Dganit is an assistant instructor (scuba) in “Aquasport”. Normally from our experience freediving courses for scuba instructors are not necessarily a breeze, they tend to struggle with, surprisingly, correct finning technique and head down equalisation.

Dganit was a joy to teach! She is one of the 2% of very gifted people who can equalise easily with BTV. Her finning technique was basically good from the start and only needed a small amount of polishing. If every student was like this… Continued…

I had come across an article more than a year ago on Herbert Nitch’s experiences in diving with the skandalopetra, culminating with his 107 mt world record. So I was pre-warned about some of the main challenges. The first was the cold, only a speedo was permitted for this discipline, there were thermoclines to deal with, and sudden cooooold!

I learned that breathe up was done on the surface in either a sitting, kneeling or standing position. This was the easy part, then one bends forward and dives into the water. My anxiety, at first, was would my noseclip come off in the plunge through the surface. This didn’t happen, but in my first dive I dropped the stone on entry, luckly my handler (kolauzeris) detected this, stopped it’s descent so I grabbed it again and continued my descent.

When one reaches the preselected depth Continued…

 Before I begin this tale of our discovery of Skandalopetra and our understanding of the techniques required, just a brief word about our mentor Nikolas Trikilis, the Guru of Skandanopetra. Nikolas is one of those people who with great ease gets on with everybody, a person of considerable charm. If he was a politician it would stop there, but in his case it is far from stopping there, he is a person of enormous patience, an ability to emphatise that goes far beyond the definition of a great comunicator. He helped us before our arrival and had the patience to listen to and answer all my questions at even inappropriate times.

We learned exactly how hard a life this was for the Continued…

It was in 1992-3 that that I read Jacques Mayol’s book “Homo Delphinus”, it had just come out in French. In it was the story of a Greek Sponge diver called Haggi Statti (Hazzi Stathi), who had recovered the anchor of the Santa Margarita. The story is one of the great stories of freediving.

The Italian light Cruiser Santa Margarita (Regina Margherita) was paying a courtesy visit to Greece and managed to lose its anchor in the bay of Pigadia in the island of Karpathos. There were no available hard hat divers and the depth was extreme more than 70 mts. Eventually someone informed the Italians that there was a local sponge diver who regularly dived breath hold to those depths. At first they were skeptical, but Continued…