On Vanuatu’s Hat Island (Eretoka) we reached the zenith of our abilities, and what would be my nadir of depth for the next 15 years. I had been diving regularly to 10 metres and wanted more of a challenge, so Sam and I snorkelled into an area where the sea floor had taken on a different kind of hue: darker and more monochromatically blue. It made us nervous just to gaze down, but eventually I was the first to try. All I remember is that when I turned at the bottom and, for the first time in the dive, looked back towards the surface, it was not where I expected it to be. It was remote. There was Sam, a lonely silhouetted shape; there were the waves on the surface, but they looked like ripples. There was, no doubt, alarm, panic, frenzied limbs and a burst of relief upon breaking the surface and sucking in fresh air. Sam looked appalled as he realised that he would now have to attempt it as well. Once again I marvelled at how small he looked when, after a flurry of kicking, he turned at the bottom. On his way back to the surface, one hand clutched the rock he had plucked from the sea floor while the other tore the mask from his face, as if he wanted to tear away the remaining water that covered him.
On that day the shaky red dash of the echo sounder settled on 45 feet, a depth of 14 metres, and we would wear this statistic like a badge in conversations with other boating kids for years to come.
Also in Vanuatu, on the near-mythical island of Tanna, the site of a very active volcano, Mount Yasur, that pulsed with an orange glow at night, we experienced what was probably our most terrifying sealife encounter. Soon after anchoring in the waters of Port Resolution, Sam and I jumped in the water with snorkelling gear to explore around the boat. The water was slightly turbid and brooding, with a mostly barren sea floor of volcanic boulders. We were swimming across the surface, gazing down on this unfamiliar seascape when I realised that one of the distant boulders was actually mobile, and moving rapidly towards us. The huge grey mass was the biggest living thing Sam and I had ever seen in the water: a 3 metre long slab of fat and muscle, with the doughy, amorphous face of a bulldog — or a dolphin that had been punched very hard in the nose. It was a dugong, or ‘sea cow’, a close relative of the hippopotamus and elephant that grazes on the sea floor, and may have inspired legends of mermaids due to the human resemblance in the way they breastfeed their young. The wonder at seeing something so massive moving so agilely through the water turned to alarm when the beast continued to swim purposefully straight towards us. What must have been close to half a ton of spongy flesh collided with our tiny bodies, pushing one then the other of us clean above the surface as we scrambled at the water, shrieking and gasping through our snorkels. As quick as we could, we swam back towards the boat, darting on angles to try to avoid the dugong’s repeated attempts to bunt us with its massive snout.
Later we discovered that this male dugong had been a resident in the harbour for years, and its over-zealous interactions with humans were probably an increasingly desperate attempt at finding a mate. The locals would feed it with cabbages and other vegetables thrown from the rocks. For light entertainment they would throw the dogs and children in too: after hitting the water they would surface screaming or yapping, and pound the water back in to shore to escape from the dugong’s amorous advances.
Tanna was one of our last stops before sailing back south towards New Zealand, on what would be the last ocean passage we made on Hornpipe. Before setting sail we climbed to the rim of the volcano and gazed down on that red sea of molten rock that had birthed our planet. It burped and spat fat globs of golden liquid, busy in the process of forcing solidity and permanence into the surrounding expanse of ocean. Terra firma was about to force itself back into our lives in a similar fashion.
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In 1991 Sam and I settled into schools and Linda and David settled into jobs in Hawke’s Bay. On attending my first day at a full-size school my social inexperience was keenly felt, and I was too busy trying to catch up to my peers, and discovering a passion for chess and sports, to really notice Hornpipe drifting out of our lives as she languished in the harbour before eventually being sold. Her features will never fade in my memory, though, and even from a distance I would recognise her immediately: the homely lines and colours of her hull, the tight curves of her sails on a beam reach, the intimate trickle of water past her steel hull when she was under way, her two cabin windows like softly smiling eyes, the rhythmic patter of her halyards at anchor during the night.
It’s hard to say whether I would have become a freediver had I not spent almost all of my childhood on and under the waves. I can’t imagine my life without those alluring depths, but neither can I imagine that a William who stayed behind to live out his childhood in the northern midlands of Britain would ever have been drawn to the oceans with such magnetism as I was in 2003. In all the time between that last Pacific trip in 1988 and my return to the underwater world 15 years later, those blue volumes were constantly calling me back; that much is now clear. The omens and messages line the years like a trail of breadcrumbs. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it was a deeper part of myself doing the calling: sending a message up through the layers of consciousness until it arrived in my awareness as an instinctive decision or cryptic piece of imagery. Quiz me at the end of a training session or a meditation in front of the water, and I might answer that, in the final analysis, the two entities — the sea and my subconscious — are one and the same.
CHAPTER 2
THE SIREN’S CALL
Glimpses of blue between the macrocarpa trees
The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever
Jacques-Yves Cousteau
WERE THE MESSAGES CALLING ME BACK to the ocean postcards from my future or reminders from my past? Or were they both: twin bodies of history behind and unrealised potential in front exerting the same tidal force on the present?
Before my tenth birthday, I attended a horse-riding camp in the heart of New Zealand’s rural Northland. I loved the horses and their readiness to trust and bond with us capricious humans, but I didn’t find the same acceptance or loyalty among my young peers at the camp, including the best friend I had travelled there with. In one traumatising experience, I was asked by the group if I had ever touched a girl. I had no real idea what that meant, but fearing ridicule I made up a story about a time I had ‘felt up’ a classmate during a school trip to one of the islands in the Bay of Islands. The story went that we were standing in waist-deep water when the girl and I both ducked under and the alleged touching occurred. I don’t think anyone really believed my story, as some of them asked me to repeat it, possibly for amusement. It’s telling, nonetheless, that when I was put on the spot the fabrication that my mind felt would be most convincing involved being underwater, as if I held myself to be an authority on what might and might not happen there.
It wouldn’t be the only time I would lie about encounters with the fairer sex in order to fit in. I arrived at every milestone well behind my contemporaries, and although I did my best to conceal the gap I doubt that I was very convincing.
When I converged with public education, I discovered that operations which my mind performed with ease and alacrity were not all the status quo. I was good at chess — better, it turned out, than anyone my age in the region. I won prizes in maths, English and science. A Hawke’s Bay newspaper ran an article with a picture of my wistful 12-year-old face gazing into the middle distance, alongside the caption ‘Casualty of the Education System’. Apparently the local schools hadn’t been providing enough of a challenge for students who were ahead of the syllabus. The article infuriated my intermediate-school teacher, who was forever after on the lookout for any slip-up I made that might debunk the article. It also provided fodder to the class bullies, who taunted me with the moniker ‘gifted child’. I escaped into chess, and into sports in which I was much less ‘gifted’. I played tennis, badminton and cricket, but never fully grasped the concept of training — I just assumed that the others had better natural ability than me.
&
nbsp; One of Hawke’s Bay’s main attractions in the 1990s was a waterfront concrete compound called Marineland, which kept a variety of aquatic mammals, including a handful of common dolphins, as the main attraction. Even as an 11-year-old child I was aware of a creepy incongruity between the tiers of worn bleachers, the unyielding cement and the tacky murals, and the sleek, mercurial beings they enclosed. No doubt harbouring a fantasy that they might recognise me as one of their own, I pestered my parents until they bought me a ticket to swim with the dolphins, but the experience was anticlimactic. They were defeated animals, resigned to a monotony of task-and-reward behaviour, and for them I was just another task. The fact that a dolphin’s jaw curves into a playful smile is cruelly ironic in creatures confined to the least smile-worthy existence imaginable for such an intelligent species.
It’s every freediver’s dream to swim with dolphins across an open seascape, tumbling and cavorting in three dimensions. Science has recently determined that, after humans, they are the most intelligent animals in the world (surpassing chimpanzees), and in India the ministry responsible for the environment has declared all cetaceans (dolphins and whales) to be ‘non-human persons’. When you interact with them in the wild and witness the way they study you with their gentle eyes, or watch their rascally antics during play, it’s difficult not to feel the bond of one conscious soul reaching out to greet another. There are tours that offer the chance to swim with wild dolphins, and if this is done respectfully then it can be a genuine and authentic experience. Dolphins communicate continuously, and a lot of this is through touch. In the same way that we would recoil from contact with a prickly hedgehog, smooth-skinned dolphins find our spindly and sharp-ended fingers creepy, and are suspicious of the explosive and haphazard movements of our limbs. So in the wild they approach and observe, and if they feel safe then they will spin and turn, coming closer little by little. I’ve been lucky enough to experience this kind of encounter, with bottlenose dolphins in Honduras, Atlantic spotted dolphins in the Bahamas, and even with the threatened Hector’s dolphins of New Zealand. It is a magical and life-affirming experience; I doubt that anyone who has been blessed with such an encounter could feel comfortable with the idea of dolphins being treated as an entertainment commodity.
*
By my early teens I had become thoroughly immersed in the world of chess, playing at a local chess club that met every Wednesday night, as well as studying Grand Masters’ games and puzzles in my spare time. The regional championships were held once a year over a long weekend, and although everyone played in a single group there was a junior prize for those under the age of 20. When I was 14 I played for close to 16 hours over a two-day period to win this title. After returning home and planting the trophy on the kitchen table, I was surprised to find myself bringing up and expelling the entire contents of my stomach. It was a well-timed revolt from my physical body for having been confined so long to a seat in front of a chequered board, while my brain commandeered every last resource for its marathon of concentration. Looking back now, it’s clear to me that although I enjoyed the mental challenge, my mind was only one of the organs that had been placed at my disposal and I wasn’t content or complete unless I was using the full set.
At school I enjoyed swimming, but there was no swim team and the local club didn’t attract my attention. Each year there would be a School Swimming Day, where all the students showed up at the local pool for races and games between the four school ‘houses’. I would place third or fourth in the breaststroke events, behind the club swimmers. My technique was merely what I had taught myself swimming in the ocean, and so in each stroke I was spending too much time underwater, gliding forwards with arms outstretched before ‘leaning’ on my hands to pop my head up and take a breath. It’s perhaps the most pleasurable way to swim breaststroke, but definitely not the quickest! I was entered in the 100-metre butterfly event as well, since — in a field of three — any finish would secure a podium place. When I turned after 50 metres and found myself sinking deeper with every kick, I realised why there had been few takers for this event. Somehow I spasmed through to the wall, but from that day on butterfly and the dolphin kick were anathema to me. When I began freediving it took me years to purge my attitude to this kick, which is indispensable for the discipline of Constant Weight or CWT (where a monofin is used for propulsion).
At around the age of 16 I was roused by the winds of vanity, and these led me in two directions: acting and working out. It started with the realisation that my arms were basically just uniform tubes of flesh, and my stomach (though flat) was soft. To the former I administered smooth cannonball rocks, lifted 50, then 100, then 200 or more times by each arm, while my stomach was targeted by some kind of 1990s ab-buster gizmo. This practice was soon transferred to the gym, where the rest of my muscles tried to catch up on the head start given to my biceps and abs. By the time I left school for university I had definition, and didn’t mind showing it. At the same time, I had been acting in supporting roles in school productions (Lane in The Importance of Being Earnest, and Egeus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream). My acting took off at the University of Auckland, where I joined my brother’s first theatrical work as director-designer: Shakespeare’s The Tempest, set in a swimming pool (Auckland’s Tepid Baths). The pool was divided into stage and backstage by a hung sail, and a platform in the centre formed Prospero’s island. My first entrance as the shipwrecked King Alonso was by swimming underwater from behind the sail, to surface, spluttering at centre-stage, as the storm was rendered with turbulent water and crazed lighting.
As Alonso in my brother’s production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. I am surrounded by sea nymphs Meredith Rimmer (left) and Amber Sainsbury (right) while talking to Chris Hodder’s Gonzalo. Sea nymph Fiona McCallum consoles David Passmore’s Antonio in the background.
Taunted by sea nymph Amber Sainsbury.
Although I was taking a degree in the sciences I fell in with the university theatre group, Stage Two Productions, that Sam had helped to form. More productions followed, mostly Shakespearian; I had roles as Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Dauphin in Henry V. By my third year I had become president of Stage Two, and was overseeing several productions a year. I tried to cross over into acting roles in television, but talent, looks or (more likely) a combination of the two was lacking, and when the pattern of rejected auditions became undeniable I started to lose interest.
At that point in my life, although I had shown interest, and at times promise, in a variety of pursuits (chess, cycling, piano, debating, tennis, cricket, art, acting and cryptic crossword puzzles), I had never completely grasped the concept and necessity of training. Perhaps I had been duped by the ‘gifted child’ article into seeing all abilities as gifts: once I learnt the basics of a discipline I would discover to what extent I was naturally talented, and then that would be more or less my level. This changed when I started rowing during my final year at university. I was talked into joining the North Shore Rowing Club by my high-school friend Michael Trousdell (who would later prick my ears for the first time with his talk of freediving). The oldest of four giant brothers (although at 6 foot 6 inches he was the second-shortest), Michael kept his thick black hair cropped short and had a Fibonacci spiral tattooed on his shoulder. He was majoring in engineering, with minors in beer-drinking and snowboarding, and his loyalty and virtuous example have made him a strong inspiration in my life as well as a lifelong friend. We would rise at 4.30 a.m. to drive out to the rowing club in Greenhithe, from where we sculled through morning mists and past moored yachts, as far as the Auckland Harbour Bridge and back (a 24-kilometre round-trip). It was calming to be back on the water, and to feel its paradoxical state of being firm yet yielding, even if this was through the intermediary of an oar. Our slender crafts glided over a mirrored surface, propelled by a combination of legs extending and arms heaving on the oars. In this movement there is a striking similarity to the no-fins discipline of freediving, in which leg and
arm phases are accompanied by periods of gliding in the water.
In the evenings we would lift weights at the university gym, ending the session with 10 kilometres on the ‘erg’ (stationary rowing machine) before I ran a few kilometres home to my apartment in Newmarket. My strength increased and my technique improved, and my trial times for 2-kilometre rows and 10-kilometre ergs got steadily shorter. I witnessed my body becoming stronger and more fit; I felt the refinements in balance and speed of the boat. For the first time, I appreciated just how important training was to success in any sport. And not just any training. It’s one thing to submit yourself to the drills and regimens set by a coach, with the primary goal of ‘getting through’ the training — ticking the box, as it were. It’s quite another to perform the same drills and regimens while focusing every moment on improving efficiency, controlling the mind and pushing yourself as hard as you can. I call this ‘proactive training’, and it may have been the most important feature of my career in freediving. Although I was lucky enough to train with and learn from many incredible divers, I never once had a formal coach–athlete partnership. Instead, I cracked the whip against my own back, and all the training programs, daily schedules, and decisions about depth and progression, diet and recovery were determined by myself — perhaps with consultation from others but ultimately with autonomy. At 100 metres below the surface we freedivers are more alone than almost any athlete on the planet, and need to be unequivocally at ease with this fact.
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