Any good Freediving Magazines?

[Finnfrog]

I love mags too, maybe I'm old fashioned or something But seriously, there's something "valuable" when you get nice looking printed information on your hands. If I find a magazine that impresses me, it's not hard at all to pay for it. It's same with music: Although you could get music with cheaper costs by downloading (or copying), I prefer buying a CD. It's just...more (than some bit information coming to your computer through the lines). And talking about the music, it seems, that people like to have something, that you have to treat carefully, something, that lasts long and really EXISTS in a matter. There's quite a many music lovers, who are going back to good old fashioned vinyls instead of CD's. So, for most of us it's not just the music that sels, it's the "whole package", the product. I think this is the reason why people still read magazines and books and are ready to pay for it.

But back to subject: If I had a magazine with contents like Spaghetti told, I'd order it right a way! It sounds like there's more freediving in a one number, than I've red in my whole (short and not so glorious thought) freediving carea!

I agree what Sebaztian wrote: At the end it's always about the money. There isn't that much money in a freediving compared spearfishing, which is guite a big sport in some countries. Spearfishers also need more equipment than freedivers. I assume that spearfisher who are more or les seriously in their hobby put much more money to equipment than freedivers. And of course, what could be better way to market your products than a magazine!

However, what I think is the strength of freediving as a subject to write about is, that there are huge amount of different possibilites to write an article about. You really can get both "heavy" scientific articles about different aspects of freediving, interviews and some "lighter" stuff, like travelling stories etc.

PS. Does anybody know, how many freedivers there's in the world? And how about spearoes? Scubadivers? Any estimations?

 

[trux]

PS. Does anybody know, how many freedivers there's in the world? And how about spearoes? Scubadivers? Any estimations?

I saw estimates of around 10 thousands competitive freedivers (some info here). Alone in AIDA result registry there is around 2.500 names, I believe. But you then have other federations like the FFESSM, BIOS, CMAS, etc - in many countries people do competitive freediving but not necessarily under AIDA (i.e. France, Italy, Spain). If you include also recreational freedivers and spearos with interest in freediving physiology and training, the number may be much higher. The problem is though that the vast majority comes from the Mediterranean countries, where people are famous for refusing English and foreign languages in general, so they don't really count as potential customers for a magazine written in English. Besides it, the Med nations all have their freediving/spearfishing magazines.

 

[spaghetti]

I once asked numbers to a friend who was in a high charge of the Fipsas (italian federation for recreational fishing and underwater sports).
These are the approximate numbers he gave me for Italy (it was 4 years ago):
up to 2005 we had 83.000 (83 thousands!) spearfishers, counting in the lot everyone from the Fipsas affiliated 600 competitive spearos, to the avid recreational ones, down to the army of gun-packed-swimmers who own a speargun and use it a couple times in summer. Then we had 600 freedivers (patented from a course: the number must have boosted since then, since every dog and his mother is attending a freediving course here), 400 finswimmers and 200 uw target shooters.

 

[trux]

Yes, it is similar here in France too. I just counted the number of freediving clubs on the French federation website. There are 140 of them, and I know the list is not complete. Our club has each year around 50 active members (but in total there were more than 200 of them visiting the courses in the last few years), although we have only around 10 members who participate on competitions. Our club may be little over the average size, but on the other hand there are clubs with far over 100 members too. So I guess, there may be easily 3,000-5,000 organized freedivers in France (perhpas even more). I did not count clubs for spearfishing, target shooting, UW hockey, or fin-swimming (though sometimes they are common for several UW activities).

The only problem (in regard to eventual English edition of a freediving magazine) is what I already mentioned - only very few of them are willing or able to read articles about freediving in English. You can see it already on the very low participation of French freedivers here at DB. There are more freedivers here from each other European country, even if the freediving community there can be often counted on fingers of your hands. It it were proportional, we would have to see hundreds (or at least tens) of active French here, but I remember only one or two occasional French posters.