Apnea Media Base

Description from www.smh.com.au:

Super Sub: Sebastien Murat, who can hold his breath for more than eight minutes, is shaking up the extreme sport of freediving. - Sydney Morning Herald Online

Divers Of course diving 'blind' doesn't mean athletes aren't afforded a safe diving environment. On the contrary, this contest has specifically been designed with safety in mind, all the while not taking away from the freedom that is freediving. Prompt and rapid ascent from depth is guaranteed in the event of an emergency, using a purpose designed diver retrieval system, coined DRUMS (Diver Retrieval Unit & Monitoring System). DRUMS ensure that athletes at depth can be monitored from the surface and promptly retrieved from any depth in a fully controlled manner. DRUMS also offers athletes an unprecedented level of freedom in preparation for a performance.

12 freedivers from all over europe has gathered to take Sebastien Murats Clinic. Among them; Spiros, an experienced spearfisher from Greece - Alun, the welsh deepdiver – Stig, the former world champion.

Sebastien advices us to leave our egos outside. ”Don´t compare – look at yourself”. Sebastien has come to Sweden to ask us to exhale before leaving the surface – to actually leave with less oxygen. Ulf from Sweden and Takis has already started experimenting with the new techniques at home. Takis does 27 meters on an exhale and Ulf 80 meters in the pool. Its called FRC diving – the amount is about what is left when you relax and let your breath escape.

Sebastien bombards us with a very scientific powerpoint presentation. Although I can get through scientific texts he is asking a lot of me and the others. He has spent many years experimenting with different techniques that would maximize his dives. And his focus has been on one thing. How much oxygen does the brain have at the end of the dive – that is the only thing that counts. And it is the dive response that saves oxygene!

Description from sub7seas.com

It is ironic that deep diving necessitates filling the lungs to an ever increasing size, yet this in turn results in the expenditure of large amounts of energy to overcome the excessive positive buoyancy such volumes generate. It seems there is something not quite right in nature's design. But as experience would have it that, there is probably something not quite right in our approach. Indeed, I always felt there was something 'hard' and counterintuitive about an approach to the mastery of freediving that pitted itself against its element.

With a diving approach that never sat easy, I began to suspect that the large stores of air in my lungs that allowed me to dive longer and deeper might also be responsible for placing me at an increased risk of succumbing to an assortment of life-threatening dive maladies. Insidious killers such as compressed-gas narcosis, decompression illness ('the bends') and hypoxia of ascent ('shallow-water blackout) were ever lurking.

Description from www.abc.net.au:

'The way we've approached free diving I think we've been doing it all wrong. We've inhaled when we should have exhaled which is what a lot of animals do.'

'It seems the way the animals do it is the right way.'

'And that requires a huge mental shift in the way we think about diving.'