Stephane's thoughts corner…

Stephane Bailliez's thoughts on everything

I’m lagging a bit behind concerning entries as I’m not diving very often and not focusing too much about taking pictures. I’m following a divemaster course (1st professional level) which is taking me more time than I expected as I’m not really focused and my mind and thoughts are wandering somewhere else most of the time.

Once it is finished, I will spend some more time in Dahab doing some fun diving (photography) , some freediving as well, as I’m just curious to see where I stand without any specific training at all. It goes without saying that I will spend more time than in vacation than originally planned.

I’m mostly hanging out with Annelie Pompe (#2 Swedish freediver), Fred, Sam Still (#1 UK freediver and World Champion Static Apnea and also unofficial world record owner with a 10min+ without breathing !), my instructor Youri and his girlfriend Samantha . All those people (plus others) are having such a diverse background (Software, Hardware, Marketing, Advertising, Marine Biology, Antiques, …) that I find it captivating. Having been talking to Sam Still for a couple of hours about freediving training, I find the topic of freediving and physiology even more interesting.

Oh, and for a couple of days now, I’m enjoying listening to Beth Orton. Her song ‘Stars all seem to weep’ from her Central Reservation album is a jewel.

Pictures were taken on a mix of freediving and scuba diving session in a dive from Bells to Blue Hole. Annelie and Anthony (freediving) were following Youri and I (scuba diving) on a dive along the whole. Depth was mostly shallow, in the 10-15m range
and this was mostly planned as a freediving photo session.

I went to St. Catherine’s monastery on new year’s eve along with Annelie and Carl. None of us being some kind of a party person, we thought it was interesting to take the opportunity to get away and do something reasonably different for a new year. At least, you remember that 2006 was the year you went on top of Mount Sinai rather than the nth year where you went to a restaurant and ended up in a bar half-drunk with 2000 other people. I had some interesting proposals to stay in Dahab and hang around but thought it would be nice to be something ‘different’. Note that there is absolutely nothing religious in our trip.

Initially the plan was to climb around 22:00 to get on top of Mount Sinai and celebrate New Year and come back before sunrise and look for rock climbing spots. In the evening, after some food and beduin tea around the fire at Fox Camp, we changed our mind and thought it was better to get some sleep, wake up around 02:45 and climb to see the sunrise. Which we did. After some good walking from the base camp (altitude 1500m), we had to cope with 2 steep sections of about 650 and 100 stairs to end up the climb and wait for the sunrise on top of Mount Sinai along with a handful of Americans (where were they coming from ? there are none in Dahab !), Colombians, Japaneses, Koreans and many other nationalities. It’s hard to give a numbers but I would say at least over 200 people.

The climb was not cold and I was fine by wearing a traveller pant, a t-shirt, a light sweat-shirt and another sweat on top. Annelie was freezing by wearing 4 layers of tight technical clothes which makes me wonder whether she is really swedish or from somewhere else (note that she was still ‘freezing’ (her own words) at the base camp in the morning when the temperature was around 17C with no wind at all). You would sure get a bit cold by staying still for a couple of hours, so YMMV. Keep in mind though that Mount Sinai is not exactly empty. You get “shops” full of chocolate bars, water, soda, tea and such on the way a s well as at the top. At the top you will also be able to get mattresses and blankets. Everything is of course at rip-off tourist price, egyptically speaking.

We left from the top at around 07:00 and slowly made our way to St. Catherine’s Monastery that we reached around 08:30. After a well-deserved breakfast, we went into the village to try to locate the place used for rock climbing, so that Annelie could come at a later time to get quicker access and probably setup rock climbing expeditions from Dahab.

There is a couple of nice pictures of Annelie (aka Annelie Pompe). She is well known in Sweden. Apart from being a personal trainer and having a website where she does online personal coaching, she’s a sport addict and hyperactive person who does everything which involves jumping around: ninjitsu, yoga, mountain biking, running, rock climbing, freediving, scuba diving and a hundred of others things. The most annoying for a normal person is that she’s good at everything. She’s working at Desert Divers for 3 months now as a yoga teacher, rock climbing instructor, freediving instructor and divemaster . She’s also training for the freediving world championship next year. At the moment, she performs around 5min30s in static apnea (breath holding) and freedive to 50m. Beside being blonde, swedish, cute, and proficient in a lot of things, she’s a very nice person to hang with and she likes Banofee pie, Snikers and Mars bars as well as Nutella (I have very compromising pictures, should it prove necessary ).

If anyone is interested about rock climbing, freediving, scuba-diving, desert trips, they can get in touch with Desert Divers and ask for Annelie.

As for Carl, Carl and Annelie went to school together a couple of years back and lived 300m from each other in Sweden. They somewhat managed to bump into each other in Dahab by pure accident. Small world eh ?

I apologize for the extremely bad coloring of some pictures posted, but for I don’t have Photoshop on my laptop and the RAW conversion utilities I have tried in either Picasa, ORF Suite, BreezeBrowser or such are absolutely unusable without spending an absurd amount of time.

Since Sylvain told me that the entry about nitrox was quite interesting despite myself not going too much into details, I thought that it could be interesting to carry on with some details about diving and along the way answer a couple of questions that non-divers often ask when given the chance. It could also at least allow some mindly meaningful content as a support to pictures.

What most people are wondering very often, is the how deep divers are supposed to go. There is not a single answer to that question, but to make it quite clear. Recreational diving is happening mostly above 30m.

As I mentioned already, the air is made of roughly 78% of nitrogen and 21% oygen. This is what we get at the normal atmospheric pressure at 1 bar. When you are diving, you get an additional 1 bar of pressure every 10m. So at 10m you have 2bar, 20m/3bar, 30m/4bar and so on…

If we increase the pressure, we increase the amount of gas absorbed. So if we are diving at 30m, with 4 times the pressure, we will absorb 4 times the amount of nitrogen. Unlike oxygen, the body does not use nitrogen, so the gas accumulates in the tissues in time. It’s not an instant process though. The gas exchange in our bodies happens in our lungs with each breath and the excess gas is then carried to our body tissues by our circulatory system.

When you have all this nitrogen in your body and the pressure decrease (ie you are slowly going up (the slowly here is important, as I said already, it is not an instant process), the excess nitrogen is slowly eliminated by the body as we breath out the nitrogen.

If you come up to the surface without having eliminated most nitrogen, like for example diving 60mins at 30m and come up to the surface quickly, you can be sure to get lots of bubbles in your blood and you will get a kind of soda-like effect within your body. It will cause you major pain, depending on gravity you will get irreversible damage and if not treated, death will certainly follow. This is what is called DCS (Decompression sickness). If symptoms appear, besides immediately breathing pure oxygen, you must go to the nearest recompression chamber facility (hyperbaric unit).

One should keep in mind that there is no single and simple rule to avoid DCS. Some people got it diving in very shallow waters with no particular risk exposure known.

Several mathematical models exist to help in knowing the limits, they have been mostly based on experience and statistics, but in fact very little is still known. Most statistics have been obtained from army experiments and of course were done on very fit young individuals. This is one of the reasons why it is advised to keep reasonably fit and healthy.

The most famous work was done by John Haldane for the Royal Navy in the early 1900′s, otherwise a large amount of information has been gathered in the last decades by the US Navy and offshore diving companies such as COMEX.