Cayman
2006 - April 2 & 3, 2006
It's another World Record for Team PFI!!!
April 2
Whew ! A day off - so to speak - for athletes and crew. Sleep is high on the priority list, for sure, except for Video Meister Herr Direktor Grant Graves, who seems to have forgotten what sleep is. He's in the middle of Laptop City , a jungle of computers, video cameras and a spaghetti feast of cabling, cranking out those moving images that make people laugh and cry.
Our perky rebreather divers think a day off is doing pretty much the same thing as they do at the office - deep diving. Luke's education in things rebreather took an exciting turn when a plan for a simulated component failure at depth turned into the real thing ! Luke, surrounded as he was by the consummate dive professionals led by Bill Coltart, said later the most challenging aspect of the situation was coping with the near overdose of expert assistance his buddies served up.
There's a sense that the operational side of things went really well yesterday, and that sense has survived debriefing and review. We done good. We're fed, watered, locked and loaded for tomorrow, the second day of record attempts. We've even changed things around so everybody gets almost enough sleep !
April 3
Uh-oh. Martin needs a new trophy case. Another World Record: 106 meters Free Immersion. Martin was totally in the zone today. He's got two more attempt days ( April 5 and 7) to do his thing, so maybe there's something to these rumors about making the other guys' lives even harder than they are already.
Mandy scheduled a training dive, constant ballast to 84 meters, but had to shut down a little short of the bottom plate and head back up - right ear wedged on her. A bummer, for sure, but hey - this is Mandy-Rae. Can you spell b-a-c-k-b-o-n-e ? Mandy must have been at the head of the line when they handed out guts, so she's just putting that steel to work and getting her head straight to make it happen.
Doc tried to raise his own ante with a free immersion dive to 54 meters, topping his own US National record set 48 hours before at 51m. He was looking a little draggy on the boat before we set out, sacking out on Captain Ebank's favorite seat and chilling, so maybe he was still making up recovery time from Saturday. His descent looked pretty good, but at about 47 meters he began to hear voices ! He figured it was rebreather safety diver Bill Coltart signaling that Doc was about to reach the plate, but when Doc looked down - no plate. Turns out it was Kirk, safety freediving just above Doc. Doc made a quick , conservative call that something was not right and headed back up. Around 15 meters he realized he still had two attempt days left and in order to conserve physical resources signaled to Kirk and Tom Lightfoot, who took hold of him and gave him a free ride to the surface. Hey, maybe we've come up with something here: valet freediving. You descend under your own power, and when you want to surface you just signal to your valets, who pull you up as you relax and enjoy ! You heard it first here, folks.
Tomorrow is another day off, meaning frantic catch-up work for the media department, wild and crazy ocean fun for the in-water crew, a little fine-tuning-training for Mandy and ..mmmmmm, a wake-up call after dawn instead of before it. We love days off, when it's already light out when we get out of the sack.
Paul Kotik
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