My name is Sean McGahern and I am a professional certified scuba diving instructor. I have been involved in a series of World Record attempts involving dives in both warm water and cold water.
The first of these dives took place in 2009 where the World Record Diving Malta team and myself broke the world record for the longest warm water open sea dive of 25 hours and 10 minutes. Subsequently, we also attempted to surpass the cold water sea record of 11 hours 46 minutes but was unlucky due to bad weather conditions that forced the team to abort the attempt 1 hour and 10 minutes short of the record. In another recent attempt to exceed the warm water record time, which had been surpassed and increased to 51 hours in late 2010, the team was faced with a number of technical issues which put the teams safety in jeopardy.
For this reason, and baring in mind that Safety is our number one core value, the dive was cancelled 36 hours into the dive. Having learned a lot from our previous attempts, we are now looking to set a new cold water record for open sea dive of much tougher endurance, with the help of Starfish Diving Center in St Georges Bay, Malta. In order for this record attempt to take place, a number of regulations must be taken into consideration. Some of these include; a minimum temperature of below 15c and a minimum depth of 11 meters for 13 hours in order to beat the current record. However, our goal is not only to beat the 13 hour record but to push the benchmark further and set a new record of 15 hours. The date for this record event has been set for the 8th of March 2013.
During the past couple of years we have built a strong, dedicated team of motivated individuals working hard together and proving excellent communication skills and team effort between one another. The team has been split into a number of sections such as: The IT department who: - Deal with the continuous updates on our website www.worldrecorddivingmalta.com where one may find articles of previous records, plans for future records, blogs, photos and where you may also meet the team. - Are responsible for dealing with e-mails, contacting sponsors media contacts during the organization of the dive as well as throughout the entire year - Update the blogs during the entire event informing the public of everything that is going on during the dive The Surface Support Team who are responsible for: - Ensuring everything is under control during the event - Tracking all records such as diver logs - Making sure all divers do not exceed their dive times - Checking all documents and forms are up to date - Ensuring that the correct drinks medications are brought down to Sean on time - Collecting copies of photos/videos from all participants The Safety Diver Team who will be responsible for: - Ensuring that Seans safety as well as their own safety is not in jeopardy, mainly by not exceeding dive times for any reason - Supplying Sean with cylinders and retrieving expelled cylinders - Delivering drinks, vitamins and food to Sean during the course of the dive - Keeping an eye on temperature, heart rate and CNS levels. - Relaying information from base camp back to land which will be recorded by the Surface Support team. - Dry divers will only get in the water in the event of emergency. - Divers will NOT be responsible for refilling cylinders but must return cylinders to filling station after diving.
All of these members now make up World Record Diving Malta -a recently launched non-profit organization- bringing recreational diving and competition diving to the next level whilst promoting the sport of diving in Malta- a paradise for scuba divers.
For more information on past events kindly visit our page www.worldrecorddivingmalta.com or for day-to-day updates follow our blog www.worldrecorddivingmalta.blogspot.com"