Monday 14 June 2010

More Freediving, and Murphy's Haystacks

I was blown away by that Guillaime Nery deep freedive - no scuba gear, just himself. Fifty odd years ago I joined a "sub-aqua" club in the U.K. That was before we'd even heard the acronym SCUBA for self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, and before any of us got hold of wetsuits either! We were impecunious university students. Anyway, it gives me a small insight into how challenging it is to go deep, something I never attempted: I have swum 70 metres underwater unassisted, no breathing apparatus. That let me begin to appreciate certain techniques of the freedivers, including careful but thorough ventilation (abdominal and thoracic) which is logical, and - which does NOT seem logical - the suppression of the breathing reflex.

The theory is that, once you KNOW the body has enough oxygen in the bloodstream to last you for, say, the next five minutes, who needs to breathe? Right? So, breathing is simply an addiction. Stop it!

Well, I SAID it was a theory.  Me, I enjoy lots of air. Best time I recall in South Australia was exploring cliff-foot caves on the north side of Wardang Island in the '70s along with Year 12 students from Adelaide's Scotch College - camped on Goose Island - using hookah gear. With this system, an air pump on an accompanying boat serves several swimming divers through long skinny clear plastic tubes, which after a while the swimmer scarcely notices.

Now, to view swimming with dolphins as you never saw it before, spend a moment with this freediver: Umberto Pelizzari.


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I made another 30 second video clip, this time all pix of the famous Murphy's Haystacks on Eyre Peninsula. Here 'tis. These rock formations are said to be 1,500 million years old. Who believes THAT? And they have been underwater many times in their geological career. On the day of my visit, they weren't.

 Who knew?

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