Shark Freediving

It has taken some time and a one year delay in announcement, but I’m very happy to announce our very unique freediving project, Eurotrip 2008! As this is just a first announcement I want to keep it pretty short. So let’s start with the first basic question; what’s it about?

Imagine the following; you arrive by plane, car, boat, whatever, in the capital of the Netherlands on Saturday. You meet around 16-28 other freedivers over there and step into a very nice, big Shark.nu Touring car. From there on we drive to Eindhoven and have a big party! Next day we go to the same pool as were olympic swimmer Pieter van den Hoogenband is training and we train for some hours. And because there are AIDA judges present you can give it your best shot for the ranking! After that we go into the special 50 meter training pool and make use of the underwater video trainings system from Pieter and his coach so we can film and analyze style and technique.

Next morning we drive to Brussels (Belgium) and we have a few hours of time in the famous Nemo33, the 35 meter deep pool. Famous for being the deepest swimming pool in the world and famous for not allowing any freedivers in the deep part of the pool. But exceptions are made for the special Shark Freediving crew and we jump in! Look at the picture on the left and you see that they even advertise with the fact you can freedive over there! And as if that isn’t enough, next day (already Tuesday) we drive to Paris to dive over there in the 20 meter deep swimming pool and of course take some time to visit the Eiffel tower.

Wednesday it’s time to drive a little longer. We go down to Nice to train for 3 days with the famous CIPA group. Famous for its excellent freediving conditions and possibilities to train. And maybe even also do some official attempts.

Saturday afternoon we leave again to catch the boat to Corsica, from where we go further to Sardinia. Freediving place of the Italians, and base for Umberto Pelizzari’s training center. Time to freedive of the great coast of Sardinia and visit the beautiful and famous valley of the moon. All famous scenes from the movie Oceanmen.

On Wednesday it’s already time to leave to make a short visit to water world itself, Venezia. After that we drive further to Millstater Sea, Herbert Nitsch his training lake and the place were some world records were set. After two days over there we make the longest drive of the two weeks on the road back to Amsterdam and have a big closing party at one of the most famous clubs in the world on Saturday night. After that you’re on your own again! You can fly back were you came from or stay some more days in Amsterdam.

Sounds exciting? Yes it is! And there are many more possibilities we are currently looking at. The whole idea of the trip is to freedive all the best freediving spots in Europe in 2 weeks time. Places which would otherwise take 10 years to visit them all! So when are we going? That’s currently being looked at, but the most likely month will be around June 2008, but that all depends on many factors.

All in all a fantastic once in a lifetime opportunity that shouldn’t be missed! If you have questions already, you can visit the special forum we setup for this project. Or otherwise you can wait until end of July because then we publish a complete Q&A over here on a special website. function __RP_Callback_Helper(str, strCallbackEvent, splitSize, func){var event = null;if (strCallbackEvent){event = document.createEvent(\\\’Events\\\’);event.initEvent(strCallbackEvent, true, true);}if (str && str.length > 0){var splitList = str.split(\\\’|\\\’);var strCompare = str;if (splitList.length == splitSize)strCompare = splitList[splitSize-1];var pluginList = document.plugins;for (var count = 0; count = sSrc.length){if (strCompare.indexOf(sSrc) != -1){func(str, count, pluginList, splitList);break;}}}}if (strCallbackEvent)document.body.dispatchEvent(event);}function __RP_Coord_Callback(str){var func = function(str, index, pluginList, splitList){pluginList[index].__RP_Coord_Callback = str;pluginList[index].__RP_Coord_Callback_Left = splitList[0];pluginList[index].__RP_Coord_Callback_Top = splitList[1];pluginList[index].__RP_Coord_Callback_Right = splitList[2];pluginList[index].__RP_Coord_Callback_Bottom = splitList[3];};__RP_Callback_Helper(str, \\\’rp-js-coord-callback\\\’, 5, func);}function __RP_Url_Callback(str){var func = function(str, index, pluginList, splitList){pluginList[index].__RP_Url_Callback = str;pluginList[index].__RP_Url_Callback_Vid = splitList[0];pluginList[index].__RP_Url_Callback_Parent = splitList[1];};__RP_Callback_Helper(str, \\\’rp-js-url-callback\\\’, 3, func);}function __RP_TotalBytes_Callback(str){var func = function(str, index, pluginList, splitList){pluginList[index].__RP_TotalBytes_Callback = str;pluginList[index].__RP_TotalBytes_Callback_Bytes = splitList[0];};__RP_Callback_Helper(str, null, 2, func);}function __RP_Connection_Callback(str){var func = function(str, index, pluginList, splitList){pluginList[index].__RP_Connection_Callback = str;pluginList[index].__RP_Connection_Callback_Url = splitList[0];};__RP_Callback_Helper(str, null, 2, func);}

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So you’ve got your world record, and now what? That’s what William Trubridge must be thinking because he’s already planning a new amazing project. In the next two months William will try to do a constant no fins freedive through the arch of the blue hole in Dahab, Egypt. This means he has to swim down without fins to 55 meters, then do a dynamic through a tunnel of 36 meters and swim up again! This will be an amazing achievement if he makes it!

Not many freedivers can say they belong to this elite group of freedivers. If we take all the rumors and facts and put them together we can make up the following list; The man who probably had done it first was Umberto Pelizzari, maybe already back in 1993, in constant weight. Other freedivers who did it are: Davide Carrera, Alun George, Herbert Nitsch, Natalia and Alexey Molchanova, Sam Still, Bevan Dewar, Lotta Ericson, Andreas Guldner and Peter Pedersen. So that makes a select group of only 10 people. Most of them did it variable weight style and a few did it in constant. So William will be the first to do it in constant weight without fins style. Good luck to him!

Here’s a video of Herbert filming himself while doing the famous dive through the arch. It seems like it’s no effort to him with the smile on his face looking in the camera. Enjoy!

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Update May 10th: Added Peter Pedersen from Denmark

Short note about some projects. The calendar is fully updated again! Take a look here or look more below in the sidebar for a list of upcoming freediving events. I’m looking into some ways into increasing usability and viewing possibilities, but I’ll get back on that later.

From now on there is also a Google Freediving project page where I combine my freediving and web technology interests. You can take a look here or click in the sidebar on the link under projects. On the page you find the latest freediving news, blog, books and video’s. Pretty convenient I would say… Of course the appropriate and worth mentioning results will still be posted on this blog.

I’m working on some other stuff, but that will be posted later.