Diving without a tank
We build our CoralGarden and farm our corals in the sea. That means that we have to work under water. To make that viable, we tend to use our diving equipment which allows you to stay under for about an hour. Just enough time to attach some corals or put a statue in place. But sometimes we wish we could just take a quick look at what’s going on. What is the situation right now and what needs to be done? Or do we just need to put something down there? In those cases it is inconvenient to prepare your whole set of equipment in advance and give some TLC to it after the dive. There has to be a better way. But diving down 11 meters is not that simple and can be extremely dangerous if done wrong!
That’s were the specialist come in: freedivers! Trained swimmers that can, in some cases, hold their breath for more than six minutes. Or that can swimm down to 90 meters with just their fins and a mask. That’s not something we strife for, but the techniques are interesting and very applicable in our case. So we want to learn how to do what they do.
Freediving is serious business that should not be taken lightly. We participate in a course by Nanja van den Broek. We want to learn how to do it (the diving…) safe. Our group consists of 7 participants and we will cover both the theory and practice. Together with Nanja we explore our (imaginary) limits, which we all reach. Nanja is professional and teaches us to set them further. Luckily fun and (safe) games are allowed.
The examination takes place at Dive4Life in Germany, in a 20 meter (!) deep pool. We do all kinds of exercises and even achieve some of them at a depth of 10 m! Vera is obviously better at this than Frank and succeeds on her first try. Frank has difficulties clearing his ears but manages to reach his “pool-diploma.” As they say, “keep practicing…”. Nanja; thanks for the inspiring lessons and the sociable experience!
