Daylight Savings - bah humbug!

grumble, mumble and assorted other muttering noises .....

Bloddy Kiwis, they lure you in, make you feel like you living in a great country and then what do they go and do, they put the clocks back weeeeeeekkkks before they need to. Due to Daylight Savings Time, Britain has a 29 week summer as opposed to 24 weeks in Aotearoa! What the hell were they thinking :o(

Anyway, all that complaining is just to let you know that we are a mere 11 hours ahead instead of the usual 13. Who fancies explaining that to my Parents? I'm not even mentioning the seasons thing to them!

Look Mum, no tanks!!!

We tried our hands at free-diving at the weekend, which turned out to be an interesting time indeed. The weekend started with an introduction to apnea (breath holding to the un-initiated), the history of the sport of free-diving and some of the fun and games involved in the sport, i.e. don't try this at home fols ;o)

We found out that New Zealand is becoming a powerhouse in the sport - they have 7 international judges where as Australia only have one! But let's face it, sports don't come any more extreme than going to 20+ metres on one breathe of air - and that's just the novices!

Here's some of the amazing feats that Kiwis have accomplised in the sport:

• static apnea - holding your breathe, in water - Men 6 mins 42 secs, Women 5 min 36 secs
• dynamic apnea - swimming underwater - Men 184 metres, Women 163 metre - let's put that into perspective that's over three times the length of an Olympic swimming pool!!!
• constant weight - the stuff you see in the movies, swimming down a line and swimming back up with all the same weight, no sledges and no assistance - Women 50 metres, Men 70 metres. Remember that at 50 metres your lungs are 1/6 of the size that they were at the surface :o(
  

The weekend was spent doing lots of breathing exercises and teaching us how to get into the best state of body and mind for breathe holding. Then putting us through our paces both at static and dynamic. We didn't get the chance to do constant weight dives as the weather was bad, preventing the boat from taking us out - not sure I would have had the bottle for the diving much deeper than 5 metres but we will have to see.

In the end, we both had a great time, learning a lot about what is involved in the sport of free-diving and I can see us doing more of this in the future.

For the record, out times and distances were as follows:

Lisa: static apnea: 3 mins 30 secs, dynamic apnea: 48 metres
Derek: static apnea: 2 mins 43 secs, dynamic apnea: 42 metres

I should mention that one of the guys on the course, and remember that this was he first time, held his breathe for 5 mins and swum for 68 metres underwater - we did check him for gills afterwards ;o)

Lisa did take some photos so we might have them on the blog soon.

Who needs air fills?

Have a look at http://www.freedive.co.nz for more details on NZ free-diving or http://www.aida-international.org/ for the international organisation.