Swimmer's Daily

  • This spooky footage was taken on October 21 by a stationary Fisheries camera at a popular dive spot knows as D9 in Cockburn Sound, Western Australia, where a sunken barge lies 3km offshore in 12m of water. The camera was set up to monitor snapper spawning, but shows a big great white circling four times within just a meter of it. It was posted on the WA Divers website and YouTube, but removed a few days later, and now local divers post angry comments, saying they should have been told of the shark sighting. Department spokepeople say that local council rangers and Water Police were alerted, but not the general public, because the creature was a long way offshore and posed no immediate public hazard. Read more here on PerthNow

  • Two instructors from Go Dive Brisbane dove into 32 meters (about 105 feet) of water with a half dozen eggs to solve this mystery. Lots of strange things happening here! Via geek.com

  • In a Le Monde article published today, 1983 French Open champion Yannick Noah accuses Spanish athletes of widespread doping, adding that the only way to level the playing field would be to allow everyone to use banned drugs. “How can a country (Spain) dominate sport from one day to the next”, he asks, “Had they discovered avant-garde training techniques and methods that no one else imagined?”. He notes that Spanish athletes are consistently beefier than French, and says the only conclusion is that they must be doping. Ouch, this of course meets hard criticism immediately, for instance from the French sports minister, telling French TV that the comments about accepting doping were “serious and irresponsible”. Via ESPN Tennis and Yahoo! Sport

    Yannick Noah

    Image courtesy of iko, cc by-nc-nd 2.0

  • 34-year-old Michael Klim was due to swim his first race in more than 4 1/2 years at a low-key Nunawading club meet at the Melbourne Sports and Aquatic Centre today, but decided to withdraw after advice from his physiotherapist a coach, because of a neck strain that he got from doing weights on a three-week altitude camp in Sierra Nevada, Spain. Read The Herald Sun.

    Klim coming out the wall

    Image courtesy of Blaise Alleyne, cc by-sa 2.0

  • So, my good American friends, I am really confused by this: At Norwood High in Massachusetts, boys compete on girls teams because their schools do not have boys swimming programs. Able to do so because the open access amendments to the state constitution mandates that boys and girls must be afforded equal access to athletics.

    I get that.

    But, now they compete in the same heats, taking top seeds from the girls, possibly becoming the girls state champion? Get to swim in the girls’ relays, knock them off the awards podium, making it hard for the girls to qualify for All-Star honors? Get to even break the girls’ sectional records?

    girl vs boy (more…)

  • Impressive, the stray dog Bob dives easily to depths of eight feet to fish out his toys. And we get a glimpse of the Canadian sport Octo-Pushing, a kind of underwater hockey where swimmers use home-made sticks to push a weighted puck around the bottom of a swimming pool. And of someone tumbling on a scooter. Via witn.com

  • It is only day two of the shooting of SWIM. – Short Movie, and already there is a bit of a crisis. Or not :-)

    SWIM – Behind the Scenes / Day Two from SWIM. – Short Film on Vimeo.

  • Aaah, Principal Fradley has surely learned a lesson about motivation, promising to swim with the sharks at the Florida Aquarium in Tampa, if his students raised more than $20,000 at a Walk-A-Thon in September.

    “I really didn’t think they would do it, because last year we raised $12,000,” Dr. Fradley said.

    Oh well, they did, and the good doctor therefore has to don a scuba kit today. Thirty Wakeland students who raised more than $150 get to watch it. Get your popcorn out, the head is going down ! :-)

    Via ABC Action News

  • Boyd Matson of National Geographic Weekend spent a week following humpback whales in the wild with Tom Conlin of Aquatic Adventures. Read more and listen to the radio interview on National Geographic News Watch.