We arrived with pretty much no problems on Monday, got settled into the hotel and slept like zombies. Tuesday we were meeting up with Lotta Ericson and Linda Paganelli from Freedive Dahab, we were hiring the sled and their services for the week. My flatmates and I had gone to York for the weekend and it was freezing cold and wet up there, as a result i've got a nasty head cold which is not good for diving.
View from the hotel
After we met Linda and Lotta we headed to the Blue Hole, which is a spectacular hole in the ocean 92m deep and world renown amongst divers. When we got there all we saw were camels, garbage and goats. But once you arrive the ambience of the place takes over as we went into one of the restaurants, looking at the ocean you can make out a darker patch a couple of metres out which is the hole itself. After suiting up we headed out to the sled. We had a warm up line to 30m close by, the idea was to do some Free Immersion dives on this line then move to the sled line for some education on sled diving. On my first warm up I started to realise how bad my cold was when I felt the searing pain between my eyes. I could equalise my ears but my sinuses were inflamed and full of gunk. I had been taking some medication but it hadn't been too effective, so as a last resort I went back to old school nose clearing - snorting salt water. For those that haven't tried this the feeling is...weird. But, it gets a lot of the gunk out and saved me my diving day. I managed to get down to 20m but it was pretty hard going. When we moved on to the sled Lotta showed us how it worked and we all had a go. It was very weird at first - you release the brake and you fly down, apply the brake lightly and you stop dead. I was nervous that I couldn't equalise, but since I was sitting upright on the sled it was a hell of a lot easier. My first dive I went to about 10m then had a fiddle with the air tank to make sure I knew what I was doing, released the air into the balloon that shot me back up to the surface and came up with a grin from ear to ear. Sled diving rocks! I made it to 30m in my last session then we called it a day, heading back to the restaurant to chill out and eat. Back to the hotel in the afternoon exhausted and into town for dinner that night. We walked past the places where the bombs went off back in 2006, which was a bit surreal as the place is so laid back and casual.
6 comments:
Nice read, looking forward to the next chapters
Hi Benj, hope you are feeling better now and the equalisation is not an issue any more.
Makes me kind of curious when you say sled diving rocks. But still I dont regard it as freediving.
You may have to be a freediver to do it but when you are making yourself dependent of technical equipment such as sled and break and air bag you are not freediving in my eyes.
Never the less, I am looking very much forward to reading about how things turn out.
for everyone who was following bennys blog and is starting to worry... no need. he is just lazy.
Benny did do his dives successfully as we can see on youtube these days:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pm2JZayPzaw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RisfTBJB4Kk
Well done with the dives... but the boggin... ;)
Haha, yes I am being a bit lazy. I kept a diary in Dahab but had no internet all week. I've been mentally busy for the last week but will update the blog as soon as I get a chance.
I dunno, you boys and your blogs. Where's the entertainment then? Updates Benny B, updates!
Dammit, Martin, do you also give away the ending to books and films? Let us live the suspense ;-)
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