Time has came soon, too soon, though, to pack my bags and move on again. I was leaving Malta heavy-heartedly – I met there great and welcoming people, and spent some amazing moments. Thank you so much to everyone, who made it possible there.
My trip from Malta was headed to Italy, and my destination there was Pisa, where I was to meet Danilo Cialoni. I met Danilo earlier during my year, on the Britannic Expedition in Greece, where he was collecting ultrasound data on blood-flow of CCR divers, after very deep dives. Apart from DAN researcher, he is also a private dentist, a very achieved freediver, and co-founder of Apnea Academy – a training agency for apnea, based in Italy, but expanding internationally, too. After long, overnight train ride from Sicilly, Danilo picked me up from station, to fill with coffee, pick up his girlfriend Valentina, and drive straight to the Island of Elba ferry.
Elba is a common destination for freediving getaways. As we arrived to our camping, already good amount of other freedivers were around – altogether, this get-together of Apnea Academy gathered well over 100 apneists. Once in there, we were left with not much facilities really – a bungalow, a restaurant… and the water! So over the next few days, we spent many, many hours off at the sea, practicing the dives on a single breath.
The organization of the event was really impressive. Every fifteen minutes, there was running a large RIB of a local dive shop from the pier to the diving site and back, serving as a taxi to anyone (registered though – which you’d prove with a small band) who wanted. The site was split in two. One part was a long line of buoys, connected together and anchored at the end. Each one of those was dropping a long, vertical shot-line, along which you could be diving. Or, you could swim just 50 meters further, where a moored boat was a base for hour „machines“ – kind of thing one might remember from the movie „Big Blue“. It’s a weighted sled, that – once released – carries the diver downward. Drop ends once diver releases the bar he’s holding while descending. Then he opens a valve, connected to tank of compressed air, and on the other side – to a large lift-bag. This bar, once filled, pulls you to the surface. With it’s use, diver doesn’t use that much effort to descend and ascend (there’s a lot of equalizing involved, though!), so deepest record freedives are done with use of such machines.
The organization made your day very flexible – there were no fixed work-outs to attend (or maybe there were, but I didn’t understand when they had spoken on that in Italian!), so small groups would form at each buoy and next to the boat, and we spent hours making the dives – under watchful instructors‘ eyes, preparing for them, swimming, laughing, exchanging equipment for a try, photographing and videoing ourselves – enough to keep going for weeks more! The actual experience of diving was a new thing for me. I used to train freediving back in Warsaw, but never into the deep. There you make decision to finish the dive at the very end of it, here – at it’s midpoint! I have quickly got used to this concept, and enjoyed great meditation-like moments, when suspended in the blue, many meters away from a closest breath.
My host, Danilo, has came to Elba not only to dive, but also to conduct a research of his. It was on effect of Taravana, which is an equivalent of decompression sickness for divers. It was especially in such people as pearl-divers, that have been conducting very frequent dives over the days and weeks. On Elba, during the meeting, „the machines“ were operated by instructors from Apnea Academy, who were similarly diving very frequently, to depths of, around, 40-50 meters towards the end of the day. After the dives, we would meet them to collect visual ultrasound samples of their hearts and lungs, searching for bubbles in case of heart, and for damage (or „comets“) in case of lungs. We found no bubbles – and about the lungs, I’ll let Danilo and his publications speak for himself!
After the whole event finished, and after many, many goodbyes then, we boarded the ferry again to mainland Italy. After staying over one more night in Pisa with Danilo and Valentina, I left, to travel through Firenze and Vienna back to Warsaw.