My wife has talked my into a 7 day cruse. I will be scuba diving on days 2,3,4 day 5 is at sea and day 6 is at a key. I was thinking of taking the opertunity to try freediving again. we fly out of FL. on day 7 at 1:00 pm.
any nitrogen issues with free diving?
I have a full day and 2 nights between scuba and free and about 18 hours between freediveing and flight if I pushed my diving to the limits.
its been along time sense I was free diving and can only manage about a 3.5 min breath hold now (but I have untill Jan. to get better)
Absolutely no problems with flying after freediving, that Is why you don't get DCI after going to 100 ft and back to the surface.
Have some fun in that nice warm water ;D
Actually Free divers can get bent just as scuba divers can. A lot depends on how deep you are free diving and how much you are doing. The deeper you go and the longer you can stay down the more Nitrogen you build up. Suunto's Mosquito Dive Computer has a Free Diving Mode on that will track your Nitrogen build up while you are Free Diving. I would reccomend the same surface intervals that we reccomend for divers which is 24 hours.
You can bend the heck out of yourself from freediving if you push yourself! There have been many cases of freedivers getting bent from not doing a long enough surface interval or trying to freedive after a scuba dive- just a bunch of bounce dives to really mess with your system.
For safety's sake I would say that you should NEVER freedive after a scuba dive and that your surface intervals should be at least twice as long as your dive time- unless your hitting 100' and then they should be at least 8-10 minutes long.
At the end of the day during freedive-a-palooza I will actually take a stage bottle of 02 and go back in for 15 minutes, or so, to clear myself out. You build up a bit of nitrogen after 8-10 hours in the water.
As far as flying goes I think it depends upon if your freediving or just snorkeling- staying above 15'. I wouldn't worry about snorkeling, but freediving is a different matter.
For scuba it all depends on the tables your using and how you ascend/deco out. You can jump on a plane after only a couple of hours if you do it right, but that's a post for another section- try the tech diving or DIR thread for more info on that.
Jon