World-renowned free diving team offers free talk to Hawaii divers

Kirk Krack of Performance Freediving to address safety and Shallow Water Blackout 

Performance Freediving International (PFI) and Hawaii Skin Diver (HSD) magazine be will addressing concerns about diving safety and Shallow water Blackout (SWB) on Friday, July 25 at the University of Hawaii Manoa Lower Campus Physical Education/Athletics Complex Lecture Hall 241 (across the Stan Sheriff Center main entrance) starting at 7 pm. Divers of all experience levels are encouraged to attend this FREE one-hour informative session, particularly those who are new to free diving and spearfishing.

With the recent tragedy of Sergio Goes, who was taking photographs while free diving off waters of Waikiki, HSD magazine and PFI have organized a free diving safety awareness session for the local diving community. Goes had taken PFI’s intense free diving courses twice before his tragedy. Kirk Krack, President of PFI, had trained Goes and over 2,300 others, including several world champion divers over the past seven years. Krack’s quality of free diving programs stress safety as well as performance to its students. After finding out about the loss of his former student, Krack was motivated to hold a special talk for Hawaii’s diving community, on top of his scheduled intermediate free diving clinic at Hickam Air Force from July 26-29.

“My condolences go out to Sergio’s family and friends,” said Krack. “While the circumstances of Sergio are undetermined, we still need to reduce these types of tragedies by keeping divers educated and aware of the importance of safety issues.”

In 2007, an article written by Dr. Terry Maas, a free diver and spearfishing national champion, author and videographer, estimated there were 5,000 spearfishermen in Hawaii. The article also estimates there are 10,000 spearfishers in the United States. Maas calculated six Shallow Water Blackout (SWB) deaths in Hawaii compared to three in the U.S. mainland where there are double the amount of divers. He also estimates Greece having 50,000 divers and six SWB deaths in that year. These U.S. figures are conservative to some, who have seen the sport grow exponentially like Krack who constantly travels through California, Florida, Virginia, Canada, Norway and Hawaii to conduct his free diving classes.

SWB is a loss of consciousness caused by cerebral hypoxia towards the end of a breath-hold diver in water typically shallower than five meters (16 feet), when the swimmer or diver does not necessarily experience an urgent need to breathe and has no other obvious medical condition that might have caused it. Many drowning and near drowning events occur among swimmers who blackout underwater while free diving or doing breath hold pool laps. Blacking out, or browning out, near the end of a breath-hold dive is common. Although the mechanism is well understood, it is not common knowledge among breath-hold divers.

Topics being covered by PFI at the free session will be:

·      Safety and Buddy Procedures

·      Shallow Water Blackout

·      Basic Protocol for Free Diving technique

The popularity of free diving in Hawaii is evident by local television show Hawaii Skin Diver TV and magazine. During the 4^th of July weekend, a fun dive was organized on the Hawaii Skin Diver website forum that attracted over 50 divers. The goal of the gathering was to get newer divers oriented with the sport through responsible participation. The free event featured an informal talk about breathing technique held by PFI participant and local diver Kurt Chambers, prizes for all entrants and three grand prizes for the heaviest trash pick-up. The fish caught were donated to the Family Assistance Center at Kalaeloa.

Please click on the link below to download a pdf of the flyer shown above.

It’s letter size (8.5 x 11) so you can print it out and pass it on.

HSD_PFI_FLYER

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 at 6:07 pm and is filed under Currents. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.