5th AIDA World Freediving Championship, Egypt

another thing to consider is the training that Safety Freedivers have - if its just a case of whoever is free on the day diving, that does not mean they are necessarily people who know what they are doing, even if they are Alternates/Athletes/ Great Freedivers. I hope Yehia will take sometime making sure that the Safety Freedivers know their trade.

We are working on a Safety Freediver course for AIDA at the moment. In future, I hope anyone running an AIDA Competition will encourage their Safety Freedivers to take this training so we have a consistent approach. The course will be designed so you can learn to safety dive for all disciplines or specialise in pool or deep events as you prefer. It should also be good for those of us who want to train a friend who is not necessarily a freediver to look after us in the pool!

I don't see why Yehia should have trouble finding good local freedivers, pretty much every member of boat crew round here can swim down to 20m to get a lost anchor - just a bit of training and there should be plenty of safety divers around.

Monkey Matt said:

Interesting comments but you seem to be focusing on the safety freedivers. They are very important to the event but so are all the other volunteers. There are scuba divers, videographers, rope pullers, announcers, people that spend their day looking after Freedivers bags etc

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My focus was on the safety freedivers because of 3 reasons

1. You need a very high level of experience for the safety freedivers of a W.Ch. which I do not believe is available locally (unfortunatelly there are no high level freedivers in Egypt who could act as safety freedivers. By high I mean high on an international level - I am sure there are some great freedivers training hard and doing their best but we have not seen any top level performances.) To put it simply - you need people who can rescue a BO incident at 30-35 ... go there and wait for a minute or so. To do that you have to be of a certain level of freediving ability and knowledge. On top of that you have to have experience in rescue procedures and AIDA competition procedures...

2. As far as the rest of the categories you mention it is a well known fact you can get a high level of scuba / tech divers, videographers, rope pullers announcers etc locally in Hurghada - therefore these people will most likely stay at home and eat at home and therefore not have to pay any fees... If I lived in Hurghada I would gladly volunteer my time and effort

3. My main reason for focusing so much on the safety freedivers is because they are the ones that save lives... not the scuba/tech not the rope pullers not the bag watchers. The rest of the people can be the best in the world but if the athletes do not feel safe with their freediver safeties they are not going to be comfortable diving...It has happened to me once in competition training to feel unsafe with my safety and I simply refused to dive (I asked to be safetied at 25m on a 65m dive and the safety told me they could not do it)...


Cheers Stavros

I beg to differ, the scuba/tech divers could certainly be called upon to save lives. So could the rope pullers...

but maybe not the bag watchers : )

Aside from the W.Ch. discussion lets go off topic a bit. I have a question about competition safety in general. All training/competition rescues I am aware of involved safety freedivers. I have never heard of a rescue from scuba/tech divers or even a rescue using the counterweight ballast. Does anybody have any such information with a bit of details? (when, where, how?)
The only info I got about accidents and scuba safety in freediving competitions was a mention of a scuba safety diver that was lost (ie dissapeared never to be found again) during a competition in Japan (I think)
Any info on this subject?

Cheers Stavros

I have no statistics, but for example on this clip a tech diver rescued Tom Sietas in -122m when his sled got jammed. There are certainly more cases, but I am not sure if you'll find a complete listing somewhere. There are probably not too many deep BO cases saved by tech divers - that happens mostly at the top levels and is indeed handled by safety freedivers as you mentioned.

I know tech divers assisted Audrey Maestro too, but in that case they actually miserably failed (not that it was purely their fault - from what I heard I rather think there was no real emergency policy for such case drilled in advance - I may be wrong though, this is just my personal opinion) - when Audrey found her tank empty, the bottom diver filled her lift bag with his regulator, when in fact he should rather immediately abort the attempt and start ascent and decompression together with Audrey on a spare regulator. And the second tech diver already left his post before Audrey ascended to his level, just because he thought the dive was aborted.

I meant in CWT/FIM/CNF dives... in sled dives it is obvious that the role of the safety scuba is of great importance.

Stavros

the counterweight was activated in Nice last year when a diver was taking longer than she should have to reach the surface - but she still arrived before the weight reached her lanyard and it turned out not to be a problem.

Nice to know it is there though, I wouldn't dive deep, certainly in UK waters, without either a CW or a scuba team. At SaltFree we have both.

Sam

I have som interesting news for you.
The 5th Aida world cup will see the first "real" africans participating. I mean real black guys born and bred in Africa. And from a very small country.

Eritrea (located on the horn of Africa) will send a mixed team of three.

More information can be found here:
http://www.fridykning.org/eritrea/

Sebastian