Shark Freediving

Herbert made it! He made an incredible dive to 214 meters / 702 feet. From the AIDA site:

New World Record by Herbert Nitsch, Austria in the AIDA sled discipline No Limit, 214meter/702feet is the new record. With this dive Herbert confirm that he is the deepest man ever on this planet. The dive was a fantastic 29 meter deeper than his previous record of 185m. The record took place on Spetses, Greece. The dive was monitored by 3 SUUNTO Dive Computers that gives us an estimate of the dive profile, and you can download the dive profile here. The dive was also monitored by two Liquivision dive computers, F1 - but unfortunately they both broke down before reaching 200m.

Total dive time of the dive was 4:24 min. After 16 seconds Herbert arrived at 22 meters to fill his EqEx. After that he traveled in a time of 74 seconds with a speed of 2,6 meters per second to 214 meters. With a very short bottom time of around 7 seconds he speed back up tot 60 meters in only 54 seconds, which makes an average speed of 2,85 meters per second.

At 60 meters it was time to take it slow to prevent DCS, so he went from 60 meters tot 9,5 meters in 50 seconds. And after hanging there for around 30 seconds at that depth he slowly ascended further to the surface in another 24 seconds. Amazing dive with very high speeds! The fastest moment going down was 3.1 m/s and the fastest coming backup was 4 m/s.

FilmOn has provided some stunning footage to watch! You really have to checkout the video. It’s amazing that Herbert can concentrate like that, between all the noise that is going on. For your convenience you can watch the clip from FilmOn below. The original video can be found here.

http://www.shark-eye.com/flv/freediving/herbert-214.flv

So that’s that for Herbert? Or will there be a surprise tomorrow? The judges are available until tomorrow as planned with AIDA, so if Herbert wants he can try for the variable world record as well. Or is it party time tonight?

The AIDA report also says that the dive was monitored by 3 Suunto dive computers and 2 Liquivision F1 computers. The 2 liquivision died before reaching 200 meters. That’s not good advertising for Eric Fattah, the maker of these computers. I wonder what his reaction will be about this. So a total of 3 F1’s are destroyed… wow!

And for people who want to start a conspiracy theory; look at the date mentioned in the dive profile. It says June 14th! That’s two days ago! Did Herbert already do this depth then? Or is it a simple mistake from AIDA?

This article will constantly be updated with all the news until tomorrow. Any news coming in tomorrow will be in a new article.

Update: Eric Fattah informed me of some wrong information that’s in this article. So below is the correction, with an apoligize to Eric.
- There were 2 F1’s used during Herbert’s event
- As of June 16, 2007 (2 days after the last real dive), I was informed by Bill Stromberg that one F1 had functioned fine, and the other F1 had suffered a failure of the pressure sensor (I still have the Skype chat record if you want)
- Further, even an F1 with a failed pressure sensor is still a useful device, and can be used for static competitions, but not for diving.  The F1 has no airspace inside, therefore it cannot be ‘destroyed’ like mentioned on your website
- The F1 was discontinued in December 2006
- The F1’s used in Herbert’s attempt were no longer under warranty (warranty expired in May)
- The CEO of Liquivision is Margaret Malewski, not Eric Fattah

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 16th, 2007 at 6:13 pm and is filed under Herbert Nitsch, Champion Freediver, World Record. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.