Shark Freediving

Today is the start of the Czech National Pool Freediving Championships in Zlín, which consists of two days of competing. With 48 Freedivers from 6 countries competing it will be a pretty big competition. The fun thing is the organizers have planned to provide live streaming of the competition to the Internet. You can watch the livestream here. Time of broadcasting will be;

• 28th May – 7.00 P.M. – 9.00 P.M.
• 29th May – 9.45 A.M. – 12.00 A.M.
• 29th May – 1.45 P.M. – 5.00 P.M.

Czech Republic is GMT+1 and the current time is:

I’m for sure going to watch this online! Will be exciting to see how they handle this and how the freedivers will be doing. They already wrote some posts about how they are going to broadcast it and how they made the underwater cameras. Interesting stuff. Remembers me of our own broadcasting experiments we are doing. Good luck to the organizers and competitors.

Now that SETT (the 30 meter deep dive tank in the UK) is closed for public, it’s time to find other deep indoor freediving facilities. In Norway they have SETT’s little sister, which is a 18 meter deep training tank from the Norwegian Navy. It’s situated at Haakonsvern (Bergen, Norway) and it actually looks pretty nice, even if it’s a lot smaller then the UK facility. Know any other good deep indoor pools?

Uros send me the following information about a Serbian pool competition. Take a look and join them for an interesting competition!

Diving club S.D.T. Svet Ronjenja is organizing a competition which will be held on 6.12.2009. and is called Serbian Winter Apnea Cup 2009. The competition is also listed in AIDA International calendar of competitions.

Competition Status: Nacional, AIDA Ranking
Discipline: STA, DYN/DNF
Place: SRC „Mladost“ Pancevo, Serbia
Time: 9:00 AM – 7:00 PM

Registration fee is RSD 2000,00 for AIDA Serbia members, and for everyone else is EUR 25.
Judges:

1. Petar Bojović (D Level)
2. Darija Subotin (E Level)
3. Aleksandar Karjuk (D Level)

It is planed that the official part of competition ends at 19.00h, there upon we will pronounce the best competitors, hand them the rewards and then have small party by the pool.

The anouncements are in the following categories:

1. male single
2. female single
3. team
4. the best male and female

All competitors will get lunch and t-shirt with logo of the competition. Beside the medals and cups (trophy) for the best, organization has prepared a suprise rewards. We invite you to join us, make your best results, make new friendships and have fun!

You can contact Janez Kranjc for more information about the competition +381 63 770 66 70, or by email: svetronjenja@yahoo.com.

Visit the website for more information at S.D.T. Svet Ronjenja

The Two Winners: Nanja coaching Jouke

Today Sanne and I visited another freediving competition. This time Liege, Belgium. It was a pool competition with 3 disciplines and while I thought it would be a small competition it was actually pretty crowded! You can read Sanne his personal story on our Team Sharkbait website.

40 freedivers from 5 countries. 30 men and 10 women made it a good and fast competition. Finally a competition where waiting times were minimized and the pool optimally used. 5 static zones and 4 dynamic zones made sure that waiting times were around 1,5 hours between performances, which was pretty doable!

With the men Jouke van Riel from the Netherlands won the competition with 194,8 points. He did a 6:34 static, 126 meter dynamic with fins and a 106 meter without fins. Close second was Daan Verhoeven, also from the Netherlands, with 193,9 points. Daan did a 5:07  static and the two best performances in dynamic: 109 without fins and 156 with fins, which was only 3 meters less then the current Dutch national record.

With the women Nanja van den Broek was the clear winner with 185,8 points, which was the overall 3rd best total points of the competition. Nanja did a 5:04 static, 141 with fins and 109 without fins. She made it look easy.

Of the 120 performances during this competition, 28 ended with 0 points. Lots of them were zero because people didn’t start in all 3 disciplines. There were 4 disqualifications due to surface protocol errors and no blackouts. There were quite some big samba’s in the pool, mostly during dynamic.  All in all, fun and nice competition with a good atmosphere!

Complete results below, or directly here.