Last weekend, Awesome Adventures hosted their Beargrass Dive, inviting divers from across the province. As a fun event and a competition, Marnie decided one of the events should be a snorkling event and invited Justin and I to demo some freediving and to help run a snorkel depth challenge.
The day started pretty windy and cold so naturally I showed up in shorts and a T-shirt with no pants or coat in my car: smooth. I figured I was in for a cold day, but Marnie loaned me a long coat in which I was fine.
While the divers participated in the first event, a garbage pickup/treasure hunt in Emerald Bay, Justin and I dove a few times on the Gertrude, a wreck of an old steamer. Visibility was barely 20ft, about the shallowest section of the wreck. Much of the wreck is deeper. We kept the dives short as we didn’t have good visual contact from the surface.
We then inspected the area for the proposed depth challenge. This was the first time I’ve freedived (freedove?) in poor visibility without a line; it was quite disorienting.
After 45 minutes we decided not to get any colder as we’d be back in the water just after lunch. We got out and helped clip depth tags onto a descent line Marnie had prepared for the competition. We had tags every 5 feet down the line to a max depth of 40ft. I wasn’t sure we’d get anyone that deep but I had agreed to demo that depth at the start and had also volunteered Justin to do so to show that with just a little freedive training it was possible to get down that far. Emerald Bay does not get much deeper than this.
After lunch, I invited the divers to join Justin and I for a dry breath hold. To my pleasant surprise, we got about ten people to trying it. We did not have time for a proper warm up, so we all just laid on the grass and did a basic two minute breath-up and then a hold. I was giving advice up to a minute from the hold when I realized I had best breath up a bit too or I would not last as long as everyone else. Wouldn’t that be embarrassing!
Sure enough, because I had not been relaxing and breathing up, contractions started at about the one minute mark! I managed to hold to three minutes, about average for my first warm-up hold, but it was a struggle. Fortunately that’s all Justin did, so I got to look magnanimous, not showing up my student; but, I was done!
The descent line was taken out to the site and attached to a cement ring by Erik, our safety scuba diver. I figured we didn’t really need a diver down there, but it may have helped reassure some of those scuba divers who were not used to snorkeling deep. However, I promptly showed why a safety scuba diver might be valuable.
I was not properly warmed up for the demo, but 40ft was not going to be a problem. As I descended, I was looking at all the flags on the descent line, each five foot section having different colors. A ways down I started wondering how many I’d seen (and therefore how deep I was) when my head collided with the bottom.
“Look at the pretty flags. I wonder how deep I am. Ooof.” Classic. Fortunately I hit a relatively spongy bottom and not the cement ring. I grabbed the 40ft flag and ascended. I didn’t tell anyone about this aspect of my stellar demo until later on.
The divers did quite well, two of them getting to 40ft and another couple getting into the 30-35ft range.
Unfortunately we did have one accident. A particularly keen diver managed to pop an eardrum. He came up in a fair amount of pain and completely disoriented: classic symptoms for cold water getting past the ear drum into the middle ear.
When I chatted with him later in the day, Wim mentioned that this eardrum had burst sometime in the past and that it had felt odd during the first scuba dive of the day. He also claims that he did equalize on the way down. I did note that he went down very fast, clearly a strong swimmer. It can be difficult to equalize that fast. Most of the divers seemed to think that speed was the key instead of relying on their breath hold. Sorry Wim, not a good introduction. I hope you do join us for another try when you are back in the water.
I replaced the 40ft flag a couple of times and did another couple of dives while waiting for more divers. Again, it was nice to be freediving without any of the pressure of competition.
Several scuba divers chatted with me after the snorkeling event. Some were completely unaware of freediving, others were just interested. I expect Justin and I will have at least a couple divers joining us for a somewhat more extensive intro to the sport.
