Shark Freediving

William Trubridge reveals that Orca will finally come out with a real freediving wetsuit. Orca freediving wetsuits are normally made for triathlons and misused by freedivers for their own work. But now Orca has decided to finetune the Orca specs to deliver a perfect freediving wetsuit.

The suit will be publicly available from January 2010 and William is already very happy with the current performance:

During DNF trials I was able to complete laps of a 25m pool with 2.5 relaxed strokes, and still maintain a speed of 1.0m/s.  This suit performs, and the clever inner back panel means that you are warmer than one-piece wetsuits twice its thickness.

Now I am back in the Bahamas, and have starting depth training in the lead-up to the AIDA freediving world championships.  Already I have cut 2 ascent strokes off (in an 80m dive) from what I was doing at this time last year.

There will be a limited number of suits available for some world championships athletes that compete during the Bahamas competition in November. Read the complete report for details. Or go to Orca’s dedicated freediving page.

On a historic note: When I came back from the Nice 2000 world championships with the Dutch team I bought a triathlon magazine at Nice airport. Immediately when we came back in the Netherlands I contacted Orca and asked for some sponsorship for Ibizia 2001 for the Dutch team. So I think we were the first national team to go all Orca during a world championship. I guess we did some early pioneering with them back in the days…