[efattah]

In my mind, it doesn't matter if we can *measure* the depth accurately. What matters is the spirit of the dive. Different oceans have different salinity and temperature, which means different drag. Also different conditions on each day. If Herbert dove 111m, then Martin dives 112m, can you really say Martin is the better diver? No. At best you can say they are virtually the same in skill level. But if Martin dives 115m or 116m, then Martin is clearly better.

Herbert made a good point of it in 2001, during his 134m no-fins dynamic record. As he passed the record of 125m, he swam many more meters, as he said, 'to make it clear' that the record was broken.

I had the same idea in 2001, though things didn't work out as hoped. After diving 82m (+1m over the record), we set things up for 90m the next day, but everything went wrong (broken camera, line hit the wall, red tide, late boat, lost the line in zero vis, etc...)

Anyway, with 'only' 82m, it was not all clear that this was any better than Brett LeMaster's dive... especially since his dive was with bifins !! Because I still felt that I hadn't really broken the record, a month later we had a competition, so I announced 85m. The day of the competition the organizer told us that the depth limit had been 'reduced' to 65m because the deep safety diver couldn't come (and no lanyards in those days)... thus was the end of my deep diving days ! Then Herbert dove 86m a few weeks later, and thus became the first diver to *clearly* break LeMaster's record.