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On Wed, 21 Feb 1996, Barrie Kovish wrote:

> 
> >I am interested in improving my breath-holding diving skills.
> >Can anyone give me some interesting pointers on the subject ?
> 
> Since your in Belgium I'm going to take a wild flier and guess you can 
> read French.  If so, check out Apnea, a French magazine with articles on
> free diving.  One technique I can mention is too use a weight on a line
> to aid your descent.  With this technique it is possible to descend 
> quite deep.  However it is also possible to get quite BENT.

Barrie,
	It is NOT very POSSIBLE TO GET QUITE BENT when breath-hold 
diving.  There are basicly only two ways to get bent due to breath-hold 
diving. 
1)	After a significant amount of Nitrogen tissue loading due to a 
previous SCUBA dive.  The microbubbles which may be present in your 
bloodstream (non-symptematic DCS) after a SCUBA dive may become 
compressed at depth on a breath-hold dive and bubble out of solution upon 
a quite ascent lodging in joints, etc. (DCS onset). Only a few cases 
reported of this kind.
2)	Repeated breath-hold dives to extreme depths (>100 ft) where the 
cumulative time at depth nears and exceeds that of no-decompression 
limits on tables (cases reported by Japanese women oyster divers who dive 
to 100+ ft repeatedly)

Other than these two situations, if you know anything about physics and 
the gas laws, you would realize it is very difficult to get bent on a 
breath-hold dive.  The gases you breath in are at 1 atm, become 
compressed at depth, and can only expand to what they where when you took 
the breath (1 atm).  I've read extensively about Jaque Mayol and 
Francisco Ferreras Pipin (2 of the world's greatest breath-hold divers) 
and their techniques.
			Safe diving, 
				Sean Creagan
				Virginia Institute of Marine Science
				screagan@vi*.ed* 
 > Barrie Kovish
> Vancouver, Canada
> 
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