Last day of Level 1 Freediving which was a shame.
We started with breathing and relaxing and while I managed some improvement, being ‘at work’ is not necessarily the best place for me to relax. Wilco did really really well and managed over 3mins. I feel that I do have the skills to keep practicing my breath holding and I know in order to improve, I need to do this – so watch this space ….
For our last day we headed out to slightly deeper water moored close to the Sattakut wreck and Hin Pee Wee. When we got there, visibility was awesome and fish were swirling around the line. At the bottom there was a small pinnacle just off to the side and an extremely curious Jack/ Trevallies. We also saw a sea snake coming up for air.
Once again we warmed up by performing some free immersion dives; pulling yourself head first down the line. I was really looking forward to this and the feeling I got, particularly on the first dive, was the same…an indescribable sense of peace and calm. After free immersion we moved onto constant weight, which is using the duck dive to start the dives propulsion down. This is followed by using your fins to go further in a fluid streamlined dive.
The line was set at 20m, I managed 17m, and its interesting to note that yesterday 16m was ‘easy’ with free immersion but 17m with fins was my max today. It shows how much oxygen you actually burn finning and how much more relaxed I was with the free immersion. The day before, when practicing the free immersion I felt I could have gone further and stayed down for longer. Yet l did notice that my dives were shorter when we went fun diving with fins afterwards.
Today we also practiced some emergency procedures. We had to swim back up to the surface from 10m using only our arms in a scenario simulating lost fins. We also had to surface from 10m without our mask – simulating a lost mask. The final emergency scenario was to surface someone from 1om who has blacked out and perform a simulated in water rescue including in water ventilation. After this, you can imagine we needed a little rest, so back to the long-tail and off to Japanese Gardens to meet up with the big boat.
We went off in our buddy teams to explore Japanese Gardens and for me, it was so much better than the day before. The site was quieter, I had some longer dives and did actually experience the sense of calm which I experienced on the free immersion dives. I’m very keen to get out with my camera…stay tuned. I would also love the chance to get back in and video the disciplines to make it easier to explain and hopefully share some of the magic we experienced.
It is fair to say that we have all really enjoyed the course and wish we could continue but both Wilco and I have work commitments and TG has to get on with his Instructor Development Course as he is soon to bcome a PADI Open Water Scuba Instructor. Although Wilco and I go on holiday soon, we will definitely do more freediving and Level 2 when we return.
