Lubomir Stefanoff | freediving and UW photography

In the beginning of May I had the chance to  visit the Turkish island Gokceada for a few days. I trained at shallower depths there although I’d planned to do deeper dives (30+ meters) in constant weight.

Gokceada is not the perfect place for freediving, but we opted for it over Halkidiki (Greece) because Ivan (a friend of mine) wanted to go spearfishing and in May spearfishing is not allowed in Greece. I don’t like Gokceada as much as the Greek coast because of the wind and the reduced visibility due to the sandy bottom.  Nevertheless, we had a lot of fun there. We stayed in the South-western part of the island and used a boat to get further from the shore to find depths of 20+ m. In the beginning I was pissed off because I was not going to do deep dives but soon I decided to focus on technique rather than depth and found out that it’s very beneficial to concentrate on only one thing during the dives- i.e. equalization and position of the head, duck dive, finning technique, free falling, etc. During the last two days I worked mostly on the free fall phase of the dive.  When I started diving along a weighted rope I noticed that my body tends to go a bit sideways when I stop finning (which affects my concentration). So I did many repetitive dives and tried to stay streamlined and sink vertically. Now that I can do it in a better way I enjoy the free fall even more! Next time I hope to use the Frenzel maneuver for equalizing the ears (I’m doing the exercises on a regular basis and will test this technique first in the pool).

Regarding the underwater pictures – I did try to take macros of some interesting fishes but the shots are far from great and I’ll keep them on my computer .