While my father had sailed in Europe, neither of my parents had any experience of long ocean crossings at the time when our family set sail from Gibraltar in the spring of 1982. It was Saturday the thirteenth of March. My mother recalls her feelings:
Shot out of the Mediterranean through the straits of Gibraltar we were pitching and corkscrewing in an energetic sea, surging upon a rising easterly gale on the first day of a voyage that might take us around the world. Sailing downwind with the current, it was a sliding slope with no way back. We could not return to windward or the comfortable house and business that we had sold and abandoned. The mast vibrated as the sails strained and our bodies tensed in response. From below, a repetitive percussion of tins, jars, pots and pans resounded from the galley. My hopes of freedom were drowned under waves of fear as I realised that we and our helpless children were no more than flotsam and jetsam on the relentless heaving sea.
As for my father, he was finally fulfilling the epitaph ‘Cast out into the deep’ that was written on the tombstone of his father, Geoffrey, who had died from a lingering war illness when David was only 10 years old. Both of my grandfathers had been officers stationed overseas in the Second World War, and both had struggled in different ways upon their return to England. My maternal grandfather, Maurice, had wanted to continue travelling and see more of the world, but was confined to the English Midlands by dependent parents and a wife who was afraid of flying. In a way, our adventure was a realisation of what he yearned for but could not do himself.
To the question ‘How do your parents feel about your freediving?’, I often answer that the expedition they embarked on all those years ago was every bit as daring, taking place as it did in an era before long-range weather tracking, GPS navigation (my father used a sextant to take sightings of sun and stars to calculate our position and plot our course) or satellite communication. So they can relate to the desire to venture out into unexplored territory, and to the feeling that the risk of living a cloistered and unfulfilled life is greater than the risk of incident.
Of course I remember nothing now of that Atlantic crossing distinctly, but there’s no denying that those amorphous tracts of time spent surrounded by nothing but ocean made a great impression on me. The fair-skinned toddler who looked out from the confines of the boat’s cockpit at the start of each day and remarked ‘Sea, sky’ did not completely understand what he was looking at, but it was becoming a familiar environment, a homely one.
Nowadays the sight of the sea is a solace to me, and the source of a rejuvenating energy. When the stress of competing or my emotional life reaches a tipping point I escape to the nearest piece of coast and walk along the shoreline, or just sit and watch the moving water, the waves that paw and rake at jagged rocks. The sight is mesmerising, and without requiring any concentration on my part it induces a meditative state: a break in the mental recursions and emotive feedback loops that can plague our waking minds. It is no coincidence that our species spends so much of its holidays and free time by the sea, even those who have never experienced its calming and cleansing embrace to the degree that I have. It will always have a symbolic presence for many.
In Santa Teresa di Gallura, Italy, during the first years of my freediving career, I would spend the summer evenings on a granite shelf overlooking the bay, performing lung exercises and long sessions of pranayama (slow yogic breathing, with breath-holds between extended inhales and exhales). While my eyes were closed I could hear the slop and gurgle of gentle waves fragmenting among the boulders, and when I opened them at the end of the session I saw, each time as if for the first time, a liquid-crystal surface stretching forwards beneath me and condensing onto the horizon, upon which the sun was lowering its orange yolk.
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When we finally made landfall at Antigua in the Caribbean, I had spent the preceding 5 per cent of my life at sea, out of sight of land, and probably couldn’t remember much of what came before that. I had learnt to walk during the passage and wasn’t too impressed when I had to learn to walk all over again on dry land, which was so static underfoot that it threw me off balance. Meanwhile, our parents’ euphoria at arriving and a free rum-punch party combined to reverse the responsibilities, and Sam and I held our parents’ hands and guided them back to the dinghy. ‘No Daddy, don’t be silly! Stop falling in the water!’ Somehow we made it back to Hornpipe.
We spent almost two years in the Caribbean, mostly in the British Virgin Island of Tortola, and this time awakened a fascination with the underwater world and the creatures that dwelt there. A waterproof book of the fish and corals of the Caribbean had become our bible, and for my first exploratory paddles into this realm I was buckled into a buoyancy vest to keep me on the surface. I wore it at almost all times, including to bed, so when one day I jumped into a pool without it on I was surprised to go straight to the bottom. My mother had seen it coming though, and she hit the water, fully clothed, a fraction of a second after me, ready to fish me out.
The flotation aid made a brief revival 24 years later, after I had set my first world record in freediving. The captain of a day-cruise I was taking with my girlfriend in Nassau, Bahamas, insisted that everyone snorkelling must wear a lifejacket, and he didn’t budge when I told him I was a freediving instructor. ‘You want to get in the water, you’re wearing this!’ My girlfriend couldn’t stop laughing at me for the rest of the day, but thankfully it happened before social media, so the photos never surfaced.
After the Caribbean, the Panama Canal was the birth canal for my long-term memory — the means by which I emerged from a state of being enclosed in the womb of the present, equally oblivious to past and to future. According to study on self-recognition by Daniel Povinelli, it isn’t until about three years of age that children begin to grasp the temporal dimension of the self: we learn that who we are isn’t just what is experienced now but also what was experienced then and what will be experienced tomorrow. So, the Pacific is where I have my first memories. We sailed on a connect-the-dots course from Panama to the Galapagos Islands, French Polynesia, American Samoa, Tonga and Fiji. I had learnt to swim in the Caribbean, but in the Pacific I learnt to dive. Even if at first it was only for a few brief kicks and a squeak to clear my ears, I became not just a surface-level observer but also a fully immersed participant in the underwater world.
One of my earliest yoga lessons with my mother in the Caribbean.
Hornpipe at anchor in the windward islands of the Caribbean.
The sea contributed to every role in the survival of our family and the upbringing of myself and my brother. It was our means of transport, our source of protein, our playground and our classroom. Our longest ocean crossing was the 5500-kilometre passage from the Galapagos Islands (where I met wizened, leathery tortoises born during Queen Victoria’s reign), to the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia. We made good speed through an area where sailing boats can easily spend weeks becalmed on glassy seas, but the crossing still lasted for almost a month out of sight of land. When we arrived at Fatu Hiva, at dawn, a reception of frolicking dolphins coincided with the exact moment that the sun rose above the island; set against the relief we felt at finally making land, not even this breathtaking scene was overly dramatic.
In Tahiti I went to a local kindergarten, and learnt French nursery rhymes alongside the Polynesian children. We participated in night-time hunts for giant coconut crabs, foraged for sugar cane and heart of palm, and made a boat horn out of a Triton’s trumpet shell. By the age of five I could shin up a coconut tree or the wooden mast of a friend’s boat. With a gang of other boat kids we came across a sea snake on the beach, and in a frenzied Lord of the Flies moment threw stones at it until it was dead — an event I am eternally repentant of, but which shows just how feral we could become.
Sam and I slept in the forward cabin, in bunk beds that ended at the door to the anchor locker in the bow of the boat. When we were sailing through heavy seas this part of the boat pitched the most, but the lumbering motion as
Hornpipe crested waves and crashed into troughs could be sedative and cosy. Especially when we were on a port tack, which meant that the boat was leaning to my side of the cabin, and I would fall asleep wedged in the V between my bunk and the wall.
While snorkelling, Sam and I kept a constant lookout for new seashells to add to our collection; especially that Holy Grail of shells, the precious golden cowrie. When, years later, I finally gazed at one, locked in a glass display case of a dusty museum in Suva, it inspired more awe in me than perhaps any other artefact could have done at the time. As a naturally competitive second child, I was always trying to catch up to my brother, Sam, and became mired in dejection when the two and a half years between us created a barrier to my doing something that he was able or allowed to do. On one occasion in Tortola, my brother and parents returned, from snorkelling on the reef, to the dinghy where I was waiting and Sam immediately gushed ‘I saw a shark!’ — I didn’t miss a beat with the reply: ‘I saw a whale.’ (In fact the biggest mammal I saw, by land or by sea, was King Tupou IV of Tonga, at 200 kilograms the world’s heaviest monarch, when he paraded past in a golf cart during a local festival.)
Never was my frustration at my limitations more acute than when my parents and Sam all swam underwater to reach Mariner’s Cave in Tonga. Legend had it that a beautiful princess in fear of her life had been hidden there by her lover until he could escape with her to Fiji. It is a very easy swim-through to reach the cavern, but after hearing my father explain carefully to Sam what he would need to do I said that I would not try it myself. Once again I was confined to the dinghy. It’s very likely that in pining after that missed experience I planted the seed of my desire to prove myself in the depths. When, 23 years later, I swam through the arch at Dahab’s Blue Hole — a feat several orders of magnitude more difficult than Mariner’s Cave — it felt like I had finally appeased that despondent boy waiting behind in the dinghy.
We encountered another of our childhood legends several times when our boat crossed paths with his. Benoît was a Frenchman, sailing with his wife, Martine, and small daughter on the boat Crysalide. I don’t remember anything else about him other than his capacity to freedive to the then mind-boggling depth of 90 feet (27 metres). Now, of course, my sense of scale underwater has changed completely, but back then this depth was abyssal. If Benoît had described how at 90 feet he had encountered an angler fish with a light on its head, swimming through the wreck of a German U-boat, we probably wouldn’t have been incredulous. Our father had been able to disentangle an anchor at 60 feet (18 metres), and even this was a fact that we proudly relayed to the other boating kids we met in our travels. For us, 90 feet was the pinnacle of human achievement — for all intents and purposes the floor of the ocean. It’s possible that it was the biggest distance I could comprehend at that time — if someone had told me that one day I would be diving four times as deep, then, aside from the fact that I couldn’t yet do multiplication, I would have had no way of fathoming such a depth.
After our final Pacific stop, in Fiji — the site of my near-drowning on frozen water — my parents steered the boat south towards New Zealand, in search of employment. When we arrived, in the spring of 1985, I had no memories of a climate that wasn’t tropical. Woollen sweaters knitted for us by our grandmother were itchy, and the water was cold and murky, making it boring for snorkelling. Sam and I had become accustomed to being able to play all day in the water and on the beach, but in New Zealand we had to find replacement activities. Dungeons & Dragons filled most of the gap, and our dice and character sheets spilled over into making swords and armour with which to roam the hillsides of Parekura Bay in the Bay of Islands, where Hornpipe was anchored. Forts were built, a thick marsh was turned into a labyrinth, and some passing cars may have been the targets of clay missiles . . . My brother also taught me how to play chess, which ticked two boxes in the growing list of my appetites: mental challenges, and something you can beat someone else at. Apparently, Sam hasn’t won since.
We alternated between periods attending Russell Primary School, where I played goalie for the losingest soccer team in the district (the Bay of Island Sharks), and completing Correspondence School study packages, which we could finish before breakfast so as to have the rest of the day free to play.
The Bay of Islands is a beautiful nook in New Zealand’s wild coastline. Urapukapuka, Moturua, Motukiekie and other smaller islands are protected from the ocean swells by the Cape Brett Peninsula, creating peaceful coves and inlets that we would explore with the boat on weekend trips. David was taking his first steps in making furniture in New Zealand, a path that would lead to him becoming one of the country’s most respected designers. When he knocked off at five in the evening he would walk down from his workshop to the shore, and whistle to get our attention on the boat. I delighted in my important role of rowing the dinghy ashore to fetch him while he waited, eating oysters off the rocks. Making wood carvings of animals alongside my father in his workshop, I learnt that the initial ecstasy of inspiration will never last to the end of a task. After its energy was exhausted by the first gleeful hour of chiselling, then if patience and discipline didn’t take over you’d be left with a hacked-at block of wood that only half-resembled the intended camel/giraffe/whale. Watching David steadily shaping elaborate works and an even more elaborate lifework, in the same way that he steadily devoured mountain ranges on long hikes, I observed the archetype of patience and discipline. Thanks to my father, I have never reneged on a training session, nor quit when results were discouraging.
Linda taught relief at Kawakawa High School, taking the school bus for an hour along dusty roads on the days when she was alerted by an early morning call to the boat’s radio. She also kept the boat functioning as a mobile house for three messy males and set nets in the bay for kahawai fish, though often caught stingrays that she would haul onto the beach to untangle, before chopping the wings up to batter and fry. Linda, who hand-sewed stuffed animal toys, quilts and costumes for my brother and me, and consummately praised us for whatever we did while also propelling us to something greater, represented a distillation of altruism that inspires me to this day. By coaxing and encouraging us — to write a little clearer, to paint a little more attentively, to play a little more fluidly — she taught me that there was always more inside: more creativity, more potential, more depth. Thanks to my mother, I believe in myself and the infinitude of our capacity for whatever we set our minds to.
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In 1988 we left the New Zealand winter to sail once more as a family among the islands in the Pacific. This time I would be old enough to start testing the boundaries between daring and stupidity.
The first leg took us to the Isle of Pines in New Caledonia, and Sam and I resumed our days of snorkelling and island-exploring as if we had never left the tropics. We accompanied David when he went spearfishing, and I saw my first reef shark. On one of the atolls we found a sandy underwater bank that sloped steeply downwards from the shore to an unknown depth in an almost identical fashion to the edges of Dean’s Blue Hole, which I would discover 17 years later. Sam and I took turns daring ourselves to swim further and further down the bank, hands outstretched to skim the soft incline, for a few more seconds, a few more kicks, before turning and sprinting to the surface.
One day we found turtles lying upside down on the beach between the hulls of an outrigger canoe, their flippers waving feebly as they waited to be served for dinner at the nearby restaurant. No one was around, so we flipped the turtles — which were too heavy to carry — onto their bellies, and pushed and cajoled them down the beach with whispered cries of ‘Go, quick! Freedom awaits!’ When all three were safely back in the water and swimming off into the bay (without, I was disappointed to note, any sign of gratitude), we swam back out to the boat to excitedly inform our parents of our successful campaign. Whereupon they quickly upped anchor and moved a few bays down the coast — after all, when the turtles were reported missing the locals wouldn’t need a Sherloc
k Holmes to notice sets of children’s footprints next to the tyre-track marks left by the turtles.
Sam was the model older brother, a responsible and eternally patient companion. He was also the creative designer of our games and roleplaying then as he is now in theatrical productions that challenge the expectations of his audiences. We fought, but probably less than most siblings. It hadn’t taken us long to figure out that with so little space on Hornpipe, friction was not an option. Our father was not very forgiving of spats between us: if there was ever any conflict back then, regardless of who was at fault, we would both be thrown overboard (provided, of course, that we were at anchor!). One such time we ended up on a beach, sulking in the shade of an island pine. One of us began digging a hole in the sand, and was mirrored by the other. Gradually, and without communication or maybe even any conscious decision by either of us, the two holes veered sideways, converging until we broke through to create a tunnel between our two pits. And in that moment the morning’s petty squabble was purged.
From New Caledonia we sailed to Vanuatu, and there for the first time I started to take notice of depth measurements. Hornpipe had an old Seafarer echo sounder, which buzzed and popped as a flickering red dash indicated the depth in feet and fathoms on a big green dial. ‘Our scion of the depths, herald from the ocean floor,’ Sam later called it. If we managed to dive to the bottom below the boat and grab a rock or handful of sand as testimony, then we would quickly climb on board to consult the sounder. There was very little resemblance to the kind of freediving I do today. Our fins were thick and rigid rubber triangles. The masks were basically rubber cylinders with a flat glass window: all of its internal volume would have to be refilled (equalised for pressure) every 10 metres, using air from our kid-sized lungs. We were oblivious of the concept of a ‘breathe-up’ (relaxed preparation before a dive), and would babble away as we trod water, right up to the moment when one of us gasped an inhale and jackknifed under the water. Like frantic tadpoles, we would waggle our fins (and our arms, too, when the legs tired) and crane our necks towards our target on the seabed. There was no time to spare at the bottom: one hand flailed out to seize a fistful of whatever it made contact with (stone/sand) before the process reversed in an even more frenetic ascent back to the surface.
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