After realising why I wasn’t happy with my medal dive I put on the big boy pants and announced to my team captain that I wouldn’t make the same mistake twice and that I would announce 98 m on the bifins day. I easily did close to that in training and my bifins depths have always been similar to my FIM dives in terms of effort but much shorter in terms of divetime, so that depth was more than reasonable to announce.
However, before the bifins day there was the no-fin day. I was very conflicted about this dive. Before last July I did a total of 0 CNF dives since 2016, so CNF was really not on my radar. Before my trip to Roatan, Mr. Italian captain said prepare 2 disciplines + 1 as back up just in case, so last July I did 3 CNF dives to see how much I sucked at it I did 60 fairly easily, with a thicker suit and quite a bit of weight. I knew I could get to the podium with a dive in the mid 60 because very often in world championships the 5th or 6th announcement ends up on the podium. So despite Bub telling me not to do CNF and save energy for my bifins dive, of course I figured, what’s wrong with announcing a potential podium number and then see how the day develops… and if the deepest dives fail and I have a potential podium then I can give it a try. Sure enough 2 of the deeper announcements failed, so I was a potential n.3, and I told myself, screw Bub, he always knows best and he’s always right, but I’ll do what I want anyways because, let’s be honest, I’m an idiot. Why should I go home with 1 medal when I can get 2, or even 3, right?
So, during my countdown, I was thinking “Ok, this is probably not such a bright idea after all, but hey I’m here and I did 60 with double the weight on me, of course I can do 63”.
Problem is, I hyperventilated (unwillingly), because long story short I was trying to change my breathe-up due to something that happened on my previous dive (it would take too long to get into it right now).
The way down was quite nice honestly (courtesy of low CO2 probably), I felt fast and efficient, my 6 strokes + 2 kicks took me to 38 metres with little effort and the freefall was quite nice. After the turn I did the first few strokes and I felt heavy. But I had barely 750gr of lead on me, so I told myself it must be in my head. At the 5th stroke I felt both my feet and hands tingling very noticeably. That’s not a good sign, like not at all. My mind went instantly back to the only one time I blacked out, 16 years ago, during a CNF wr attempt. I felt exactly the same as now, and at 25m I aborted and started pulling, at which point my safety diver (none other than mr. Herbert Nietsch because I’m cool like that and I don’t have nobodies as safety divers) picked me up for a free ride but at 10 meters I went off to dreamland.
So here I am, feeling all weird and thinking that I’ll black out on this one dive too, that I should pull up instead, but my pride doesn’t let me, either I make it or I don’t but I’m not gonna quit. I heard my ascent alarm at 25m and told myself, cool, maybe I’ll make it after all, but it was hard to focus on the smaller details and I forgot to slide my hand on the rope to glide against it the last few metres, so when I broke the surface i went like, ops, where’s the rope? I can’t see anything with my fluid goggles out of the water, I tried to grab the rope, I missed and grabbed some air instead and that was enough to send me over the edge. The safety had to hold me, and I had a small black out while still trying to hold myself up and give the ok sign to the judge (looking super stupid in the process-as you can see in the video) and I was given a red card as a reward.
