At the end of May the depths competition took place at the Blue Hole in Dahab. It would be pity to organize the STA competition at the place like this.
But to be honest organizers from the Freedive Dahab team (Lotta Ericson, Linda Paganelli) have crazy ideas from time to time.
Considering that Marek lives in Dahab, he took part, of course… and won. This time he decided for the FIM discipline reasoning have sore feet from the monofin and having tried the CNF at the Bizzy Blue Hole already. Definitely worth mentioning was the first competition day. It would not have been Marek if he hadn´t attracted the attention to his dive. He had 71 meters reported and here I attach his description of the dive.
The whole dive setup was a little bit uncomfortable for the contestants. The rope was dropped down from the bigger buoy and so there was not much space for the dive. Relaxation and warm up went through with no problems and I was looking forward to the dive. I put on my nose-clip (I dive only with the nose-clip, without the diving mask or fluid goggles). I went to the competition area and fastened the load. Because of the rope placement the load had tightened itself like a string and I could forget about the breathing in and out on my back. Two minutes to the official top. In the vertical position, leaning on the buoy I had finished the breathing in and out, packed a little bit and dived. But. When diving in I slightly hit the buoy with my head and my nose. The first few meters went perfectly well – I had not realized what was going to happen in a moment. 25 meters and my mouthfill and nose-clip fell down from my nose and was jiggling under my neck. Turn back? That would be a shame, so I grabbed my nose and mouth with my hand and started falling down. All the way down I kept thinking what would happen on the plate if I had to use the hand holding my nose for tearing off the tag. That meant the relaxation was lost. I reached 71 meters, the plate and there lay my tag. I held the rope with my left hand, with my right hand I grabbed the tag and at this moment some 300 liters of the salt water flowed into my nose and sinuses. The only thing I could concentrate on was the feeling of having to blow my nose as soon as possible. Not really possible in the 71 meter depth under the water. So I had to get up quickly. I started scaling and in a short while I was really surprised how fast I got up to the water-level. I breathed out, did the protocol, looked at the jury and saw him looking at bubbles at my nose. I heard the safety diver saying he had never seen such a quick FIM. I suppose I did not look very attractive at this point because while waiting for the card I blew those 300 liters of the sea water back to the Blue Hole. Finally, the white card. The only advantage was that during the protocol I did not have to take off any equipment, there was none on my face. The whole dive took 2:24 minutes within which the way up from the 71 meters took 50 seconds.
The second day brought no unpredictabilities. Marek improved his FIM to 75 meters and won the MiniComp overall. Detailed report from the sharp Linda´s pen can be found here.
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