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Day 2: May 31st, 2004
Written by: Rudi Castineyra

Welcome back to all, and if you thought that we had already endured enough during the first day and were set for some easy sailing, think again, today was another test of our patience. Kas is renown for enjoying some of the best and most stable weather in the Mediterranean, the seas are usually very flat here all year round, and that’s one of the reasons why we have made this place our base of operations basically. So, it was with some degree of surprise that I woke up today early in the morning, with a very familiar sound beating in my ears. The sound of huge waves pounding on the shore. And that’s what it was, no more, no less, huge waves pounding on the shore, just some 70-80 meters from our room balcony. And, as the day wore on, it only got worse, so we decided to wait for that time when the wind abates, usually late in the afternoon.

In the meantime, we used the day to run redundant checks on all of our systems, dive gear, decompression stations, camera and video gear, GPS coordinates for all dive points, etc, etc, etc. We did some maintenance work on our old and trusty dive platform, the same one that has been with us since Yasemin’s first record back in 1999. I remember back then, as the record was over and the partying started, our whole team, 12 divers in all, started jumping on the platform, testing not only the general laws of fluid displacement and buoyancy established by Archimedes, but also cracking a few of its ribs, to the point where it started leaking in water. No matter I said, we will built a new one for next year, more streamlined, lighter yet sturdier, sea worthy in extreme, the platform to end all platforms. Of course, life being the way it is, when it came time to use a platform again, our space-age new platform had not even been designed, so with some reluctance we dug out the old one and promised ourselves to use it for just a few more days. We haven’t stopped using it ever since. So, every year, before record attempts, master courses and training camps, we redo all of its seals, replace all the bolts and nuts, sand it and paint it. It was no exception now, and today we gave our old Kon-Tiki (this is what I call it) a needed makeover. It’s good to have old friends around, and that’s what we all realized as we sat around and relived stories from past records, most of the team having been together since 1999. It is a great feeling to see how, regardless of how far our work and endeavors take us around the world, we always strive to get together one more time come record time…

As the sun dropped ever lower on the horizon, it was clear that our break to dive was gonna come later than we had anticipated, allowing us insufficient time to arrive at the dive site and perform the longer than usual set up maneuvers that are typical of the first day. So, with some disappointment, we opted for not loosing the day completely and I had Yas and David suit up for a short pool training session. Apnea capacity and dive shape are still at peak level, so the quick dip in the pool was some small consolation. Desperate for even more water, David and our two deep divers Arthur and Luca, decided to jump in the beach across the hotel as Yas and I waved them goodbye from our balcony, but we could only smile to ourselves as we saw them running back just a few seconds later, with nothing but the smallest portion of their toes wet. They claimed the lifeguard turned them back due to the seas being so rough, but I have a feeling that the real reason is the water temperature. After all, these three guys have a combined body fat percentage of no more than 9%, giving them very little insulation to cold weather, and while Arthur and Luca sleep with their dry suits under their pillow, David even gets cold taking hot showers…so much for our brave divers then…

Well, tomorrow we are getting up at 7:00 Am, leaving the marina at 8:00, and try to be in the water diving by 9:00, so that we can beat the wind if it is still raging, but I have a feeling that we should start seeing better conditions from tomorrow on, we’ll see. We want to do a technique, speed and buoyancy check so we will go for shallow dives, Yas diving to 30 meters and David to 40, each of them doing that depth twice in the cold water permits. We’ll keep you posted.

David’s comments:
Rudi pretty much summed it up well. I was desperate to get in the water today. Not just to get wet but to test the cold that I am definitely not used to. Didn’t get to do anything but a small training session in the pool. It was still cold but not as cold as the ocean. After about 25 minutes in the pool I was shaking pretty badly, thinking to myself “How the heck am I going to manage in the ocean tomorrow?” I worried about it all night long. Instead of worrying about the cold I decided to go to bed early and get good rest before first diving day in a long time. It’s been 6 months since I have been in the ocean and I always want to be fresh and ready for it. So, guess we’ll see how it goes with the cold tomorrow.

Yasemin’s comments:
I was also set to dive today, so it was very disappointing to wait the whole day and not being able to dive. However we ended up getting so busy with setting up things that I felt quite exhausted by the end of the day. First my new suits scheduled to be delivered to me 2 days ago got lost in the cargo, so we spent half of the day trying to track them. After checking up the whole country to see where it is, the box was finally found in the cargo office we were doing the searching. Because of the short amount of time we had, the logos of Hyundai were used wrong. So I spent another few hours trying to convince the sponsor to accept it like that, that I had to start using the suit. Besides this we had to send the size of all the stickers, banners for all sponsors we were gonna use. Unfortunately it’s never just the record we have to worry about… Added up with all other little details like this, the rest we got this day from diving was appreciated.