It has been a great dive day at the blue hole, beautiful visibility. I saw some great dives today. A disappointing day for Ryuzo, he had an entire film crew here to film him and he had a sticky ear and had to turn early at 90M. Johan finally made the 100M, so it will be interesting to see what he does in the final.
I must eat breakfast now!

I think I am doing all right, 10th in the world in CWT and 5th in CNF going in to the finals!!!

It is surprising how well they go together. I’m not sure if I should be thanking or cursing the Japanese film crew for introducing to the best cheesecake that I have ever had. Immediately after I first tried it, within a few days I had an entire cheesecake in my fridge, and now for about two weeks, there has not been a day when I haven’t had cheesecake. Maybe it is was conspiracy?

Something crazy must have been happening for the women in the CNF qualification heats. I think it is possible that we were all under this cheesecake spell and many of us didn’t anticipate the effect this delectable dessert was going to have on our performances…

It is strange that 4 of the 6 deepest announced had issues on their dives. Hmmm I smell conspiracy, I think I will confront the film crew about this. Not that I am complaining since two of my biggest competitors had black outs at depths which should have been very easy for them. Over half the women had problems with their dives, there were more BO with 13 competitors then with the men with 27.

Personally I had a very sloppy dive, I got distracted by all of the underwater cameras, I think I passed four videographers before I passed 35 meters, not counting all of the photographers, so I was slightly distracted and not paying attention to my equalization. I swallowed my mouthful and that was my last equalization. I was in a lot of pain and I thought about turning early. I had my hand on the line and was about to turn when I looked down and saw the plate and decided to go a few more meters. I got the tag and made my depth, but I lost 5 points for grabbing the line.

Thank you to my coach Alexey, see us below, I felt very relaxed before my dive and had a nice easy warm up. I know what to expect tomorrow having to share my time in the deep with so many other people, so hopefully my ears and sinuses will be happy with me at 10:58 when I return to the surface.


It was an all around fantastic day for the men. The sun was shining all day, 11 national records, 7 men made the finals because of nice planning by the French team. It will be an interesting finals, I wonder how many of them were diving close to their limits? A few of the top seven looked very strong upon surfacing and others were a little shaky.

The woman finalists on the other hand, I do not predict seeing any big surprising, although rumor has it that Niki has her eye on the world record. Natalia is sure to do a solid clean deep performance, maybe even breaking her world record, Junko and Brigitte will likely add to their records, however there is always a chance that they may have a trick up their sleeves. Olga was pleasantly surprised to make it into the finals and I expect to see a clean, solid dive from her, slightly deeper then she did in the qualifying heats.

Today I rested and I was able to eat only one piece of cheesecake, this is what I look like two times a day, when I answer the call from the fridge…

One more day until registration, what should I announce? What will my competitors be announcing? Does it matter? These are question many athletes will be thinking over in the next couple of days. Some divers are here to dive for themselves, to add to their personal bests, some are here defending titles, some are here diving for sponsors and media attention, we all have our reasons.

I have to say that I am feeling very grateful for having a lot of time here to prepare, things have not gone the way I would have liked them to go most of the time, but with the competition beginning in two days I feel that I have done the best that I can do. I feel ready. I learned a valuable lesson at the last championships about pushing too hard and I plan on doing dives that I feel very comfortable with, will those be enough to make the finals? Honestly I am not sure, I do not know much about my competitors, but I do know my personal struggles and myself.

Depth disciplines are interesting because there are no surprises, if all of the competitors make their depths you can see the winners from the day before. Of course things don’t always go as planned, which can make things very scary or exciting.

Yesterday I took a rest day, I will dive tomorrow, then one more day of rest, then it is time. Until then enjoy the sunsest!

It is pretty unbelievable that I have already been here for ten days, where does the time go?

I travel a lot so usually when I arrive in a new place it takes me a few days before I feel settled and relaxed. When I arrived on Long Island I was initially disappointed with the room that I had rented. It was suppose to have a kitchen, necessary really because I am here for a month and it only had a very small fridge. I chose not to worry about it, because I knew something great would come up and “Rowdy Boys” happens to have some of the best fish burgers and fries on this planet. After a few days I moved into a beautiful, big house that is very quiet and peaceful.

Initially there were not many divers on the island, Alexey and I thought we would pick a not so popular time of day to dive, the morning. Things can get pretty hectic on the lines here after 10:30am until the mid afternoon. 10:30 is Will Trubridge’s time slot, and with Rob, Johan and Herbert diving after that so there is really no other times to dive except in the late afternoon or the morning. Diving in the late afternoon makes the rest of the day useless, although after my morning dive, lunch and a nap the sun has usually gone down.

When Guillaume, Ryuzo , Kathryn and Chris discovered we were diving in the morning they all decided to join us. Suddenly our not so popular slot has become the most popular time of the day. The majority of the French team arrived yesterday and now there is around 10 of us on the platform from 9:20 to 10:40am. In a way all of these people on the platform feels like diving in competition, another good way to prepare.

Long Island is known for being a very slow island with not a lot to do. But with all of the diving I have been doing, plus land training and a few dinners with friends the days are fading away very fast.

More people will be arriving everyday now and the atmosphere will continue to change and become more exciting. Hopefully days will continue to be filled with great dives and wonderful friends.

The biggest battle I have been fighting here has been with the sand flies aka no see ums. These nasty little bugs make you feel grateful for mosquitoes. After 2 nights of stormy rainy weather I was covered in about 200 very itchy bites. I would be waking up in the middle of the night scratching my legs very hard. If you are coming here start taking vitamin B1 NOW! The only person who has not been badly bitten is Ryuzo and he normally takes this vitamin. I have been trying all sorts of experimental treatments that I found on the internet and I am able to sleep through the night now.


This is Guana Cay, one of my favorite places on the island.

Diving has been going well, then not so well, then a few days ago it started to feel good again. My head likes to play funny games with my body. The first few days I put no pressure on myself at all to do any deep dives and things were feeling wonderful, I was comfortable at depth and I was doing deeper dives in training then I have done since February.
That made me feel fantastic and very confident about my abilities for this upcoming competition. As some of you may know I typically change my favorite disciplines after I set a record. While I am training I can be very motivated by the challenge to do things that I did not think were possible for me to accomplish. Usually after I have reached my goal I need a mental break and so I change my focus to another discipline.

I think it is also common knowledge that I am not a big fan of CWT, simply because I have problems relaxing at depth and therefore I cannot equalize. This is a common in most beginners and during CWT I find humility. I am not challenged by lactic build up or by hypoxia, but this is where my head comes in and creates a limit for me. Anyway this is my very long way of starting my story that in the beginning of this trip I was loving CWT! It was feeling easy, very nice and I was equalizing much deeper than I usually do. Of course my ego loves this, and my head is off to the races about what I will do in the competition and how easy it will be to dive deeper. I am thinking the next dive will be great, when I try to go deeper then my other training dives, what happens? I can’t equalize, hmmm expectations ruin everything, thus is life and definitely not a new lesson.

I believe that if I had an opportunity to train CWT without the pressure of an upcoming competition that I would do much better in that discipline, but for now being new to the sport and having had great results in many other disciplines, I am okay with laying my goal of achieving records in CWT to rest until I am more experienced, I have a lot of time and much still to learn.



The competition is approaching very quickly and so now I must focus and prepare myself for CNF. I did my first CNF on day three to 30M and it was so hard. This is how CNF feels if you have not done it in a while. I got a few suggestions from Kerian about a better way for me to train and I have had two successful CNF days in a row and tomorrow I will take my 2nd day off since I got here.

My body has been feeling very stiff recently. My plan is to begin practicing yoga again, also being more diligent about stretching in the morning before the dive. I am not a morning person and the idea of getting out of bed, without food or coffee in the morning is not something I would do for anything other then diving. The last two days I have stretched and I have had very nice feelings during my dives so stretching does me well.

A little late I know, but better late then never. I was actually getting ready to write this blog a few weeks ago with the main subject being 3 times Egypt and no Egyptian tummy, well that thought was unexpectedly demolished by getting sick. I am not sure what caused it, whether it was something I ate or if it was the extremely still Red Sea. Many of my fellow divers got sick as well. The lack of current, although beautiful to look at this sea of glass, made to lack of government infrastructure very apparent when surfacing from a dive you had to swim past a sea of trash.

Okay I’m jumping way a head; let me start from the beginning. After the world championships in Denmark I had 5 different planes to take and a very long time before I arrived in Sharm el Sheik. As soon as I walked in my friend Deb’s front door, put down my stuff, she told me to grab my gear because we were going diving!
Five minutes later with my bikini on, gear on my back and trying to cover myself appropriately to respect the locals during their Ramadan fast, we were off. To be truthful all that I wanted to do was sleep, and after a great lunch on a beautiful boat I had a nice cat nap before some beautiful afternoon diving.
Originally I was planning on heading down to Dahab after a few days, but I was having so much fun in Sharm that I delayed my departure for almost a week and I could delay no longer. I was recreationally diving almost daily in Sharm, but I knew that if I was planning to dive deeper then 30M in the competition that I had better get to Dahab and dive on the line.
Originally my plan with the triple depth competition was to just have a very relaxing, easy comp without any pressure. This year triple depth decided to have a team component to the competition and Alexey Molchanov had asked me to be on his team. Ok so now the pressure to perform was on. Alexey and I arrived in Dahab and we needed to find another teammate. At dinner my suppose to be roommate Kathryn McPhee was also looking for a team, so it was settled. I had three days of training on the line before the competition was to start.
I was training mostly with Alexey. I have to say that compared to him, I don’t train at all. I realize that I am relatively new to the sport but my typical deep training day would consist of stretching in the morning, a couple of warm up hangs at 15m then a target dive. Over the three days I did more training dive then I would typically do in a few weeks!
After training and finishing lunch on the first day, we went for a swim to, then some fun no fins dives going under a swim through at 25M and then a little diving with some scuba divers around 20M. I think the first day I must have done at least 15 dives, and the other days were much of the same.
The first day of competition was static. I hate static! I admire people that can lie down in the water and play dead for minutes at a time and enjoy it. I haven’t come to that place yet, maybe one day. I had no motivation for the pain that day and after two warm up hold of 3 mins and 3:40, I pulled off an amazing 2:40 as my target. Good thing static didn’t count for points towards the main competition. My team mates had nice easy holds and afterwards we came up with our team name. We had been going back and forth about what to call ourselves. There was a mention of something Kiwi and something else Russia and during an afternoon Yoga session and Tiramisu lunch we decided: Sexy, Flexy, Mulha Bandha. I will let you decide who you think each name applies to since we had a few friendly battles over it ourselves.

Day 1: Free Immersion: I had announced 51M, somewhere around 40M I missed my equalization and being the warrior that I am I road it out to the plate and came up clean with the tag and a little sinus squeeze. Kathryn had a clean dive to 55M and Alexey did a ridiculously easy 90M.
Day 2: Constant weight: I announced 55M, thinking that was a conservative and should be nice to my sinuses. I got the tag, returned to the surface, pulling off my nose clip just before and the first thing I hear out of Lotta’s mouth after I say okay is “YOUR BLEEDING” Sinus squeeze day 2 a little worse. What to do? I have no options for rest before CNF the next day and being my strongest depth discipline I wanted to take back the Pan American record but that was two days in a row of a sinus squeeze.
Day 3: Constant No Fins: I announced 53M, the deepest announcement for a woman. A lot was riding on this day for the team competition, if the three of us had clean dives or small penalties we were for sure going to win. Kathryn had a successful dive as did I and Alexey did an easy 75M, but he got a penalty for still holding onto the line when his airway entered to water. I was very happy to have completed my dive, my sinuses had taken a beating this competition and it was time for a rest.
A rest for a few hours anyway, I was heading back home late that night. Surprisingly I ended up placing third overall for women. Another surprise was our team won free entry into next years competition. Things that are free always make me smile, especially when they are useful.
A long journey back home, which always seems to feel like a bit of a war zone when I have been away for a while. Too much to do in too little time, what better to do then wake up on a Friday morning and book a ticket back to Egypt for that afternoon? Ha ha maybe one of my crazier moments but I had 6 days to kill before I had guests arriving so a little vacation is good for a recharge and maintaining my constant state of jet leg.
That brings me to the third time Egypt, serious training for the world championships. I had a wonderful trip, besides the small visit to the hospital, but overall I felt great, the diving was great and I have to say that Egypt is a very nice place to train.
Today I arrived in Nassua, Bahamas and I will spend one night here before I head to Long Island and become reacquainted with the Dean’s Blue Hole and island lifestyle. There are three things that Egypt and the Bahamas have in common; spectacular diving, nice weather and crappy Internet!