rooster wrote:...and dived for 136 meters, which was enough to win...
The other mindboggling number is 446 feet. Using scuba gear, you can use exotic stuff like trimix (helium/nitrogen/oxygen) to get down around that depth, but after about 10 minutes you have to come back up and wile away the next 90 or 120 being bored out of your skull as you slowly decompress at various depths along the way back up. By comparison, something like 95-98% of dives are done with compressed or slightly oxygen enriched compressed air, where you're limited to 120 feet.
If you have no equipment like this guy it's called freediving and means you have don't worry about decompression. For records like this you basically just sit on a sled with weights, hold your breath, take a ride to the depths, and ascend as quickly as you can. The freedivers I knew were always slightly nuts, albeit less than the ice divers cutting holes in lakes during the winter.
A brief Google search found a post on the other board by a couple divers with much better than normal desats given their AHIs, and much like them I was always told I took a lot longer to burn through an air tank for my size than I should have. Very interesting.
I may have to get back into the sport - learning to free dive might be a lot more fun adjunct therapy than didgeridoo playing!
