Freediving the Willy

[Chris H]

Jon,
When you post your photos on this page, they need to be less than 100KB. Do you shoot them in high res and then edit them with software so they are smaller, or do you take them low res?

[FreediveWI]

I have some phots saved on my hard drive that I took with film and scanned in. Those photos I need to reduce in size. I just resize them and save them in a seperate file.

The photos that I posted under this thread were taken with my digital camera set to its lowest resolution setting.

Jon

[Omicron]

That's awesome...I like the self portrait

So how deep is the willy anyway?

And on a day of freediving, when off a charter...how many dives do you make usually? And how long does a free dive last, as far as bottom time goes?

Sorry about the rapid fire questions...I'm kinda curious

[FreediveWI]

The bottom is anywhere from 70' to 90' deep.

I try to always double my surface interval time from my bottom time- to avoid getting bent. If my dive time is 1 minute I stay up for 2 minutes. If I am down for 1 1/2 minutes I stay up for 3. I can keep this pace up for quite a while.

When I dive shallower, like when I go spearfishing, my bottom times are around 2 minutes and my surface intervals are the same, or even a little bit less.

Jon

[Omicron]

Interesting stuff. So you can really get quite a few dives in then...you could probably spend as much time on the wreck as the guys on scuba. Cool stuff....

[FreediveWI]

More time in the water is one of the big things that really attracted me to freediving. I have been on too many dive trips where some guy sucks his tank down in 20 minutes and the divemaster makes us all surface with 2,000 psi and go back to the boat-sometimes it's even the divemaster who runs out early! :-X

With freediving you are free from those constraints.

If we do two dives on the same wreck I actually get more time in because I don't need to stay out of the water for an hour and change tanks. I can dive for three hours straight with the right wetsuit on. 8)

The last time I was divig up at Lake Wazee I spent almost 8 hours in the water. I could cover more ground than the scuba divers and didn't have to get out to switch tanks or get them refilled. After all, spending time in the water is really what it's all about.

This past winter my buddy and I were spearfishing in Lake Monona. We were in the water for a little over an hour when this scuba diver came in all suited up in his drysuit, pony bottle, flags and floats, dive lights, ect. He spent MAYBE 30 minutes in the water and then left. We spent another 2 hours in there and saw all kinds of fish- musky, northern, bass, carp, ect. We speared some and I took picutres of others. It was a great day and we got to see a lot of things that the other diver missed.

Some of the best things, like the HUGE tiger musky, were in very shallow water, less than 4', and my back would have been breaking the surface if I had a tank on it. When we spearfish everything is very shallow- less than 20'. The shallows are where all of the fish are at in the inland lakes. Once you past 20' you enter the mud zone and ther just aren't the plants and 02 there to support large amounts of fish. If you want to see fish you need to stay shallow. If you want to get close enough to pet them you need to stop blowing bubbles which sacre them away- except for bass which are so stupid that I don't think anything would scare them away.

Next time you get out diving try and do about an hours worth of freedivng before you put your tank on. You'll have scouted out the area to see where the best places to go are and I bet that you'll use a LOT less air because your body gets acclimated to the water. This is a big reason why I always teach the snorkeling dive as part of the openwater course. If you get a good 30 minutes of snorkeling in before you have to go down and do mask clears it just seems to make everything go so much easier. It's too bad that so many orginizations now make that dive optional. It really does make you a more comfortable diver.

[Omicron]

Yeah, I never even got the snorkelling as part of my original OW class.

I would agree with you that you get more time in the water when you are freediving...definitely. But, I just get annoyed, or don't like, the feeling of holding my breath for that long. It's uncomfortable and leaves me with a not so pleasant feeling of being underwater. I enjoy it, but the constant nagging feeling in your chest as your breath slowly gets old....

[FreediveWI]

COLD WATER IS BACK!

After getting blown off the lake yesterday, we got out for a quick charter this morning. THe lake was starting to calm down, though there was still a little swell, and the warm water was gone. I had 45 degress on the surface adn was a littel bit bummed becasue I had brought my 3mm freediving suit instead of my 6mm. :'( Still, I wasn't as bummed as the guys with the Scubapro regualtors that had freeze ups and had the call their dives short.
The Dacor and Apeks regualtors didn't seem to have any problems at all.

On the positive side, vis was great, well over 40'. But the divers decided to call it early, after only one dive, since their gear wasn't up to it.

Here's a shot of them when they first got in.

Jon

[FreediveWI]

We also had a bit of a fog bank to go through on the way out, but it cleared up nicely once we tied up to the wreck. 8)

Jon

[FreediveWI]

In the end I only got to do a few freedives since everyone's dives were so short- and two of those were spent searching the bottom for the boat hook that someone else lost during our tie-up.

I did manage a quck shot of the pilot house.

Jon