Triple Depth news

TD 2011- Schedule

2011-06-20T08:01:00.000-07:00

Schedule

19th
Training at the Blue hole
Leaving from FDD at 9.00
Optional sled diving in the afternoon (by booking)

20th
Training at the Blue hole
Leaving from FDD at 9.00
Optional sled diving in the afternoon (by booking)

21st
Training at the Blue hole
Leaving from FDD at 9.00
Optional sled diving in the afternoon (by booking)
ANNOUNCEMENT for STATIC at FDD 14.30-16.30.
Start list on FREEDIVE INTERNATIONAL’s FB page
& outside FDD at 18.30

22nd
STATIC comp at Yasmina Hotel
First OT at 10.00
Static result list and protest time at Yasmina after the last OT.
ANNOUNCEMENT for FIM at FDD 8.00- 16.30
Competition Meeting at FDD 18.00 (with start lists)

23rd FIM comp
First OT at 9.00
ANNOUNCEMENT for CWT at FDD 8.00- 16.30
Competition Meeting at FDD 18.00 (with result and start lists)

24th CWT comp
First OT at 9.00
ANNOUNCEMENT for CNF at FDD 8.00- 16.30
Competition Meeting at FDD 18.00 (with result and start lists)

25th CNF comp
First OT at 9.00
Final results posted at FDD 16.30 (for Protests)
Closing Ceremony & dinner party at Rush 19.30
(don’t forget your ticket!)

TRIPLE DEPTH 2011

2011-03-21T02:38:00.000-07:00

ALL INFO ABOUT TRIPLE DEPTH 2011 TO BE FOUND HERE

THANK YOU AND WE HOPE TO SEE YOU THERE:)

TD pictures

2010-10-01T03:40:00.000-07:00

in the bus.
the staff (most of it. the rest were in the back sleeping or being dodgy)

the driver

the cheese and the snot (these two together are disgusting)

the 100 meters guy. you cant'say anything about his achievements in cwt and fim. but excuse me, somebody with feet that big shoulnd't be allowed to compete in cnf. those two things should considered as bifins.

dirty feet. i'd like to be able to say that i don't hang out with such dirty people. but i can't, since two of these feet belong to lotta. i don't know about the other pair; somebody might say it's mine, but of course they would be lying.

the almost winning team. the chicken, the deepest bear and the vodoo doll.

unfortunately the deepest bear had a bad dive the last day and he black out. we rescued him and lotta gave him a rescue breath (i meant a mouthfill) and cpr, but it was too late. erika shagatay was also there, and she said there was nothing more we could do to help him. rest in peace deepest bear!

the official zone A.
where the deep stuff was happening. in zone B nobody was diving deeper than 90. losers!

the funkiest safety diver we ever had in td. i had heard urban stories about her doing safety at 50 meters, which is as flattering as it is untrue. however, after we lost the deepest bear her self confidence is faltering.

the quiet before the storm. safety divers arjen and jeremy, and judge kostya looking out at sea and thinking they'd rather be in the german bakery having coffee and croissants instead.

vassilli having an orgasm. i don't know if john's presence behind him has anything to do with vassilli pleasure, and maybe this is a question that should stay unanswered...

vassilli surfacing from his cnf dive, with the firendly barracuda hanging out under the platform waiting to see some black out. it seems small in the pics, but it's a big evil looking thing, even though it must really like freedivers because he's hanging there the whole time.

daan rebirth. years ago he used to be a half decent freediver. then he turned into a fucking chicken for a couple of years. and now he's back to be a real man. he did a cnf dive to 55 meters and got a national record.
even though i would have skipped the lung squeeze if i were him.

monsters
we have found this freak on the highway on the way to sharm (a taxi driver ditched him in the desert because he looked too scary and especially because he would refuse to pay bakhshis). his name is sam, and he eats like a pig.

this other freak showed up uninvited.

and what were we supposed to do? you can't say "go away" because everybody will think that's just because he's so ugly. which of course it's the truth. so we had to take him too.
then, the rumor that we pick up freaks must have spreaded and they all started showing up. like this one.

however, this is nothing, wait until i post the pics of the party...

the next day there was a fourth waiting for us on a highway, and we just ran him over.

pics from jacques de vos

Check out our Calendar for info regarding the 2011 competition schedule!

Final Results

2010-09-30T04:38:00.000-07:00

CNF results

men final results

women final results

team results

Day 2, results and announcements

2010-09-28T09:38:00.001-07:00

Day 2: CWT result list:

Total points after day 2, individual and team:

CNF announcement list for day 3

Diary of a Safety Freediver

2010-09-27T23:31:00.000-07:00

9.24 am.
People start showing up and being annoying.
Everything is packed out in the porch ready to go in the bus.
On my way to the german bakery to get more food for the platform and hide it from Sam, who is always hungry.

10.26
We’re on the bus on the way to sharm, everybody was on time, nobody is missing.

We are more on time than we’ve ever been, and I’m thinking, gosh, that went so smooth to be Egypt, when the bus starts slowing down and stops in the middle of the desert.
The driver gets up, open the door and gets off the bus. And I’m thinking, oh, ok, that’s more like Egypt, and I feel somewhat relieved.
There is some problem with the engine and the oil temperature is too high, so we have to keep going very slow and cut the AC off.

(here while i'm giving instructions to the drivers as how to fuck off)

Ukranian Viktor is the only one being happy about that, since he had been complaining about the AC being too cold since he stepped in the bus. I think by the end of the trip he will had changed his mind, since his buddy Vassilli sitting next to him is visibly perspiring.

11.30
After an endless and sweaty trip we finally reach Sharm, while Lotta is on the microphone being our tour guide and mainly saying stupid stuff.

We get at Only One and there’s barely the time for sweaty hugs with my mafia friends, because we have to get in the water to prepare the platforms for the first official top.

Of course Marco is a lazy rasta, so instead of doing something is walking screening the female freedivers who got out of the bus to check which one has the sexiest bikini, and I’m thinking, how the fuck does he manage to pay rent at the end of the month?

12.50

We are on the platform screaming, where’s this, where’s that, who’s safety here, where are the tags, as Sebastian noted. He’s the first one to go on platform B and he’s exposed to this horrible chaos. I think he enjoys it because afterwards he can go bitching about that.
The current is massive, the ropes are all at an angle and I’m thinking, thank god I’m not competing; I don’t even want to do safety in this current.

12.58
2 minutes before official top and the stupid search and rescue boat is not here. And of course we can’t start a comp without the doctor. Since they have the tendency to be late (during the minicomp they arrive 30 seconds before the first dive) they were told that the comp would start at 12.30. But of course they are late anyways. We have to delay the first start in platform A of 1 minute. And I’m thinking, why on earth am I living in this stupid country?

13.35
Vassilli is doing his dive. I recently taught him the mouthfill and he was happy with his diving. He announced conservatively and took a few meters off his personal best. Which doesn’t help much, since he’s having a black out on the surface. Now, not that I have feelings, but generally speaking I feel more for those who have been my students, and even though I enjoy very much seeing black outs, I always hope they happen to either freedivers I don’t know or to those I don’t like, so I was a bit sad that it had happened to him.

13.29 and 59 seconds
Mr. Kim is one of my favorite freedivers in the world. We all love him, even though we don’t get half of what he says and he doesn’t get a fifth of what we say. Now, he came from Korea to be the first one setting Korean records, but since the aida rules haven’t been translated into Korean yet (hello aida people, what are you waiting for? We need rules in every language, including manadarine) he’s really trying hard to guess what’s good and what’s not. So since yesterday he started his static 1 second too late (getting a yellow card and missing the record), today he wants to make up by starting 1 second too early, which I think it’s very good thinking, but unfortunately the rules disagree with him.

15.27
Yuri is one of those freedivers who I rarely saw coming up clean from a dive. So of course I want to be around in case he’s having a black out. Which he has. Small, on the surface, while all the Russians around him screaming and coaching him into doing the protocol, which he almost manages. Except that he mumbles “I am blea..h..” instead than I’m ok. However, he drops repetitively his head which is a clear sign of post bo mechanical movements, which of course all the Russians are completely oblivious about and they are not too happy to see the red card. And I’m thinking, why doesn’t he just try to do a clean dive for once?

15.35
Rune happily announces a 70 meters dive in 2.30 not having a clue how long his dive time will be. And since he’s another one of my mouthfillers I really want him not to fuck up. I’m doing his safety and I’m going down after 1.30. I am at 20 and I still don’t see him. So I wait. And wait. And wait. And despite the 40 meters vis I do not see him. So I give the counterweight sign to the surface and swim up together with Arjen, who is safety 2.
As I get to the surface Marco is dropping the weights and the rope starts coming up. As the counterweight is barely 10 meters underwater we see Rune slowly coming up being completely clean and just being 50 seconds late on his dive. Gee, don’t I want to strangle him right now?
Of course now we have to pick up 40 kilos and we’ll be late for the next top, which is Annelie trying a FIM Swedish record. So we call a delay and hopefully it will be not too long.

In the confusion of the moment, Rune ends up getting a white card because everybody need to run and fix the fuck up and Marco just picks up a card and gives him to Rune, and it’s a white. Which of course is the wrong color, since he was pulled up for 10 meters in his FIM and he should have got a red instead.

However, the counterweight thing resolved just thanks to my huge strength (while Marco and Jacques are pretending to help) and we fix it very quickly and Annelie is only delayed of 1 minute.

15.46
Unlike Rune, Annelie goes down and comes up in time getting a well deserved white card. That was the last deep diving record that Lotta still had, but since Lotta has been senile for a while now, she doesn’t even remember that it was hers and she’s there all happy about the fact that Annelie broke somebody’s else record.

15.53
I’m on the surface watching Jon’s dive and I can see this won’t end up in a white card. The 2 safety pick him up very fast and handle him well on the surface while I’m trying to get his neckweight off. He takes a while to wake up and there is some confusion about his rescue breath and Lotta is on the platform screaming “Can somebody give him a mouthfill!?!?! Give him to me then!!!!” She is clearly drunk, and not only she is thinking that a blacked out guy needs a mouthfill to recover from a black out (and a rescue breath at 25 meters on the way down). And when Lotta is drunk she becomes very affectionate and she wants to kiss everybody. But she’s not fast enough because Jon wakes up just a second before getting a mouthfill from her.

16.08
Matt has announced 100 meters and has been down for 3 minutes already. Andrea just went down and I’m taking my last breath.
I meant to go to 30m but I meet him at just over 20. I’m on his side and he’s facing Andrea. Then he turns to me and smiles. He’s totally ok after a 4 minutes dive and he feels like smiling. We break the surface together and now he looks a bit confused and he’s taking some time before his protocol. It doesn’t look at all like a samba and I’m thinking it’s rather a bit of nitrogen narcosis.
Well done Matt, I’m always so glad when I don’t have to rescue freedivers who weight double than me!

Photos: Jacques De Vos

day 1 results and day 2 starting list

2010-09-27T09:23:00.001-07:00

Here the results of today's FIM

Total points so far (after day 1):

CWT STARTING LIST for day 2

TD 2010- Static Comp

2010-09-26T03:09:00.000-07:00

Static comp is done.
It was a while we didn’t have so many people for the TD static.

Here the results.

We had a couple of nice samba, and a rather big one. Unfortunately it was not in my official zone but in Lotta’s.
It was Anna’s; she was probably going for the uk record, which is Georgina’s I think. She almost got to 6minutes before she started dancing.
Here's coach Wendy supporting her.

However, the good thing about having been on the other lane is that from our vantage point, Hanli (my co-judge) and I had this spectacular view of this dude sucking on what it seemed to be an egg. For over one hour. Turns out it wasn’t an egg but a hard candy thing. However, the view was so disgusting that both Hanli and I couldn’t take our eyes off him. You know when you see something so gross that you have to keep watching, even if it makes you wanting to puke?

Other things worth mentioning (not many): Chris was the hungriest coach ever. He went on chewing on his pancake during the whole performance of poor Viktor.

Our shop bitch Cathy (Jeremoy poor wife) did a very nice performance, and she was first of the women and third overall during her first ever competition. She had a very cute samba and for a few seconds she looked completely confused as to what she was doing there, and probably also as to why she had married Jeremoy.
But soon after she got back to her senses, she found the answer to the first question (never to the second).
Here you can see them after her performance, while he is reminding her the reason why she maried him.

George and Daan are very much into cheese, and of course this is reflecting very negatively on their Freediving. After having spent few snotty days in blue hole sprinkling mucus all over our buoys, today they both came up from their breath hold very early. I think they couldn’t face the idea of staying more than 3 minutes without sticking their tongues into each other mouths.

Here’s some cheese to prove it.

And more cheese.

However, yesterday they had a massive fight.
Daan caught Georgina sunbathing topless in blue hole.
Here’s Georgina nipple as proof.

Daan got very upset. Here’s how he looked for the rest of the day.

Georgina, being a true blond, was very puzzled as to why he was angry.

But obviously they had made peace overnight.

Betrand claims he got a shot of me while I was smiling. It is clearly photoshopped, because everybody knows I never smile. Bertrand, I’ll give you a red card tomorrow for lying about me.

Tonight meeting at 6.30.
As usual, the athletes will ask the most ridiculous questions.
Like, “how many attempts do I have every day?” or “why do I have to pay to participate in the comp?” and “why do I get disqualified if I black out?” and the such.
Luckily Lotta loves answering stupid questions, so I can be in a corner making faces.

Here the starting list for tomorrow.

TD 2010, Training Days

2010-09-22T08:37:00.000-07:00

I have no idea what is going on around the athletes and the competition.
I’ve been in blue hole a lot, but with a bunch of useless students, and had no time to dig for gossip among the real freedivers. Luckily out of 8 4star students, 5 have fallen like dead flies, so we had a break. I thought I had the time to go hanging out with the real people. But then I took pity on a couple of wannabe moutfillers, and since they were willing to pay a decent amount of money I promise to take them on a 1 day mouthfill workshop.
The idea was to infiltrate in the training situation and see who does what. I was hoping I’d see a black out, because my boring students never give me the satisfaction. Well, except Greg the other day, when he gave us a little samba, which was the only highlight of an otherwise very boring day. However, the mouthfilling went very well, but the two of them, Clemens and Vassilli were being very demanding, so I had no time to look around.

Today it was raining. We were diving, and it was CLOUDY AND RAINING! I know that some people living in sad countries dive every week end in cloudy and rainy places. But hey, in 8 years I’ve been here, this was a first. It was amazing, especially considering it is summer.

Today all the Swedes and the Danes (the people living in Denmark, not the dogs) who are staying in Sharm came to Dahab for the registration and of course to dive in blue hole. Obviously they were all on top of each other, and they were all looking pale, balding (the guys) and blond (the girls). How original.
Except Sebastian. He always needs to do things differently, so he doesn’t look bald, he doesn’t look blond either, he doesn’t look pale, he didn’t dive, and he was smiling. He even hugged me; which was quite shocking. And I’m not easily shocked. I think he never hugged more than 3 people in his whole life.

Instead of training for her world record, Swedish Annelie is playing around with her camera.
I think Annelie believes in the blond theory, which was postulated at a late hour during one of the Triple Depth parties (I think Erika Shagatay is doing some study on this); according to this theory, blond freedivers, especially if females, are much better freedivers than brunettes and gingers. The reason behind this is that little brains burn little oxygen, and therefore more blood is available for the blood shift and more oxygen is available for the organs which really need it.
Now, I don’t know if this is true or not, but I know a couple of brunette freedivers who could totally discredit this theory.
As for gingers, now that I think of it, I don’t know a single ginger freediver! There must be some scientific explanation behind this. I hope Erika will consider doing some research on it.

There was a potentially broken eardrum today. South African Trevor had to stop his descent at 79 meters because somebody shot him in the ear, or at least this is his side of the story. I think it was rather that his eardrum committed suicide.
However, hopefully it will be just a nasty middle ear barotrauma and he will be able to dive again in a couple of days. Shame though, because I know he was doing very well and he looked very happy all the time.

Polish Matt has been touching the bottom of the blue hole several times already, so I’m guessing he is definitely one of those who will win blog immunity and maybe a tan-through bikini.

You can tell Matt is a deep diver by the look on his face.

Here Samo, the only slovenian with an afro.

Seems like the Serbs are doing well. especially now that they started doing safety for each other.
Gordon, who is half Serb but he’d rather dive with the Spanish (maybe the reason behind this is that the Spanish girl who shares the buoy with him is always diving in her bikini?) thought it was much more fun to dive with only one functioning leg and one functioning arm, so he decided to crash with his bike and limp for the rest of the month. I think he’s sad because he’s not getting enough female attention. In fact last year he spent most of his training days with his face in between girly legs (I’m not going to mention names; if you want to know you have to ask Ingela, who even has pictures to prove it).

Oh, and I almost forgot the little gem of the day. Dutch Bertrand was about to do a variable weight dive using a heavy bottom weight to descend. Now, the weight was only 6 kilos, so I told him to do few kicks at the beginning before he could start falling. And so he does: duck dive, 3 kicks and then he stops. And then he starts floating back. But of course he’s not noticing that, and he’s there with his eyes closed thinking, wow, this is so cool and easy! Until he popped back to the surface, first with the tip of his fins, then his ass pooped out, then he rolled over, and only then he realized that he wasn’t freefalling toward the abyss.
That was precious dear Bertrand, thank you.
Luckily you have sense of humor and you laughed. I would have shot myself in the head out of shame.

Finally in the afternoon everybody fucked off and went bothering poor Lotta who was sitting in the shop for the registration. Luckily my retarded people were being so useless in the water that it took forever to finish the diving, so we got back late enough to miss almost all the people.

And of course, regardless all the friendly (and unfriendly) advise of bringing all the right paperwork, how many people do you think got it wrong and came with half of what they needed for the registration?
Many, of course. And not all of them were blond.

Tomorrow the official training is starting.
We’re only having 4 buoys out since the rest are doing their own thing, thank god.
We’ll put a floating rope across the hole for our buoys. You are most welcome NOT to attach your buoy to it, and if you really have to, please do NOT make a bloody knot unless you want to be screamed at. It drives me insane when at the end of the day I have to go undoing the knots that other people do to my ropes and don’t even bother doing it themselves when they leave. Like I don’t have anything better to do with my life.

Oh gosh, how can I forget the important news?? I have a new pet.
I told Husband that if he ever felt like buying me a present he should go for either a diamond, a house with the swimming pool, or a sport car.
But like all men, Husband is not very good at listening, so one day he got home with a pet instead.
Its name is Jacques, it’s not very furry and it doesn’t like bones.
But it’s good at tricks, like photography for example. Plus it can speak, and therefore I’ll refer to it as he instead, since I like pets more than I like people.

Initially Jacques offered to be my slave, which flattered me very much. Being south African he doesn’t know that in the rest of the world slavery is frowned upon; so despite not having anything against slavery myself I had to decline because I’m very sensitive to the public opinion and I’m always very careful not to offend people and their beliefs.
So we decided that he was going to remain my pet. Occasionally though, when nobody watches, he does some slavery work, like rinsing my equipment, carrying stuff, running errands, making coffee and other lightweight slavery work.
But normally all he does is to play with Lua, sniff the customers in the shop and do all the cute things that make people happy so that they end up buying a fdd t-shirt or a lanyard. He lives next to the shop (in the almost not illegal anymore Freediving center) so that he can guard the place. But please nobody tells this to Mr. Kim!
How to blame Mr. Kim: Jacques is so totally cute that everybody wants him. Lotta is desperately trying to get him for herself. And I can foresee all the slutty female athletes will try to attract his attention.
You are all warned. He is mine!

Here above Mr. Kim with Sam, his biggest fan.

Pictures: the ugly ones are mine, while the cool ones are from Jacques.

TD Registration Info

2010-09-20T05:30:00.000-07:00

Hi all.
REGISTRATION will be on the 22/9 between 13.30 and 17.30 at Freedive Dahab shop!

BRING:
-ORIGINAL medical statement form a doctor (original means original and not a photocopy!)
-Your passport AND a copy of your passport (of course half of you will forget that as usual, which means you'll have to walk back to your hotel and come back again. And no, it's not possible to bring it the following day instead)
-Final payments (same as above!)

You will get all additional information you need for the competition at the registration!

Athletes that are arriving late can register on the 25/9 between 13.30 and17.30 at FDD shop.

There will also be the opportunity for athletes who are staying in Sharm to register at ONLY ONE Apnea Center in Club Sharm Hotel. On the 22/9 and on the 25/9 between 13.30 and 16.00. You can call Paola at this number: 016 6951192 (or, if you call from abroad or from a foreign mobile phone: +0216 6951192.

If you have any question please contact us on info@freedivedahab.com

TD program

2010-09-12T01:34:00.000-07:00

Hi all.
Not much time left until Triple Depth begins! (22-29/9)
Here are some updates.

We have about 30 athletes… But this year there is no limit on how many can participate... so it is still not too late to enter!
AND DON’T FORGET! There is NO DEPTH LIMIT this year! If anyone feels like going for a WR it will be possible!

Weather conditions are still superb and will not change much in the coming 2-3 weeks: 28 degrees in the water, at least 25m visibility, around 35 degrees in the air and constant sunshine.

BEST Men and Women will win 100€ each! (Sponsored by www.deeperperformance.com).
More information about prizes soon.
DON’T FORGET TO TEAM UP FOR THE TEAM COMPETITION!!! Three athletes in each team and at least one must be a woman! The team must be registered latest at the first announcement for FIM (on the 26th) with a team name and the team member’s names.

To register pay the fee and send an email to info@freedivedahab.com. Price for the whole event is only 205€! Price for only the 3 competition days in Sharm is 130€.
Below you find a short schedule. A more detailed schedule will come soon.

TD2010:

22/9: Registration and opening meeting in the afternoon/evening in Dahab.
23-25/9: Training sessions in Blue Hole in Dahab
26/9: FDD Static competition in Dahab.
Announcement for FIM in Dahab.
Event meeting with start lists for FIM in Dahab.
27/9: FIM competition day in Sharm el Sheikh. AC bus to and from Sharm. about 1 hour each way.
Announcements for CWT in Sharm.
Event meeting with results protests and start list for CWT in Dahab
28/9: CWT competition day in Sharm el Sheikh. AC bus to and from Sharm about 1 hour each way.
Announcements for CNF in Sharm.
Event meeting with results, protest and start list for CNF in Dahab.
29/9: CNF competition day in Sharm el Sheikh. AC bus to and from Sharm, about 1 hour each way.
Event meeting with results and protests in Dahab.
Closing ceremony and dinner party in Dahab (at RUSH as usual!!)

All photos from Jacques de Vos, photographer with lots of talent and sexy calves, and Linda's new pet.
Jacques will be around the whole comp to take pictures; if you want some UW pictures of yourself let us know! (and no, it's not going to be for free!)

TRIPLE DEPTH 2010 INFO

2010-07-10T05:37:00.000-07:00

For the 6th time in 6 years we are organizing

Triple Depth Freediving Challenge

22nd-29th september 2010

For the first time with no depth limit!!!!!

Who will be the best male and female freediver in all 3 depth disciplines in 3 days? Like last year you will be able enroll also as a team and compete for the BEST TEAM title! At least one athlete in each team must be a woman or transvestite (to qualify as transvestite he must wear skirts, dresses and bikinis during the whole comp)
The big difference this year is that we will run the comp in SHARM EL SHEIKH; we will use the facilities and the fancy Only One center! So there will be no depth limit!!!!!

The training, the registration, the final party and the static competition will all be in Dahab as usual. On each competition day we have charted AC busses to take us all down to the dive spot in Sharm el Sheikh and back to Dahab again (ca 45min one way). We have done this already during the Minicomp in May and it worked out very smoothly

The Price for the comp will be ONLY 130€ for the three competition days!!!

27th FIM comp day in Sharm el Sheikh
28th CWT comp day in Sharm el Sheikh
29th CNF comp day in Sharm el Sheikh and closing dinner party (…until late at Rush as usual…)
TD COMP DAYS ONLY: 130€

TO BOOK or for more information CONTACT US ON:
info@freedivedahab.com

td 2009- the very end

2009-11-29T02:12:00.001-08:00

As always i'm totally sloppy with the last day of any competition i have been writing about. So this is not exception.

It must be the party bit that confuses me, and it takes me few days to get to remember my name again, and who i am, and especially that i have a blog to update every day for the rest of my life, which sounds even scarier than being married.

And about marriage, guess what.
I actually did find a husband!!

I woke up the next morning with my wedding noseclip superglued to my nose, which by the way is still there, and a husband next to me.
I don't know how that happened, but let me tell you that I'm aware that no sane person on this planet would (and should) marry me, which is basically the proof that the guy is completely crazy.
But hey, now it's done, so i guess my husband hunt is over. Which makes me sad, and i'm gonna miss it.

And here the wedding ceremony, celebrated by Rob the King.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7j-M057oi-Q

However, wasn't this about TD and all the amazingly useless freedivers that have been defying death during the most challenging day, number 3, where you have to propel yourself to the deepest abyss without the use of any device, and come back alive?

So here you get the result list again,

And you will see how the Israelis should start training seriously and quit with their disco breaks and fizzy bubblerh, because it's definitely not helping their performance.

This time John (who now everybody calls "husband") found the tag and finally got his first white card. We showed him the tag before his dive, so that he hopefully could remember how it looked like when he got to the plate, provided that his short term memory would stay switched on during the whole descent, which was unlikely. We wanted to drop one with a big "TAG" written on it, but we forgot, so we could only hope for the best.

For once in his life Mike actually got close to the plate enough to touch it, which i found very impressive. And he did that without the help of his giant monoflipper.
I'm aware I'm a bit harsh with him sometimes, and somebody might think I don't like the guy. Quite the opposite: despite being a chicken he's actually a nice and funny guy, who survived one of my instructor courses (respect!), and especially who arranged and brought most of the prizes for the winners of TD. I don't know where he got them from, probably he stole them, because let's be honest, who would want to sponsor Mike with anything?
Here's the proof of our friendship. See, i'm even smiling.

Marek made me proud again (and he'd better not disappoint me if he doesn't want to get fired) with a very nice 63 m.

And Matt, who you can admire here below in all his gracefulness, despite the massive drag created by his noseclip, made it safe to 70 and back, setting a very respectable polish record.

Rob and Alexey should have got the prize for the biggest morons of the competition, since they did 2 awesome dives, and not only got 10 points off for not letting go of the rope early enough (which is the stupidest beginner mistake you can make at a comp), but also missed the chance to set 2 national records.
Gordon also joined the moronic club, for doing a beautiful 50m, coming up, taking of his goggles, saying "THERE WAS NO TAG", and then completing the SP. Now you tell me, how stupid was that? Very. This is why we gave him a red card.

Karsten, who you see here above looking stupid, just chickened out at 17m and therefore deserves no mention here, even though i like the guy and the way he's helpful with everybody, especially the losers (but we're not here to speak nicely about people, so let's carry on).

But the best was Roman, the author of "the big black gay jewish dragon and the donut princess" novel, who added some excitement to the show with a black out on a silly 40m dive when he's been below 80 few times (ok, he had his giant monoflipper then), and once or twice he even made it back awake.
Honestly I was expecting something dodgy to happen, since he had a black out also the day before, and i told the safety divers to be ready to get him.
I did the same before Flavia's dive (and she also announced 40) and she switched off few meters below the surface. She had a very funky one, and it was obvious that she was having the best dream of her life. I'm sure she was more pissed off about waking up so early than about the red card she got.

Note that the Shisha team (which was obviously Marek, Roman and Flavia) got 3 back outs out of 9 dives, which is impressive, so everybody got to the amazing and absolutely unforeseen conclusion that smoking shisha is not good for freediving.

Thanks shisha team for sacrificing your lives to science so that the rest of us can become better freedivers.

The women did well, and few NR were broken:
Alana (who you see here below, doing what I like to do best, which is giving the finger to Mike) with a 23m dive;

Agata with 36m; our blond Wendy with 45m; Jarmila with an impressive 52; and Jana, with a even more impressive 53m.

So, after the last dive, we took the pyramid in, drank a coffee, peeled off the last burnt bits of skin that was left on our faces after 7 days in the sun, and went home: I updated the blog, while Lotta was supposed to put the final results together.
And here something went wrong. Maybe some of her coffee leaked in between her few neurons interfering with the cerebral transmission, or maybe is simply the senility: however, she managed to fuck up the overall women results.
So, we all happily go to the party, and before everybody was completely drunk we managed to do the prize ceremony, announcing Liv as the bronze medal winner, and giving her a beautiful mask. Now unfortunately for Liv, she was behind Jana of 1 point, which means that Jana was third, while Liv was only fourth…

Nobody realized until the day after, but when we tried to get hold of Liv to get our (or Jana) stuff back, she did a runner and tried to fly back to uk before we could get to her. Which didn't work out since we sent the egyptian secret police behind her, which is world famous for its efficiency, so they found out all about her escaping plan, stopped her and recovered the medal (not the mask, because they are not trained for multitasking).

Here you can see Liv with her misleading angel face. Don't trust her, she's bad!!!

And below you see Jana, surfacing from one of her successful dives. She does look bad, and she probably is, but at least she didn't try to steal anything.

And here Jana with the rest of her winning team:

So in conclusion, apart all the bullshit, we would like to:
-thank Mike from the bottom of Lotta's heart (I don't have one) for the funkiest prizes from suunto, technisub, neptune wetsuits.
-thank Elios for giving us some free neoprene, the puking bag for George, and lots of hats.
-apologize with Jana for the fuck up. Hopefully we will be able to send her the medal soon.

I would like to say something about the party, but unfortunately I have memories only until the wedding, after which somebody unplugged me and my files have gone forever. Which happened to a lot of other people, since at some point there was a bunch of us (namely Lotta, the Husband, Roman, Wendy, Matt, Betti, Agata) lying on the ground (half of us on top of Husband because he's big and comfortable), while Roman was reading for us the story of the gay dragon while sucking on Lotta's dirty toes.

If somebody have pictures, please send them to me.

TD 2009- the end

2009-11-29T02:10:00.002-08:00

Finally back from blue hole. And it is over!!! Now there's only the boring prize ceremony to go through, and if we manage to stay awake we will eat the awesome food from Rush and have a disco break until late night.

So, what had happened yesterday and why was I so dead tired?
The main pulley placed on top of the pyramid was broken, so, who did they put up there to hold the rope? Me, while my slaves where hanging out drinking coffee and smoking shisha.

Not only I'm the boss and I should be entitled to privileges, I'm also an old lady who should stay home knitting and taking care of her arthritis.
I'm really not happy about all this.

However, for everybody else it was a good day. Lots of white cards, only 1 black out. It was silver guy, who is obviously gay, so I let Dean to catch him. I'm only rescuing the hot single hetero ones, as everybody know already.

Day 2 is always my favorite day, since it's CWT, and everybody show off their most expensive giant monoflippers, and you look at them in the water and you are all impressed, and you think "wow, this guy looks so professional", until the moment when they start their dive, with the most appalling, inefficient, useless duck dive that even my 2 star students manage to do better.

So we did have a good time commenting on the worst ones (French Marc was probably the champion), while we were trying to protect camera and operator from drowning in the splashes. Marc will win a coupon for a "duck diving workshop" with Freedive Dahab.
I have to admit that I've seen a few perfect ones, which I found very surprising, since I've been to a large number of comps, and I know that perfect duck dives are as rare as rich hot single men.

However, sorry for the continuous distractions, I really try to do some serious journalism here, but my attention span must be very short, since I keep getting distracted with irrelevant details.

Deepest dive was 90, and guess who did it. Yeah, him again.
Second deepest announcement was Roman who didn't make it.
Then there was Polish Matt with a nice 80 (polish record).

You see him here before his OT, and I want you to notice his noseclip. He obviously added some neoprene as padding, but didn't cut it round to fit the shape of the plastic. Now, I know that eastern Europeans are not so big on fashion, and they have other problems than looking funky, but since we care about the image of our competition, tonight at the ceremony (and he doesn't know yet) he will win scissor as a special prize.

Then there was my pupil Marek with a 76 m, which I agree was a bit of a pussy announcement but he needs to find his motivation back before we push him to more respectable depths.
But hey, he did it in a record time of 1.52, which is pretty fast. On the other hand if you are Czech and want to do a freediving record, you got to do like that Austrian guy and come up with your own creative stuff, otherwise you're fucked.

Gordon did also a Serbian record with a 70 m dive. And Alon did a Israeli record with 65m, after which he had a disco break with all his buddies.

Stuart turned early, and so did Mike (just for a change), and they both got the chicken badge.

John didn't do any record, and didn't even find a tag on the bottom (while witnesses swear there were 2 down there), which cost him lots of abuse. He got even more abuse for his ridiculous monofin, for which he will win a prize.

Actually i shouldn't be to evil with him, since the poor guy in a moment of confusion, promised to marry me. We'll get married tonight a the party so we don't have to spend money in a wedding party, which is a pretty smart idea of mine. now the only problem is that he's not rich (hence the lack of proper wedding), but he's promised me he will be rich in one year time. If not he will refund me for the loss of 12 months husband hunting (and when you hit my age 12 months are very precious).
Plus he seems to be a good housekeeper, and he's a perfect babysitter for little Lua (my puppy), which will make me save some money in salaries. I can probably even convince him to work for free as a office slave, since Sleif the slave will leave this winter.

Oh, i almost forgot to say that we had 2 national records also for the women: Wendy with a nice 60 m (finally!!!), and Betti, with a 53 m.

Apart from the diving, lot of sluttiness was going on again on the opposite platform.

and more

and more

I still wasn't sure what was going on over there, but I can tell you that everybody goes there and flash their boobs at Erika. Is she giving them chocolate or what?

So I couldn't resist and i went there and very casually I flashed my boobs to see what happened. So Erika's assistant put some lube-looking substance on my boob (and I thought, OMG, something really dodgy is gonna happen) and then she POKED me with a metal stick that had a wire connected to her headphones. And she said she could hear my feelings, which obviously was a big fat lie because it's notorious that I don't have feelings.
So I gave her the "piss off" badge.
But then she confessed that she was just listening for bubbles to which I didn't say anything, but I thought: didn't she realize that we're not bubblemaking here, and that she's hanging out with the wrong people?
But somebody explained to me later on that we can also have bubbles in our body from just freediving, and that no, it's not because you farted in your suit. And that you can hear these little bubbles with something called doping or topping, or dumpling or maybe doppler thing but now I cannot remember.

However, that was all for yesterday, and now i should write today report, but unfortunately the party started and i have to run. I'll have time to write more tomorrow, while trying to survive the hangover.

But of course you find all the results here below.

and here the overall results for the men

and the women (Lotta got back to her senses and finally fixed it).

TD 2009- CWT

2009-11-29T02:10:00.001-08:00

here the result lists:
i apologize for the shitty resolution, but today the egyptian connection is even slower than normal, and i'm too tired to sit here the whole night to upload the results...
(i also apologize for not writing anything about this absolutely exciting day, but i'm gonna have to go home and sleep or i'll drop dead before tomorrow.)

cwt women

cwt men

partial results - day 2 - women

partial results - day 2 - men

team partial results:

CNF announcements for tomorrow

TD 2009- FIM

2009-11-29T02:08:00.000-08:00

Wow, that was a boring day today.
Not a black out, not a samba.
Only the Israeli team (6 of them) made it worthy being exposed to the strong wind, the unforgiving sun and the cold water (now down to 27 degrees!) for so many hours, and provided us with some good entertainment. And amazingly a couple of them even managed to get a white card!
The others maybe felt in a happy mood and wanted more colorful cards. We got some late starts, some late surface protocols, some short depth, and I don't remember what else.
Now, a little digression so that you can understand what has been going on the pyramid during the whole day, because nobody else other than us and the Israeli had a clue: if you would have lived in a primitive country like Egypt for too long like we have, and your IQ would drop considerably (obviously due to the lack of intellectual stimulus) like ours had, then you could only watch intellectually unchallenging movies like "u don't mess with the zohan", which is obviously all about Israelis, their culture and their funny way of speaking, and then finally you would understand why all of us spent the whole day speaking about schnorHkels, HaustrHalians, fizzy bubblerH, Hummus and have a disco brHeak uuh uuh between every official top, and you would find it funny.
Well, I can tell you that the IsrHaeli team didn’t find it very funny, but who cares, we are the ones with the red cards in our hands.
(And just for the record, when I say US, I don't only mean Lotta and I, but the rest of the book club: Dean, Katya, Leif the slave and Nikki. And ok, I confess I had to watch the movie twice before I could grasp all the deep insights.)

While we were pissing ourselves, there was something strange happening on the other platform: several athletes kept sitting there exposing their private parts to the attention of Erika the scientist and the rest of her team.

Here you see Kathryn, who has this innocent angel face, and then look what she's doing.

And then Gordon, who (during poor Karsten final breathe-up) you can see in the process of lowering his pants. Poor Karsten didn't appreciate that, let me tell you.
However, I wonder if these people were trying to buy a white card by offering their naked bodies to others, which wouldn't surprise me considering the amount of sluttiness going on in the freediving world, but unfortunately they were on the wrong platform trying to bribe the wrong people.
No big damage, since there's not many of them that I would want to see naked anyways.
Guys, if you want to bribe the right people, tomorrow come to the big platform, and please show us money instead than your pale naked bits, thank you very much.

Oh, and by the way, here's the result list of day 1, the FIM day, where is so difficult to get a yellow card (because of the inability of making rope violations), but our athletes still manage to get them just to keep us entertained.

Most yellow went to early turns, and those are my favorite dives, because together with the yellow I can give the athletes the chicken card.
And here the team results:

I'm sure you're wondering who the team members are, and i have to say i ave no idea. lotta is doing all the paperstuff, including the teams registration, while i spend my time taking the piss (and embarrassing pictures). I'll investigate more and let you know about the team situation.

About the chicken's (or pussy's) situation, the athletes seem to believe that chickenness (or pussiness) is a medical condition. Now, how did I find that out? The other day I had a 10 minutes break during my 6 hours safety session in the water, and being very hungry I grabbed a bit of leftover food from Jeremy plate.
Mike saw me, grabbed his head in his hands in a dramatic motion, and in a panicked voice he screamed "Oh my god!!! Now you got infected with the chicken virus!!!"
I thought he was being ridiculous, but all the others were showing terrible concern.
But now that I think of it…OMG, what if he's right? That happened right before I jumped on the sled with George and I stopped halfway!

Anyways, chicken virus or not, I did the deep safety for the deep guys: I safely escorted back from the abyss Marek, Roman (who got DQ but then won the protest and got white), Mateusz, and Alexey.
Alexey was obviously the deepest, with a 90 m dive, and he came up, yawned, and did the SP in 3 seconds and a half. Since we were worried for his safety (not for the depth, but for the aggressive pissed off freedivers), the Egyptian army was in blue hole for his protection. Nobody noticed anything of course, since those brave higly trained special soldiers were cunningly disguised as defenceless snorkellers (or schorhkellers).

TD 2009-static and other things

2009-11-29T02:05:00.001-08:00

Today it was the static day. Out of 11 people that made an announcement (static is not that popular is it?) only 8 managed to compete, since the others came to the pool announcing an unexpected (and convenient) dodgy belly when they woke up. They did look very upset about not competing, with their beers in their hands while dancing at the other end of the pool.

So Lotta, who is the only person in the world to actually likes doing static, in order not to leave any breaks in between official tops decided fill them by doing static herself. She had two goes, but then she skipped the last one, which was her actual official top.

Most impressive performance was Jana, who thanks to the outstanding coaching of Alexey pulled off an amazing 2.32, of which she was obviously very proud.

Our newbie southafrican John (who is now highly ranked in my list of ex students who embarrassed me most) went easily to 6 minutes, but due mainly to inexperienced pushy coaching came up too late (6.23) and kept taking off his noseclip 25 times before he managed to fuck up his surface protocol. Just to be sure that he got a red card, his coach kept touching him the whole time during his struggle to stay awake, or maybe she just fancy him badly and couldn't restrain herself.
Here John before he lost his dignity, when he still knew he had 1 noseclip only.

Here John after, when he was upset for the loss of the other 24 noseclips.

However, the gold medal goes to Alexey of course, who doesn't really give a shit about doing good times, or winning.
No, he only likes to piss off the others who obviously have no chance to win anything when he's around.
Look at how pissy Mike got when he figured he got second after him.

Let me tell you, Alexey doesn't have many friends left, and I hear rumors of sabotaging plans against him.
I think I heard something about mutiny on the platform during his dives, and kidnap the judges and the official surface camera. If somebody must kidnap me I hope he's at least hot and rich and that he will ask for a very high ransom that nobody can afford to pay so he has to keep me forever.
Here the other results of our amazing noname competition.

1.alexey molchanov- rus- 6.49
2.mike wells- aus- 6.33
3.kathryn mcphee- nz- 5.25
4.lotta ericson- swe- 5.16
5.stuart bond- uk- 5.04
6.jana strain- can- 2.32
7.karsten schneider- 3.05, yellow, short

As for the official training, we're done, and tomorrow the real comp is starting.
We had a couple of fun days on the sled, during which some of the athletes trained some depth adaptation, while some others were just having fun.

Even I had a go, first with George, which I chickened out half way (how embarrassing!), which was actually a good thing, because I went again on my own just after, and I got so badly narked (shallower and shallower every time) that I don't want to be responsible for other people down there when I'm in that state.

The beautiful picture of me, my sled and my finger was shot by Mike, and i hope he doesn't mind the fact that i stole it from his facebook album. If he does and complain, i'll give him a red card.

Serbian/Swedish Gordon, who is one of our oldest freediving friends, is now coached by Sara, who during TD is also going to be the shortest safety diver ever (I'm trying to convince John to black out at 20m, because I want to see her picking him up, since he's just around double her height, and it's gonna be fun). So Gordon is obviously using Sara's non-training approach, since not only I've seen him in Blue Hole only once, but he seems to be doing all sorts of activities other than freediving. The other day we went together on a bike ride in the desert, which was very funky and I totally understand why he'd rather do that instead than holding his breath and endure contractions.

So, for next year's events, in addition to the freediving/climbing weeks (called "go vertical") we're planning freediving/biking weeks (which I want to call "go horizontal", since I have the tendency to fall a lot, but then we have to go freediving in a pool and do only dynamics).

Here you see the most funky staff of any competition ever. Apart from Ingela of course, who keep haunting and stalking me with her even more massive boobs. And the worst bit is that she's planning to stay in Dahab for 2 months, and if that wasn't enough, it seems that her mother will join her soon.

And above another bit of our staff, little Vera (here with Lotta), who is almost as short as Sara, and if you don't believe that, the next pic will prove it.

TD 2009- The Training

2009-11-29T02:04:00.001-08:00

First thing first: I have to say that I'm totally upset with all you who read the blog and don't vote when I suggest a contest. "Funny faces" seemed very successful, everybody read it and found it funky, but only 2 people voted, and one of them voted for himself, and he wasn't even in the official contest.

And now, let's forget all about the pussy pool freediving, and let's go back to the real subject: TD 2009

Here we go. For the fifth time since 2005 freedive dahab is hosting the funkier and funkier triple depth. This time we told the various Herberts, Natalias, Saras and Williams to stay home watching telly because we are so tired of seeing them breaking world records and banging their heads on the bottom of blue hole all the time.
We want more beginners, chickens, pussies, nerds, losers and useless freedivers this year!

Therefore Rob the King signed up, but he's still undecided if joining the useless category or the chicken one. It will be a very hard head to head with Marek, who is also representing his gay club together with Silver Guy (alias Roman).

Silver guy, being the master of the uselessness, is the same guy that in the Rab Off competition got stuck with his noodle in between his legs. After that he got sponsored by Vaseline. Now he's rubbing himself with it before every dive, so his noodle is not getting stuck anymore, but who knows what a guy like that can come up with at the next occasion?
Here you see him in a mug shot that I found in the Czech police archives.

Apparently him and Marek got arrested once for having a fight over a hottie outside their gay club. Here's Marek mug shot.

However, also Marek got sponsored, by a big Egyptian company, Masri Shisha Inc., and he's working together with them at the prototype of an underwater shisha for freediving and scuba.

Australian Mike, who has been the chicken icon during "minicomp 2009" escaped from the chicken coop and flew back to Dahab after becoming a TV star for being the first freediver to swim a 120 long underwater cave with his giant flipper. Check it out, and listen to the audio.

http://video.ninemsn.com.au/video.aspx?mkt=en-au&brand=ninemsn&tab=m163&from=39&vid=E7FD6DD0-6975-4132-BD2E-1D596BA5887F&playlist=videoByTag:mk:en-AU:vs:0:tag:AUnews_AU60minutes:ns:MSNVideo_Top_Cat:ps:10:sd:-1:ind:1:ff:8A#::e7fd6dd0-6975-4132-bd2e-1d596ba5887f

French Marc will have his own category: FWS (fucking weird shit). Hopefully nobody will challenge him on that one, since recently he didn't train much fws: in the last month he's been seen hanging out with a giant underwater scooter. His mate Jeremy, who's the captain of Marc's cheerleaders, refers to it as "Marc's masculinity".

here you see Jeremy holding Marc's masculinity, and if you look at his face you can very well guess what he's thinking about.
By the way, this is the same Jeremy who we badly abused last may during his first FDD experience; now he's back, and he's spending all his waking hours in our shop, despite the continuous abuse and the rudeness. At the closing time the slave has to chase him away with the cattle prod we bought for the annoying customers.

Unfortunately some real freedivers heard about the most amazing prizes we have for the winners, and after paying massive bribes managed to infiltrated the competition. Molchanov junior, miss McPhee & miss Strain are some of them.

here you see the two girls practising mouthfill:

and here Alexey looking very cool:

By the way, the bid for Alexey computer bag with his autograph is still on. The winner will also win a coupon for a date with him, so hopefully if will be a girl...

Badges updates: since this is my competition and there's no Maria telling me to fuck off when I ask for more badges, I can have as many as I want.
I'm gonna have (amongst many others):
-piss off badge (my trademark)
-choppy chop badge
-what u want badge
-pussy badge
-chicken badge
-suck it up badge
-I'm single badge (to show only to the hot athletes, together with the choppy chop badge)
-no Mohamed, I don't want to marry you badge

Unfortunately i don't have any gossip yet, everybody is still behaving and the whole atmosphere looks very boring indeed. Shit, why do the sordid athletes only go to Crete to do their dodgy stuff? Hopefully something will happen later on...

TD 2008 - Behind the scenes

2009-11-29T02:03:00.001-08:00

Ok, so this will be the last thing i'm writing about Triple Depth 2008, because we are all tired and we feel it's time to move on with our lives.

Lotta and I are going to be very busy during the next few weeks, with an Instructor Course starting tomorrow, and soon after we'll fly to Nice to be the judges for Guillame Nery WR attempt.

Hopefully the rest of July will be a quiet time so we'll have time to rest and sit home in our air con knitting and cooking :-)

But what I'd like to do here now, is to thank all the staff that worked in TD, and try hard to say something nice about each one of them :-)

The safety

Let's start with the lazy Spanish safety, Miguelito and Alex. They weren't lazy because of bad intention, but just because it's written in their spanish genes. This is why we love them anyways.

The only thing i blame Alex for is his bad smoking habit. He smokes way too much, even though he cut to half his original dose, and as punishment he's always being sent out of Aqua Marina restaurant every time he is seen with a fag in his hand. We are going to abuse him more badly during the Instructor Course, so hopefully he will stop completely.

As for Miguel, he is the antipode of punctuality, and this is why i was so surprised to see him arriving in time for his safety shifts. Maybe that's because he was scared of me, remembering those times when, as my student, he was continually screamed after, especially for showing up late in the mornings (every single one!), using as an excuse the fact that he had to cycle against the wind.

As for Patrick, his bigger fault is being French, but since there’s nothing he (or us) can do about that, we decided to accept him as he is. The good thing is that he’s becoming very funny when drunk, especially when mimicking me during the party.

Marco the Rasta is actually even lazier than the Spanish crew. And on top of that he’s so easily distracted by any female presence, to the point where he only wanted to do the safety for the female athletes, and one time I had to do the safety myself for Liv dive, since Patrick missed an equalization and couldn’t go down, and Marco was looking at bikinis swimming about, missing completely the whole thing. Despite this, and the fact that he admittedly doesn’t wash his hair with shampoo since 1998, everybody loves him, and I have to say I miss him very much, because he’s very funny and nice with everybody.

The official surface videograper, and much more

Dean, our Canadian rock climber instructor(the one on the right in the picture) got caught into the freediving business when he fell in love with beautiful Katya, few months ago. Now that it’s to hot to climb he always comes diving with us, and our favorite pastime is to challenge ourselves in races for the faster rope puller at the end of the dive sessions. He still didn’t beat me, but I know he has a pull up bar in his place, and he’s training hard. He’s been working so hard during the competition, and we thank him from the bottom of our hearts, because without him we would have been in deep trouble.

The land coordinator

Peter Ericson, who can be seen standing in Aqua Marina restaurant with a binocular trying to understand what’s going on inside the Pyramid, and informing the athletes when it’s their time for the official warm-up. He’s also the one in charge of being polite with the tourist police anytime they come over (about 10 times a day) and ask the list of the athletes and nationality (yes, it’s the same every day!). Luckily it doesn’t have to be me doing that, because I’m well known for my short fuse, especially when confronted with useless bureaucracy and inefficiency.

The judges

Obviously I’m not going to thank myself, also because I’ve been a bit useless (I got flu 2 days before the comp). I’d like to thank Katya, who was also uselessly sick, but she’s been there, sitting in the sun the whole day in spite of feeling so weak. And thank you Lotta, for taking charge of everything and not making me feel bad about being absent when there was so much to do.

Judge Lotta wearing her Judge uniform

Next one is Judge Katya in her charming hat

This is me being silly, in a shot of Richard.

The drivers

I’m thanking the drivers only out of diplomacy (which as many of you know, is one of my best qualities :-) Thing is that our bright Bedouin driver Mohamed, got married just few days before the comp, and the wife didn’t want to release him from the bridal bed. So the poor guy had to co-ordinate from home some less bright relatives of his, who were often late, or lost, or didn’t understand, and whatnot.

The Scientist

Dr Erika Schagatay has been sitting on the platform taking measurements of every athlete after their performance, to see how hypoxic they were at the end of their dive (for some of them you didn’t need an oxymeter to see that, believe me), and how long they took before getting back to normal levels (some of them will never go back to normal, I suspect). Hopefully all this research will give us more information and open new doors and shed some light on the mysteries of this beautiful hypoxic sport :-)

TD 2008 - Static Comp

2009-11-29T02:01:00.000-08:00

Hey, i almost forgot about the coolest static competition in the world!

It all happened at the Octopus hotel pool, where 9 worldclass athletes fought for the title of the "dahab' best breath-holder".

Since Natalia didn't compete, not surprisingly Lotta won the comp. She managed a 5.53 with basically no training, which is not so bad.

Here you see her, after her winning performance, together with Liv and George.

On 9 performances, judge Katya and i gave 8 white cards and 1 red.

Here we are, with Natalia being our safety surface camera, since she rescued us after our official camera's battery died :-)

Unfortunately coach George touched Liv before the 30sec window, disqualifying her 5.01 performance

2nd place went to Richard Wonka with 5.27

3rd place to Yuri Shmatko with 5.22

Ben Guyat almost got disqualified for showing the wrong finger (the middle finger!!) as an ok sign.

After the competition everybody went for breakfast, or so they said. I suspect they all went to the alcohol shop to get ready for the closing party :-)

TD 2008 - The Party

2009-11-29T01:59:00.000-08:00

Yes, the party was 2 days ago, and i'm late with the updating, but we were all comatose yesterday, especially me, and i only woke up at 7pm...

I didn't do anything special to be so wasted, (or i should say that i don't remember having dome anything special...) It's just the advancing age, and i think last time i partied until late i was still in my teens...

Anyways, Dean had my camera, and was supposed to take pictures of the ceremony with medals and the rest, but he got severely confused by the events and didn’t take any. So, the only pics I have of the party are the drunken ones (which I think everybody agree being the most interesting ones anyways).

Here you find some:

Me and the winner Rob the King

Lotta dragging people on the dancefloor

Liv and George with the drunk camera crew

Lotta had a lot of fun. She also got electrocuted when she got out of the pool and stepped on some electric spot. Apparently she found it very funny, and kept stepping on it just to get extra buzzes. Last night Ben (Guyat) was imitating her over dinner and I almost died laughing!

Richard has been photographed dancing wildly with Lotta, and several people jumped in the pool several times. They tried to throw me in the pool, but without success.

Lots of people have been telling me funny things that I did or say, but since I don’t remember any of it, I won’t report it here, because what I really think is that they just made it up with the intention of putting some obscure shadows on my stainless reputation :-)

As you can see from this one together with my italian posse, i look fresh and in control!

This is safety Marco after he finally managed to kiss the russian girl that apparently every guy is dreaming of (the same one with the pink wetsuit). He definitely looks happy enough. Paoletta the girlfriend seems not to mind Marco running after every decent looking girl, probably because she knows that unlike all other italian men, Marco talks a lot and does nothing.

Richard and Patrick being very happy

This one is for Ben's mum, just to prove that he's still alive and doing well. Don't worry Mrs. Noble, we're taking good care of Ben, and hopefully after the instructor course he will lose a couple of pounds :-)

If anybody has some good pics, please send them to me :-)

TD 2008 - Day 3-second part

2009-11-29T01:56:00.000-08:00

This is the Triple Depth headquarter, the Aqua Marina restaurant, where athletes meditate, stretch, get dressed and undressed, eat their egyptian breakfast (if Ibrahim remembers), fall in love (not very often), get tanned, feed the cats, and admire the cool snorkelers walking up and down with their fins on, stumbling on them, except the more advanced ones, who walk backwards, stumbling anyways, and all looking like a less evolved species of penguins.

National records of today were for:

-German Anna, who luckily made it to 40 without swallowing.

-Egyptian Ashod (35mt), who came up with a new goggle style. He did his whole dive with his goggles parked on his forehead. His excuse was that it was too dark with them on… (I really think he just didn’t want to admit that he completely forgot to put them on, like yesterday with his snorkel :-)

-Croatian Karla, who with a very original style (which has much to be improved) did a easy 47 mt dive and came up looking as pink as a rose (as we say in Italy).

-Croatian Slaven, who did a 43mt dive and new NR, broke few minutes after by Tomo who topped it with 2 meters.

These Croatians did so many NR these days they almost got boring. Jakov is the only entertaining one. Even if today he impressed all of us with a penalty-free performance! The judges were very happy to finally give him a white card!
Croatian Vedrana decided to turn half way down, and I do understand that she’s getting quite tired of setting national records just to lose them a hour later :-)

Poor Portuguese Mafalda has been sick ever since she arrived in Dahab, and finally today she felt a little bit better and tried a dive. She wasn’t as well as she thought, obviously, because she didn’t have a very easy exit. Had a samba, and dipped her mouth in the water before she could manage the SP.

Liv did a beautiful 40mt dive and came up happy and smiling. At this very moment she’s sitting here in the El Salam restaurant (second favourite restaurant of the TD athletes), having some dodgy conversation (too dodgy to report here) about Natalia Molchanova pee, which she’s supposed to bring back with her to UK and send it to the lab in Germany… yes, yes, that Liv, the polite and shy one! (I’m awfully shocked!)

American Rob of course did a very clean and very easy dive. On the other hand he announced 35 meters…the chicken. Obviously he was aiming to secure for himself the 1st place and win TD 2008.

Here's another beautiful pic from Nanna. It's of the laziest of the athletes, Ben Guyat. During the whole comp he showed up only for CWT. And he doesn't have any yalla yalla excuses (dodgy belly). I think that he spent too much time in Egypt, and got transmitted some egyptian genes into his DNA.

Italian Andrea (yes, the one that pretends to be Swiss) felt very lazy and announced 10 mt less than his own Swiss NR, but that was enough to secure him the 3rd place in the overall points.

As for Aussie Ben, I’d like to say to his mum not to worry, and that whatever happened with the safety divers is in the past, and that everybody loves him and that he’s still alive and happy and well fed :-)

Here's a pic of Natalia during her final preparation just before her final countdown. And yes, believe it or not, the one on the right is a woman wearing a PINK tailormade wetsuit, and if you could zoom in you would also see that she has a personalized mask with strass on the frame...Sorry, I'm not going to comment on that one.

TD 2008 - Day 3

2009-11-20T06:23:00.001-08:00

It’s over!!
The pyramid is already on a truck and the Blue Hole looks exactly like any other day of the year!

Here’ the result list of today

1 Ingela Karlsson 14mt ok
2 Martin Wikstrom yellow card (early turn)
3 Sofus Kreutzmann 42mt ok
4 Mafalda Oliveira 23mt yellow card (dip mouth)
5 Richard Wonka 28mt ok
6 Jakov Kastelar 30mt ok (hamdulillah!)
7 Angela Ambrosi red card (SP)
8 Ashod Papazian 35mt ok (NR)
9 Robert King 35mt ok (chicken!)
10 Vedrana Vidovic yellow card (early turn)
11 Ben Noble 40mt ok
12 Anna Von Boetticher 40mt ok (NR)
13 Liv Philip 40mt ok
14 Andrea Zuccari 41mt ok
15 Slaven Cubric 45mt ok (NR)
16 Tomo Vrdoljak 45mt ok (NR)
17 Veljano Zanki no start (yalla yalla)
18 Karla Fabrio 47mt ok (NR)
19 Natalia Molchanova 60mt ok (WR)

As for the winners, ladies and gentlemen, i have the pleasure to announce the following:

As for the boys, the winners are:

1st place Robert King 176 points

2nd place Slaven Cubric 156 points

3rd place Sofus Kreutzmann, Andrea Zuccari, Tomo Vrdoljak, all with 145 points (which is awfully bad, because we don't have 3 bronze medals ready!!)

And the girls:

1st Karla Fabrio 165 points

2nd Liv Philip 151 points

3rd Natalia Molchanova 142 points

This one is of the warm up lines, with Natalia during her preparation.
Oh, by the way, i forgot to say she did another world record today! she dove 60 meters CNF, beating Natalia Avseenko record of 3 meters. It looked like a very easy dive (and very long), and again she made a big smile as she broke the surface, as to confirm that she was feeling very fresh.

Unfortunately my camera died the very moment Natalia came up from her dive, but hopefully somebody will send me some pic that i can upload...

This beautiful pic is of Sofus (shot by his sister) (she shot the picture, not her brother) (unfortunately), who promised to marry me and then he showed up with a girlfriend... bad guy, and i forgot to give him the red card! Sorry Ingela, but it's time you know who you're dealing with :-)

Sofus, Ingela and Martin were the first diving today, because they had a flight early in the afternoon, so they had a taxi waiting for them in Blue Hole, jumped in the water, did their dives and jumped in the car with their wetsuits still on (almost).

Ingela did a very impressive dive to 14mt, and she even managed to get the tag! There was a lot of tension during the 2 minutes before OT, but she was very focused, and she did it! Safety Miguelito impressed everybody, since he dove with her the whole way!!

(She's not very fond of CNF, so i guess she just decided to have some fun.)

Martin had his lanyard on his wrist, which appeared to be a bad choice, since it got tangled all around his arm, making the breast strokes almost impossible to perform. He wisely made the decision to turn (which surprised many!) and came up 10 meters too short but clean.

Sofus had the same set up for his lanyard, and it also got tangled during his descent, but he wisely started swimming only with his legs, having the time to fix the lanyard before the turn.

As for the rest of the daily report, i'm now running to the meeting, so i guess i'll find some time later...

TD 2008- Day 2

2009-11-20T06:20:00.001-08:00

CONSTANT WEIGHT

So, it’s 3pm and I just got back from Blue Hole.
Here you find the result list of today:

1 Ingela Karlsson 33mt ok
2 Jakov Kastelar 41mt yellow card
3 Georgina Miller 43mt ok
4 Rahel Zemoi 50mt red card
5 Tomo Vrdoljak 50mt ok
6 Olga Suryakova 50mt ok
7 Angela Ambrosi 50mt ok
8 Richard Wonka 51mt ok
9 Andrea Zuccari 52mt ok
10 Ben Noble 53mt ok
11 Vedrana Vidovic 55mt ok (NR)
12 Anna Von Boetticher 50mt yellow card (early turn)
13 Liv Philip 57mt ok
14 Martin Wikstrom 57mt ok
15 Yuri Shmatko 58mt ok
16 Karla Fabrio 61mt ok (NR)
17 Slaven Cubric 63mt ok
18 Sofus Kreutzmann 60mt yellow card (early turn)
19 Ashod Papazian red card
20 Ben Guyat 67 mt ok
21 Robert King 72mt ok
22 Veljano Zanki 80mt ok (NR)

Thinking of all the dives i’ve seen today, the first thought that comes to my head is: how difficult can be to do a duck dive?

On the platform poor Dean and Katya (and especially the surface camera) have been splashed and showered quite regularly every 8 minutes.
Twice I risked to be decapitated (or at least severely injured) by a monofin, but luckily I saw it coming and moved away, and the blade missed me of just few centimeters.

So, next year we’re planning to have a one day “duck diving course” before Triple Depth, which hopefully will benefit the athletes diving and especially will preserve our lives :-)

Today was again very windy so not many snorkelers were out there. The few that attempted an invasion were kept away by Vedrana, who took the charge of the surface patrol :-)

Natalia Molchanova wasn’t diving today; our spies reported that she’s resting for tomorrow big dive.

By the way, some people are wondering why Sara Campbell is not competing this year. She is in the UK now, taking care of some personal stuff. We hope things will be sorted soon, and that she’s back in the water soon :-)

Today, again, no black outs. Judge Lotta is becoming very restless; 2 days in the comp and she didn’t kiss anybody yet!!

Like yesterday we had only 2 LMC (Swedish Martin and Russian Yuri). Which is a shame, because is well known that sambas and black outs are all people want to see in a comp;-)
In any case, they did the SP in time and both got white cards.

Andrea (he’s Italian, but pretends to be Swiss) will get the medal for the quickest dive: 52mt in 1.09. I think he was showing off for his photographer, with the result that he was so quick that she missed him and didn’t take any picture of him :-)

Jakov will get a medal for the one that collects more penalties. Also today he did an early start, plus grabbing at the start, and grabbing at the end.
It’s funny to see how some people go to a competition ignoring completely the little rules that cost them red cards and minus points.
Rules are on the internet, so please, download them, read them, and ask questions to the judges when you don’t understand something!!
(some judges might not know the answer, but at least you tried:-)

6 national records were announced today, but only 3 were successful, and all of them are Croatian! You will think: how’s that possible?...one male, one female, and what else?
Like yesterday, Vedrana does a record dive, and short after Karla adds few meters on top of it. So Vedrana today had her record for a whole one and a half hour :-)
As for the guys, Veljano did an 80 meters dive, beating his own NR of 4 meters (if I remember correctly)

Rahel got confused and forgot to put her noseclip on. She realized when she was about to duck dive, and she managed not to touch the water and to put it on before the 30 seconds window, but then she turned very early. It was definitely not an ideal start to attempt a pb.

Anna as usual swallowed her mouthfill, missing the chance to add one meter on her German record. It’s still her record anyways, and she didn’t seem to be upset.

Ashod was trying a 65 meters and had problem equalizing. The funny thing is that he dove with his snorkel in his mouth, forgetting completely to leave it on the surface :-)

Judge Lotta was in the water wearing a pink cowboy hat on top of her metallic blue suit, not looking very fashionable at all. Hopefully some kind soul will send me a pic of that, so I can post it here.
I’m planning to wear my Chanel hat tomorrow, and I’m sure I’ll look much more posh than her :-)(apparently Italians have the fashionable cells in their DNA)
Katya (despite being Ukrainian) has very good taste, and was wearing a big black hat with charm and elegance.

Marco the Rasta safety diver (many of you will remember him in Sharm during the WC) is getting very easily distracted but the bikinis swimming around the competition area, sometimes forgetting it’s his turn to do the safety. Tomorrow we are going to have somebody patrolling the area and forbidding all the half decent looking girls to enter the water during the deep dives :-)

Tomorrow is CNF.
Stay tuned for the updates and the final results.

TD 2008- Day 1

2009-11-20T06:17:00.000-08:00

FREE IMMERSION

This year Triple depth turned out to be a small and chilled competition, since we have only 25 athletes.
So we celebrated this by starting with the first official top at 10 am.
The staff got to the Blue Hole quite early anyways, since every time we think everything is under control and we relax too much, something bad always happens and we make it JUST in time for the first official top!
(Just like that time when Lotta and I were so early with the preparation the day before the comp, that we decided to go shopping at the second hand shop, and we spent 3 hours in there, ending up measuring the rope at midnight!)

Luckily the wind was quite strong, so that the billions snorkelers were too scared to paddle about and the situation around the competition area was more or less under control. The platform has been invaded only once by a scary looking woman with 2 inches of make up on her face, and poor Dean (the official videographer) was too polite (or too afraid?) to tell her where she should move her cellulite.

Judges this year are Lotta Ericson, Linda Paganelli (that’s me!) and Katya Smirnova. We are 3 because Katya and I are so sick that the two of us put together barely make one functioning person.

As many of you might know already, the Russian machine, also known as Natalia Molchanova, did a new world record today, with an 82mt dive. Dive time was 3.47 (she’s taking her time!), and she did a very lazy ascent during the last 15mt, since she let herself very slowly floating up to the surface. She did a happy and perfect surface protocol in 9 seconds, and judge Katya showed her the white card. Natalia had the WR in FIM since 2005, but Sara took it during last year Triple Depth with a 81mt dive. Now she finally got it back, and despite the Russian self control she looked happy enough.

Another remarkable news is that there were no black outs today :-)
The only one not being happy about this is judge Lotta, because she is well known in the freediving world to be the one that always likes to kiss the blacked out divers (especially the boys). Truth is that she must do it so well that they wake up so fast after the kiss :-)

Finnish Ingela had a LMC and didn’t finish the SP in time so she got a red card.
The only other LMC was of Swedish Martin, but he managed the SP in time, so he got a white card.
Another red card went to Croatian Veljano who was a bit confused with the SP and made a little mistake. Otherwise he did a nice 67 mt dive, ascending unassisted (at least in the last part, because I saw his dive from the surface).
Jacov was also DQ’d for the surface protocol. We noticed Jacov does everything way too fast: he started 5 seconds before OT, he announced a divetime of 2.30 and completed the dive in 1.30, and did the fastest SP I saw. So fast in fact, that he didn’t have the time to locate the judge.
Sweet Rahel got a yellow card for early turn and for starting 1 second before official top!

Everybody else was doing fine and made us all happy.
6 new national records were set.

German Anna did an easy 53mt dive beating her own national record. When she’ll stop swallowing (her mouthfill!) and she’ll work a bit on her technique, she’ll dive much deeper :-)
Another national record went to beautiful Croatian Karla, who dove to 57mt, and took Vedrana’s NR of 47mt, which the latter had the pleasure to hold just for around 1 hour (since she just dove shortly before Karla).
Egyptian Ashod did a 52mt new NR (well, he’s the only Egyptian freediver still living, no wonder he’s holding all the records!)
Ben Noble did an Australian record with a 52 mt dive, and Mario took the Portuguese record doing 45mt.
Ben managed to upset the lazy Spanish safety crew, so if I would be him I wouldn’t attempt a deep dive tomorrow…you never know.

Rob King from US did a beautiful 69 mt dive and came up with a big smile (he only does it because otherwise I hassle him for not looking happy enough!), and his tag “velcroed” to his neckweight. Since I’m a bit evil (and some people might think that BIT is not quite the right word) before he had the chance to do anything, I screamed “he doesn’t have the tag!!”, and you should have seen how quick his sweet smile got replaced by a horrific look :-)

Here's the results of today and the starting list for tomorrow (CWT)

FIM results

FEMALE
1st Natalia Molchanova 82
2nd Karla Fabrio 57
3rd Liv Philip 54
4th Anna Von Boetticher 53
5th Angela Ambrosi 50
6th Vedrana Vidovic 47
7th Georgina Miller 34
8th Ingela Karlsson 0

MALE
1st Rober King 69
2nd Martin Wikstrom 55
3rd Ashod Papazian 52
3rd Andrea Zuccari 52
5th ben Noble 51
6th Sofus Kreutzmann 50
6th Slaven Cubric 50
6th Tomo Vrdoljak 50
9th Mario Albunquerque 45
9th Richard Wonka 45
11th Veljano Zanki 0
11th Jakov Kastelar 0

And for tomorrow:

CWT Starting list (11th June)

1 Ingela Karlsson 33mt
2 Jakov Kastelar 41mt
3 Georgina Miller 43mt
4 Rahel Zemoi 50mt
5 Tomo Vrdoljak 50mt
6 Olga Suryakova 50mt
7 Angela Ambrosi 50mt
8 Richard Wonka 51mt
9 Andrea Zuccari 52mt
10 Ben Noble 53mt
11 Vedrana Vidovic 55mt
12 Anna Von Boetticher 56mt
13 Liv Philip 57mt
14 Martin Wikstrom 57mt
15 Yuri Shmatko 58mt
16 Karla Fabrio 61mt
17 Slaven Cubric 63mt
18 Sofus Kreutzmann 64mt
19 Ashod Papazian 65 mt
20 Ben Guyat 67 mt
21 Robert King 72mt
22 Veljano Zanki 80mt