I suppose I should share a bit on how you ended up reading this blog. I grew up in a rural part of Australia, not far from the beach. As a youngster we had a pool in the back yard and my brother and I used to do plenty of laps underwater. Mum has some good swimming genes so we both got into it quite a bit, though neither of us did any proper training. I remember going to a family friend's farm when I was probably 7 or so and swimming in their creek, we had a competition to see who could swim to the bottom. I remember getting to the bottom in what seemed like 50m deep murky water and picking up a rock and bringing it back up. In hindsight it was probably about 5m deep but hey, I was pretty small back then. When I was about 10 I could do 2 and a half laps underwater in the pool, so roughly 30m. When I was 12 we moved to the beach and I started bodyboarding more and did a little bit of snorkeling but not that much.
In 1990 I saw a movie called The Big Blue on tv, we taped it and I still have the tape now. It's a story about 2 freedivers in a rivalry and diving deeper than anyone else in the world. A real romantic kind of story which got me hooked on the sport from that point. Now though you talk to any freediver and they'll say they watched The Big Blue as a kid and fell in love with the sport, but they secretly cringe now as the movie is a bit over the top, and Rosanna Arquette is possibly the most annoying person alive. After that I went to uni in a town hundreds of miles from the ocean and then moved to Sydney and put aside all watery things for a bit.
On my honeymoon in 2004 we went to Fiji and I managed to get down to about 13m a few times on some of the reefs. On our daily snorkelling excursions I met a guy that had a set of freediving fins (ridiculously long looking flippers) so I got chatty with him, turned out Rick lived in the next suburb from me in Sydney. Before we could exchange details or anything he ended up getting gastro and I didn't see him for the rest of the trip. Back in Sydney I hunted on the internet for a couple of months and found out that there is a whole competitive sport based around this crazy nonsense. I found a shop that sold freedive equipment and went in to buy some fins. The first person I spot was Rick looking at some wetsuits. Not long after we started spearfishing together, then eventually a freedive course was offered in Sydney by Wal Steyn, the best freediver in Australia and one of the best in the world. Out of all of the guys on the course, only myself and another guy, Nathan kept training. We trained twice weekly for a year and a half and kept in touch with Wal and met a couple of other Sydney freedivers along the way. Late in 2005 we moved to London and I started going to some competitions over here, including 2 World Championships. My best rankings in comp have been 2nd in the British Championships in 2007 (Wales), the Apnoe Greene Pool Comp in 2006 (Germany) and a 3rd in the SaltFree Summer Splash (Wales) in 2006.
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