Drowned Alive questions...

[superhornet59]

well everybody i havent shown myself in a while, but its gettin warmer and that means open water freediving. thought this time would never come

okay point of the thread. i believe Kirk Krack is a member of deeperblue, so i just had a few quick questions about the whole Drowned Alive event.

I was just watching daily planet, and they were showing the event. in the program, David Blaine said hes gonna hold his breath for 9 minutes while getting out of those chains. 9 MINUTES!? last i heard the record was 8:03, how on earth is he gonna achieve that, especialy after the hard conditions hes gonna go through during hte 7 days, surely this cant be right. also do you see any potential from him to being another big name in freediving? other then that, what are the affects on a human body in 7 days of water? i mean skin gets all pruny and i get uncomfortable after barely 5 hours. how is he gonna manage physicaly? on top of that, that water is filtered i hope... alot of skin is gonna accumulate in there if not that water didnt look to transparent on tv...

anyway thanks for your time, Matt

 

[Morg]

I just finished reading an article on DB. It explains some of your questions.

Heres a link: http://www.deeperblue.net/article.php/725/2

I missed the program , I would have wanted to hear PFI talk. Is he going to be doing the breath hold in a few days? Or has it already happened?

 

[naiad]

The breath hold is going to be on 8 May.

 

[trux]

I was just watching daily planet, and they were showing the event. in the program, David Blaine said hes gonna hold his breath for 9 minutes while getting out of those chains. 9 MINUTES!? last i heard the record was 8:03, how on earth is he gonna achieve that,...

The official AIDA record in static apnea (on plain air) is 8:58 of Tom Sietas, and today there are numerous freedivers who managed to hold the breath over 8 minutes. Tom Sietas held his breath over 10 minutes in training with clean surfacing.

However, Blaine can be relatively confident to go over 9 minutes even after the stress of the 7 days long underwater stay, because he apparently cannot breath plain air - at the depth of the water bubble of 8 feet (2.4m), and spending big parts of his stay close to the bottom, he would be seriously saturated with Nitrogen if he breathed plain air. Although the depth is quite shallow, the extremely long time would increase the risk of a decompression incident, and also the risk of bone necrosis (otherwise rather rare). For this simple reason he needs to breath a different gas mixture, or needs to be purged with Oxygen regularly. This will apparently happen also before the final apnea. The Guinness apnea record after breathing Oxygen made by Tom Sietas is over 15 minutes. An additional advantage of Blaine is that he'll breath the gas under pressure higher than the athmospheric pressure, so he can actually have much more Oxygen in lungs than Sietas had when breathing up on the surface.

Considering all these factors, Blaine is confident enough to hold his breath over 9 minutes that he even added another performance to it - escaping from chains. I just hope for him, that when preparing the chains, they counted with the swollen hands and feet he'll have after the 7 days under water.

 

[Morg]

I was watching ABC last night and he was saying that he is going to be chained to the bottom and his feat will be to get loose in 8 minutes or something. I thought he was going for 9 minutes

Hows he going to compete against Tom when David has to move around and get free from chains?

 

[trux]

Hows he going to compete against Tom when David has to move around and get free from chains?

Well, if Blaine does not want to comply to the AIDA rules, AIDA will have to change the rules. Since now, all next AIDA freediving competitions will be done in chains.

 

[matrixed82]

Well, if Blaine does not want to comply to the AIDA rules, AIDA will have to change the rules. Since now, all next AIDA freediving competitions will be done in chains.

And they will require a 7 day facial immersion.