Annelie Pompe hates pool training. That’s unfortunate given that her occupation is professional freediving. Not long after summiting the lofty altitudes of Aconcagua in Argentina, she’s back in the pool preparing for another world depth record in freediving. The last time she was in this position she only had two months to prepare and it came back to bite her in a big way – she blacked out while ascending from a very, very deep dive. Fair Warning: It’s not easy to watch her pass out and turn a weird shade of beige at 3:09.
Levi Gavin, 23, was collecting kina and crayfish at Horahora Estuary, 30km east of Whangarei on February 10, when an orca grabbed a catch bag attached to his right arm.
It dragged him beneath the water for more than 40 seconds before a rope connecting him to the bag came undone and he was able to free himself from the death spiral. Remarkably, he escaped injury. […]
“As soon as it got me under water, my goggles came off and kept flapping on my face and it just kept going,” he told the Herald on Sunday.
“I went to go open my eyes but all I could see was little white bubbles so I just closed my eyes and tried not to use my energy because then I use up my breath.
“I got to my last breath. I couldn’t really think at the time.”
Cyril Baldock will soon be the oldest man to swim the English Channel at 70 years of age, 29 years after his first English Channel crossing which he took part in when he was 41.
Grant Hackett was barefoot and shirtless when he burst into the foyer of Melbourne’s Crown hotel-casino, searching for his four-year-old son.
The panicked moment, captured on a mobile phone camera in the early hours of Saturday morning, began when the troubled former Olympian woke to find his son Jagger had gone missing from their hotel room, theHerald Sun reports.
A series of intersecting and stressful events formed the backdrop to the final hours of an already vulnerable and depressed Charlotte Dawson, who killed herself in her luxury waterside apartment at Woolloomooloo.
The 47-year-old television personality was coping with her two-bedroom apartment on the Finger Wharf going up for auction on Saturday, she felt she was not getting enough promotion for the Logie award votes for her former role as judge on the Foxtel reality TV series Australia’s Next Top Model, and she had recently been setting up a homewares range.
On top of that, friends say she was struggling after the 60 Minutes tell-all interview with her former husband Scott Miller, whom she had confessed she still loved and would be the only man she would ever marry.
In her last interview just a week ago with Fairfax Media journalist Jo Casamento, Dawson had said she was unsure if she was strong enough to watch the interview that cavassed their failed marriage, his battle with the drug ice, criminal convictions for drug offences, stolen goods and prohibited weapons as well as accusations he was a pimp and a drug dealer.
“I continue to fight my depression – it’s a bitch of a thing – and I fear watching something like this as it’s the most painful time in my life,” she said.
The cat had got stuck under the HSC Gotlandia II, which operates in Visby on the island of Gotland, and the crew were spurred into action after hearing strange noises coming from the vessel.
“We heard the cat meowing when we were getting on to work, it had probably fallen into the water and was trying to crawl up. He sat there and was distressed,” crew member Stellan Stenberg told Aftonbladet.
Colleague Johan Skärkarl donned his wetsuit and jumped into the water to retrieve the animal, before swimming to the shore with the cat nestled on top of his stomach.
Brave guy – I once tried rescuing a cat from a dog, and got a full face of scars to prove it ! :-)
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