First day is over. In brief it was a nice first competition day which saw some very good results. Most of the time I was filming underwater and it was some time ago that I saw so many different techniques. I’m typing this from a QWERTZ keyboard so I keep the post short, because it takes to much time to write something.

Here’s the result list from today’s DNF.

Tomorrow morning Static and in the afternoon Dynamic with fins. I already got many photos and videos but these will be uploaded when I get back. You can follow live coverage as it happens during the competition at my twitter feed.

Ah, the wonders of automated posting! When this article is being published I’m already on my way with the Team Sharkbait crew to Geneva in Switzerland, to visit the 7th Coupe des Dauphins competition. The competition starts on Saturday evening with dynamic without fins and continues the day after with static and dynamic with fins. And of course we wouldn’t be driving these 850 kilometers if it weren’t for the party afterwards!

If there is an internet connection I will give you an update during and/or after the competition. In the mean time here is the freedivecentral competition website. 58 competitors from 10 countries is a good international line up!

LAST MINUTE UPDATE: I’ll be twittering all the latest info, including pictures, to my twitterfeed which you can find by going to my personal website and looking at the right collumn, or by directly visiting the feed itself on twitter. If you’re familiar with twitter and have your own account over there you can follow me and even ask questions directly to me at the competition. You have a question for a competitor like William Winram? Just ask me and I let the person reply by himself!

Probably many of you never heard of Esther Williams, but it appears that in her peak days she was a pretty well known actress in Hollywood. As a former swim athlete she made several underwater musicals where she swam in her typical mermaid style way, shot and edited in such a way as if she could breath underwater. It gives a pretty and also somewhat funny picture as you can see in the video below.

She had a few oxygen related accidents and even some hearing problems because she broke her ear drums several times during shoots for her films. More about her on her own website or her wikipedia page.

I wonder how long she really could hold her breath with all the shooting and training she did for her films.

From August 30th to September 6th CMAS will organize their first European Apnea Championship in Antalya, Turkey. They will be hosting this competition with 3 different disciplines. First the jump blue, then a dynamic competition and lastly a new experimental speed apnea discipline.

For the people who forgot about CMAS and their intentions to take over the freediving world; everybody is invited to join this competition but if you compete here you need to know that you sell your soul to the devil, because after this it’s forever forbidden to participate in an AIDA competition. You see CMAS has some crazy rule that the only federation that you can freedive with is their own Uber organization. If you still dare to compete with the dark force that is called AIDA then you will be banned from CMAS. Now that’s what I call customer binding!

As most freedivers live up to their name and they want to be free, they mostly ignore this competition. For sure the top freedivers from AIDA will not be there and the level of freediving going on at a CMAS world champion competition is about the same as many national AIDA competitions.

Everybody is free to do what they want, but when an organization is making such stupid rules everybody should ban this competition. Sometimes I wonder what these kind of people are thinking and it brings back memories of one of my favorite cartoons “Pinky and the Brain”

If you absolutely, positively, sureability must have more info about this event, then you can visit their website by clicking on the small dot . (Just to make sure that you’re very sure)