What a fantastic comp! Very well organised, executed brilliantly, and was a great deal of fun. The Greeks are a great bunch of people - very helpful and friendly, it was quite humbling as all went out of their way to make sure I wasn't completely lost in it all. My wife also had a great time chatting with the rest of the "Freediver Wives" in the back of the stands. I was really surprised at the size of the crowd, it was very weird to be applauded by 30-odd people after getting the white card for my no-fins. And the after-comp feast was awesome, lovely Greek food and tons of it. After not eating all day my wife nearly had to roll me home (though in fine Ben tradition I managed to convince her to stop in to the Haagen Daaz cafe on the way home
)
I had a mixed bag of results - new PB's in static and no-fins, I really stuffed my breath up for dynamic and ended up a lot shorter than I hoped. As a result, I think i'm the only freediver in the world who got the same distance in a comp for both DYF and DYN!! :duh All good fun though.
Some of the highlights for me were watching Alex do a 7:15 clean static; Panos's 106m no-fins; and another guy (maybe Stavros Kastrinakis?) doing 171m (I think); and I was pretty happy with my static and DNF too
The lowlights were watching 2 guys I got friendly with both get red-carded in their first comp in the static - one for failed SP and the other for a BO - they both came back and did well for the rest of it though; seeing the look on one guy's partners face when he BO'd was horrible (
mental note - don't black out in front of my wife!); watching a couple of guys come unstuck with the surface protocol, both with the old rules and the new rules, particularly when one competitor missed a Greek national record in DYF because his SP was about 1.5 seconds too long. All in all though I think the new rules work well, they certainly didn't cause too much havoc.
I think there were 3 BO's in static and a couple of sambas here and there, the safety guys ran like a well-oiled machine and did their job particularly well.
Thanks for a great show guys! Looking forward to it all again.
Cheers,
Ben