The finale begins.. photos from Day 7

Davide Carrera (left) executing another picture perfect constant weight national record for Italy. Davide breathes up through a snorkel on his front, and in the photo you can see an assistant grabbing the snorkel he abandons in the duckdive. Watching from the surface is AIDA judge Linden Wolbert.

Kerian Hibbs (above right and below) is racing to meet his kiwi peers Dave, Ant and Will, with a lightning quick dive to 81 rn in 2:23. He has developed a pair of low profile fluid goggles that he sells through his site www.monofins.co.nz and which are being used by almost half of the athletes at Vertical Blue 2009.

Tomoko Yamanouchi (above and below) is the rising star in women's freediving. Today as well as extending her Japanese national record she entered the exclusive 70 club in CWT, with only 7 other female athletes. What is most incredible about Tomoko is that she possesses only 2.8L of total lung volume, even after she has packed! Both her lungs would fit inside half of one of Herbert's lungs! At the depth she achieved today her lungs would be compressed to the size of two small oranges...

Herbert Nitsch (below left) was up to something today. He announced a depth of 95m in CWT, and ambled down with his normal slow knee-kick at less than a meter per second for the first 60m. After a brief pause on the bottom he pulled and finned back to the surface with a total dive time of 4 minutes. He was back in the water in the afternoon testing a new technique that applies to all disciplines, so we may see some surprises in the last couple of days.

Walter Steyn is unstoppable. The Australian (below right) has been freediving for many years, but hasn't competed at depth for at least two, and came to Vertical Blue 2009 with a PB in comp of 77m. Today he continued to gain ground on his kiwi rivals across the Tasman sea, with a very confident dive to 98m. After finishing the surface protocol in 1.3 seconds he told us he was narked as a skunk down there! If he can brave the narcosis again, and has enough juice left in his legs then he could become the 10th entrant into the exclusive 100m club.

A stingray lies in wait on the sandy bottom of the lagoon next to Dean's Blue Hole (below). Could there be some last minute surprises in store in the final two days of Vertical Blue 2009? Sara Campbell is resting and plotting another attempt on a three digit depth, Herbert is experimenting and calculating, William is getting steadily deeper in CWT, with today's dive to 109m, but may turn back to his trademark discipline no fins, Ryuzo is a dragon waiting to breathe fire and Walter is steaming downwards...

Within a few hours we will release the top times for the penultimate day of Vertical Blue, and I recommend that you are sitting down, or lying on a sandy bottom like this stingray, when you read them.

Standby. . .

Whats Tomoko\\\'s static PB? wondering now after the ratio by lung volume to deep -just crazy impressive.rn by mike on 2009-04-09 22:02:46

Very Good Site And Thank you by Mr. Ahmed Khater on 2009-07-28 05:34:35