Tag: blow tap talk

Practice makes perfect

~ @S2WFreediving ~ 2 Comments

As readers of this blog know, my challenge as a beginner freediver has mainly been equalization. This is nothing out of the ordinary as many beginners, scuba- and freedivers alike, struggle with this when they start out exploring the world beneath the water’s surface.

There is good news however and I’m the living proof of it: practice will help you!

If you’re new to this blog and don’t know what troubles I had with equalization, you can read all about it (and how to go about solving equalization issues) in previous posts on this blog. In short: I came from a place where I wasn’t able to equalize at all when diving with my head down.

I started reading about and practicing the Frenzel method for equalization (read more here). I did loads of dry training and to test my progress I went to a 5 meter deep pool every single Monday evening.

As promised before, here is a vid of one of those sessions:

It might seem we are mainly having fun, senselessly blowing bubbles. However, as I said before and probably so in slightly different words: relaxing and having fun is paramount to progress. And let me assure you, we definitely did practice equalization, a lot!

BUT… Of course I wanted to be sure the improvement in my equalization skills was not a fluke. And preferably so before the forthcoming 29th of March. That’s when I’ll be going to Germany again with World Record holder and Freedive instructor Nanja van den Broek to do my re-examination for the SSI Level 1 Freediver certificate. So… how to go about that? How to make sure I can equalize comfortably to the required depth and not go to Germany to be purely decorative again?

My initial idea was to go to the same pool in Germany where we did the deep diving part of the level 1 course (Dive4Life) and where I’d also be doing the re-exam. A great plan A! There I would be able to go deeper than 5 meters, even past the minimum of 10 meters and so be sure. Unfortunately there was just a small, tiny, itty-bitty, little problem…

I called Dive4Life to check if it was possible for me and my buddies to dive there in the near future. I turned out you can’t dive there without at least a level 1 certification. Even if you have two buddies with you that do. Even though I was (and am) bummed out, I must say: props for the strict safety standards they adhere to!

A great plan A doesn’t need a plan B, right? Wrong! Except… I didn’t have one. After discussing this impediment with the buddies that would join me, we decided to send Nanja an e-mail for tips. Turns out she has some good connections at DiveWorld in Enschede, a town in the East of the Netherlands, very near the German border, where they also have a dive tower. There, Nanja said, we’d be able to train with the three of us even with me being a “pool freediver” (already).

I gave DiveWorld a call and told them about our plan and situation. We were more than welcome. And Nanja’s name definitely carries some power! The DiveWorld pool has 10 meters of depth which isn’t as deep as Dive4Life in Germany, but it would definitely be deep enough to get some certainty about the state of equalization affairs.

I texted my two buddies and we decided on a date to go training. But let me not keep you in suspense any longer. It was pretty amazing and exceeded all my expectations! I had no trouble equalizing, we had fun, practiced some rescue dives and other drills for the level 1 certificate. I will truly go to Germany with great confidence. That’s what is was all about after all… and this awesome vid of the day of course(!):

Karamba! Keep you guys posted!

SSI level 1 freediver – 3rd course day

~ @S2WFreediving ~ Leave a comment

If you are new to this blog you can start from the first post by clicking here!

The third course day was all about safety and rescue procedures in the pool disciples (static and dynamic apnea). The theory focused on the importance of the buddy system and what happens to the body when you get a loss of motor control or black-out. To get a good understanding of these phenomena we were shown a long video with stuff going wrong.

This is what a loss of motor control (LMC), also called samba, looks like (skip to 2:03 if you’re bored by the swimming):

In the above video there is clearly no adequate safety near the diver, so at the same time it is an example how these attempts shouldn’t be done. If this diver’s LMC would have been stronger he could have hit his head on the edge of the pool and in the process he’d probably lose some of his teeth. Ouch.

You can probably imagine what a black-out looks like. Sometimes a black-out just occurs without a warning, but especially in the pool disciplines they can follow the LMC:

Generally they say a black-out is when you have a short gap in your memory (even if it just looks like a samba). Of course you want to avoid these situations altogether, but you have to know how to rescue your buddy when something like this happens to him or her.

So last Wednesdays course day was all about saving your buddy when they black-out. We practiced something called blow tap talk extensively in the static and dynamic setting. It was great fun and it’s definitely no exaggeration when I say that some of us are quite talented actors. Unfortunately I have no filmed documentation of this statement, but just trust me… 🙂

If you want to get a better picture of how to get someone out of a black-out, another great video by Adam Stern will show you how:

After we practiced the rescue procedures and Nanja was satisfied – also with our execution of the forceful advice to the blacked-out freediver that he is not allowed to freedive anymore for the day -, we did a timed static apnea and some more dynamic apnea’s.

My static attempt was a repeat of my previous personal best of 3:10 minutes. Even though I think I could have held out quite a bit longer if I had known I passed the three minute mark, I’m quite satisfied about this consolidation of my static ability. It was a relaxed and nice breath-hold where the contractions at the end didn’t bother me too much.

The evening ended with some more fine-tuning of the duck-dives and – while we filled in our logbooks – Nanja (our instructor) treated us to some bitterballs and chicken-nuggets because it was exactly two years ago that she did her world record variable weight dive, which is a record until this day!

If you read my previous post you know I was a bit concerned about my ability to equalize the middle ear when we would go deep diving in Dive4Life. As I write and now conclude this post, I already had the deep diving day yesterday and know how I fared. Even though I will have to keep you in just a little bit of suspense (at least until my next post tomorrow), I’ll leave you with a picture of the pool from the edge as a teaser:

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