X-BBH

So many things didn`t go according to my plans this time. I was planning for a 14 day trip with lots of training before the many comps. Instead I got a 7 day trip with 3 days in Dahab before the competition. Did I mention the ashcloud?? In the end I was just very happy to travel afterall. Staying at home with nothing to do with all the bags packed etc for 8 days was not a lot of fun! So Steinar and I went one week. Either one of us had done any deep diving before travelling. We did some empty lung diving in a 5m pool. That`s it.

I trained all of the three days prior to the comp. First day max 30m, second max 50m and the last day I did max 52m. It felt great and I really wanted to put some meters to my PB. And I wanted the National record in CWT. So what better to do than to put 10 m on my PB and 1 m to the NR.

A lot of things were new this year. I was finally able to see something when I was diving deep. The Nirvana fluidgoggles are superb. If the price was 1000 Euros I would start saving right now. I was also keeping track of my depth with my depthalarm on my Mares Apneist. I just put it inside my hood and set it to beep on every 15m. Excellent for divers with little training. I also had a new, fantastic suit from Eliossub. 2mm Daiwabo neoprene with lining. This time I was trying to loose as much as I could of my buoyancy. Together with this suit and with less packing I only needed 1kg of lead. This makes it so much easier. So now I`ll try to think of air only as something to equalize with. I also feel much more relaxed during the dive. Very different from my dynamics is also the warm-up. Two FRC-dives, starting at about 15 min before OT. If I get a blackout sometime after a deep dive, I`ll consider doing no-warmup.

The 77m dive was not so pleasurable. I was really stressed out by doing a 10m PB. Also because I went from 5m to 77 in 4 days. And from 52m to 77m in 20 hours. The start went fine, I kicked slowly for a long while. Maybe 45-50m? And I had my arms over my head all the way down. Very easy to keep balanced through the freefalling like that. I lost my mouthfill at about 60m, managed to do some reversed packing and equalize once more at about 65-70m. The last bit I didn`t equalize. On the way up I was not very confident until I passed 30m. I slowed down to make a controlled surfacing and everything went fine.

What I didn`t like about this dive was the 12 hours before the dive. Very stressful, making the diving not so pleasant. Almost no sleep and food says it all. That`s why I decided to do a safe and easy dive the second day. I announced 60m CWT. That was a smart call. My best dive ever! I was relatively calm before the dive and technically everything was perfect on the way down. This time I was facing the correct way. When I was freefalling past 40?m I started seeing some strange light down there. The Arch opened up so beautifull to me and I stopped at the plate for a few seconds to enjoy the moment. Truly mesmerizing! Off course after 5 m of swimming I thought it was a bad idea to stop for a few seconds, but a couple of seconds later I was confident again and enjoyed the rest of the dive. Stay tuned for the video from BlueEyeFX!