Here’s the result list from today’s DNF.

Tomorrow morning Static and in the afternoon Dynamic with fins. I already got many photos and videos but these will be uploaded when I get back. You can follow live coverage as it happens during the competition at my twitter feed.

If there is an internet connection I will give you an update during and/or after the competition. In the mean time here is the freedivecentral competition website. 58 competitors from 10 countries is a good international line up!

LAST MINUTE UPDATE: I’ll be twittering all the latest info, including pictures, to my twitterfeed which you can find by going to my personal website and looking at the right collumn, or by directly visiting the feed itself on twitter. If you’re familiar with twitter and have your own account over there you can follow me and even ask questions directly to me at the competition. You have a question for a competitor like William Winram? Just ask me and I let the person reply by himself!

She had a few oxygen related accidents and even some hearing problems because she broke her ear drums several times during shoots for her films. More about her on her own website or her wikipedia page.

I wonder how long she really could hold her breath with all the shooting and training she did for her films.

For the people who forgot about CMAS and their intentions to take over the freediving world; everybody is invited to join this competition but if you compete here you need to know that you sell your soul to the devil, because after this it’s forever forbidden to participate in an AIDA competition. You see CMAS has some crazy rule that the only federation that you can freedive with is their own Uber organization. If you still dare to compete with the dark force that is called AIDA then you will be banned from CMAS. Now that’s what I call customer binding!

As most freedivers live up to their name and they want to be free, they mostly ignore this competition. For sure the top freedivers from AIDA will not be there and the level of freediving going on at a CMAS world champion competition is about the same as many national AIDA competitions.

Everybody is free to do what they want, but when an organization is making such stupid rules everybody should ban this competition. Sometimes I wonder what these kind of people are thinking and it brings back memories of one of my favorite cartoons “Pinky and the Brain”

If you absolutely, positively, sureability must have more info about this event, then you can visit their website by clicking on the small dot . (Just to make sure that you’re very sure)

This is the first competition that makes use of the AIDA results machine, so it’s pretty easy to pull out the results. At the same time it’s also interesting to link to all the names mentioned in this article so when you click on their name you see a full overview of all competitions they attended. Great stuff!

Lets start with the women, sorry woman. Paivi Mettovaara got the first place prize with a 4:15 static and a 104 meter dynamic with fins. Congrats to her.

With the men Jussi Lehtonen was the winner with a 6:32 static and a 125 meter dynamic with fins. Second place was for Eero Soralahti who did a 5:01 and a 129 meter dynamic with fins. Eero put himself to the goal of reaching 200 meters in dynamic in 2007 and what I understood he took a little break after his failed attempts during the world championships in Maribor. So this is his first competition again and I hope he will reach his goal this year. Third place was for Saku Saaristo who did a 5:25 static and a 100 meter dynamic.

See the complete results in the AIDA results machine here. The pictures attached to this article are from Kimmo Lahtinen and you can watch a slideshow of his photos here.

Of course I don’t have to tell you anything about that fabulous place in Brussel with the 35 meter diving pit. Open for scuba divers for already 3 years, closed to freedivers for at least as many years. The first steps at opening up for freediving have now come with the introduction of Frederic Buyle’s freediving courses in that place. I received the following information from Fred:

AIDA Deep Tank Freediver course at Nemo33!

The 3 first ever freediving courses in Nemo 33 will take place in may 2008! Choice of 3 dates for the AIDA Deep Tank Freediver with Fred Buyle:
5th and 6th of may 2008
9th and 10th of may 2008
10th and 11th of may 2008

The courses will take place at Nemo 33, the world’s deepest pool over two days. It includes classroom sessions, 4 pool sessions and AIDA Tank Freediver certification. Freediving documentaries and slideshows’s projection during the evening.

Price: 425 Euros for the 5th/6th of may and 9th/10th of may, 450 Euros for the 10th/11th of may. Possibility of package deals for accommodation and meals. Stay tuned for more infos.

For more informations, please contact Fred.

“We plan to try out the new ranking system tomorrow for the Underground Apnea III competition. It’s still located on my temporary server and armed with “not official” texts, but I’d like to just put it out there and see what happens. So you should be able to follow in almost real time the results from the competition tomorrow, starting at around 13:00 GMT+2.

The results from 1999-2007 are also in there, so go ahead and play with it. While not perfect, I think I’ve managed to put some pretty cool features in there… Anyway, feedback is most welcome. Positive is nice, but (constructive) negative is more useful I’m particularily interested in concrete bugs and error situations and inconsistencies in the data. Such as a diver having results from a competition he never attended, or a competition having the wrong date etc.”

Bill Stromberg adds that soon this will be the way for AIDA to work with our ranking and on-line LIVE results. Interesting development and great to see. After browsing around for some time I find it pretty good already for basic use, but the one thing that will make this thing even better if they will make an open line to the data so that I can grab it and combine it with my own and create some interesting queries on top of them.

Once again, if you want to test it out go to this place.