again.

Just a short personal note for the readers. In the last 6 weeks I’ve been into a very hectic schedule; work, family and more work dictated my daily calendar. So, in moments like that Shark Freediving gets a little lower priority from me because it’s a free time investment. Family comes first place with me and after that my work that pays the bills.

Too be honest I must say that I did not expect such high visitor numbers on my site at all! It seems a lot of you are really daily visitors and looking for freediving news, articles and other stuff. So maybe it’s time to make it somewhat more professional and monetize this website by placing a few ads and affiliate links. This way I can do more work for this site and bring you much more. Too be honest, I only have time to do 20% of the stuff that I actually want to do for Shark Freediving, but there is simply no more free time left.

Let me know your thoughts and ideas!

Anyway, the busy time at work is over, so no more extra hours and everything, so expect more regular (daily?) updates again instead of the weekly update bursts I did in the last weeks. And if you have any news, tips and ideas, please let me know! Your comments give me the energy to continue, otherwise I wonder for who I am doing this for!

Just a small note to let you know that I’m back from my holiday and that you can expect daily updates again. I published some articles to appear on several dates during my vacation automatically but something went wrong with this normally working function. Anyway, I published the articles anyway, so you have some catching up to do. Few more articles lined up to still publish, so watch the site.