Shark Freediving

Yesterday was actually the first day that Herbert would do a no limits record attempt. But due to unforeseen circumstances, the doctor on site had to leave for an emergency, and without a doctor there is no go with the attempt. So Herbert just did a fun dive, took a weight in his hand a dropped to 143 meters… That’s some amazing freediving going on.

So today at 14:00 (GMT+2) Herbert took another shot and made a perfect and easy no limits dive to 185 meters. Due to a technical fault on one of the cameras it was not clear during the day that the record would be validated by AIDA, but just one hour ago AIDA told the organizers that Herbert’s 185 meter no limits dive is now the official world record. So a good start for Herbert! Now we probably see the depth increase in the coming days.

The whole new sled system worked exactly how it should be. If you take a look at the dive profile you can see that Herbert slowed the sled at 26 meters taking 18 seconds to reach 34 meters. From then on it was full speed all the way, hitting 101m in 1:01min. That’s fast! He touched down 185m in only 1:40 min, that’s 1,85 m/s. The way up began a little slow with 1m/s until 170meters where the counter weight sped him to over 3m/s. He went from 157 meters to 118 meters in only 12 seconds. The brake was shallow at 11m, and the dive time then was at 3:02 min.

And then the fun stuff began; Herbert didn’t surface then but did a breath hold decompression stop of 30 seconds at 11 meters before slowly coming up to surface, so that the total dive took 4:07 minutes to complete. After completing the surface protocol and getting the white cards Herbert took a oxygen bottle and went down again to a depth of 9 meters for 10 minutes to decompress further. All in all an amazing routine, which shows that these dives aren’t about how long you can hold your breath but more about how good you can equalize. Amazing job!