World Championship - Trough our eyes

Pages in this article 1  2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10   11   August 10, 2007 3:25 PM

Finally, we in Freediving Team Åland have been to our first freediving World Championship! It was a great and interesting experience for everyone in our team to go to Maribor in Slovenia to meet the world elite of freedivers. Here you may read about what happened and what we experienced there:

Day 1 (30.06.2007)
Peter, Johan and Anders went with the evening ferry from Mariehamn to Kapellskär in Sweden. On the bus to Stockholm we met Nikolaos Pizanias, that had studied for a while on Åland, but now was moving back to Sweden. He saw that we carried freediving fins so he asked if anyone of us were Daniel Flöjt. He said that Daniel had been in contact with him to get some text translated from swedish to greek, and that Nikolaos mother had helped him. He also said that his father, who was from Greece, was one of the first men in Greece that started freediving and spearfishing.

We also spoke with a gentleman who claimed to be some sort of a CEO at the swedish railway "SJ", and that he was interested to sponsor us, since we explained to him that it is pretty hard for freedivers in general to get sponsors, mostly because freediving isn't a well known sport.

When we arrived to Stockholm in the night, we went out to Burger King and everyone had a burger. After that it was time to get back to our hotel at Odenplan to get some sleep.

* * * * * * * * * *

Day 2 (01.07.2007)
Daniel, who had gone to Sweden a few days eariler to visit some relatives, met us very early in the morning outside our hotel. We got a taxi and went to the Arlanda airport. There we met up with Peter Boivie, who gave the impression of beeing a little bit nervous but calm and humble man.

We boarded the plane and went to Vienna. On the airplane we spoke to a very nice and pretty flight attendant, by the name Theresa, about freediving. She was a scuba diver, and seemed to have some experience, so she had a lot of questions about how the body reacts when you freedive down into the deep sea. Then it was time to land and change flight to Graz. On the plane from Vienna to Graz, we had company by William Winram, Deron Verbeck, Nicholas Guerry and Christian Maldame, just to mention a few. When we arrived to the airport in Graz, Weine Gustavsson who came earlier there from Sweden greeted us with a big smile on his face. And with his quick lines and funny jokes, he put a smile on everyones faces too :)

Unfortunately our luggage didn't make it onto our plane, so we had to convince the staff at the airport to send it to us in Maribor when it arrived.

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