IT’S ALMOST TIME for the next competition (in the neighbouring island of Lanzarote) and my coach Bub (short for Beelzebub) tells me it’s time for tapering. My non-native english speaking brain gets stuck on this strange sounding word. For me, taper are those who tape. Like with colourful electric tapes. Or duct tape. Or any tape. And tapering becomes the art of taping, like a hobby kinda thing.
But no, Bub means something more sinister than that.
In fact, tapering is a thing in sport, meaning “waste your time doing nothing but make it looks meaningful, and not like you are just being lazy”.
According to Google, tapering means “becoming thinner or narrower towards one end”, and yes, applied to my patience, that is absolutely correct; my patience is becoming very thin at this point. One more week to go and I can feel it inside, that I’m gonna lose it and kill someone.
While trying to kill time, I checked the status of tides for the comp day. Man, it doesnt look good, low tide at 7am, high tide at 1pm and a tidal range of 2.2 meters…. which means, very strong current in the middle of the morning, which is when we’ll dive.
Of course it may turn out that I’m wrong and miraculously the line will be straight as a raw spaghetti, but I’m doubtful.
My options? Announce short, or do an early turn, or black out.
This sucks, because I wanted to do a nice dive there.
This brings me back to 2018, the first and only other time I was in Lanzarote; I wasn’t competing then but I was coaching a friend at the Spanish National Championship (the photo below is of that competition) and at some point the current was quite vile, and pretty much whoever didn’t turn early ended up blacking out.
That’s when I thought, I’ll never come here to dive, but then of course a few years later when my memory of the event was accidentally expunged, due to probably excessive exposure to low O2 levels (age may have been a contributing factor as well) I thought, “Hey, there is a competition in the next door island, what a fantastic idea, it’s gonna be a blast!”
Yes, it will be a blast, with a bonanza of black outs, or else, with a number of shitty shallow dives.
That said, I just got hit by this brilliant idea: since CMAS became (in)famous for recently inventing all these new make-believe World Records, i wonder if they have thought yet about creating a new category of records done in current-y waters, and just like when they literally doubled the number of world records available to break in fresh water, they would instantly be adding around 10 new disciplines (45° degrees freediving), which would be just fantastic. No?
UPDATE:
note to self: NEVER, EVER try again to freedive in Lanzarote again. Both my attempt failed miserably. I skipped mentioning this earlier but last june I already signed up for a competition, and I got Covid 1 week before, yay! Then tried again for the september edition and for the probably first time in the history of the Canary Islands the government closed all travel and every single sport event that week-end due to an incoming tropical storm. Like really??
In the end of course we had just a little rain and wind that was even weaker than the average wind we normally have here. So much drama for no reason at all.
So long story short the competition got cancelled and I had to flee the island before they started to cancelled all the flights.
Adios forever Lanzarote! I won’t miss you a bit.
