Into that empty space my ego was quick to expand, pointing out that since I was at the same depth as the nearby scuba divers I could flaunt my newfound aquatic prowess to them in many creative ways! So I shadowed them on the surface, and for the rest of the session swam down to startle the group from behind, cruise disinterestedly past in front of them, or appear magically inside a wreck they were exploring. I was thrilling over the ease and naturalness of unencumbered underwater movement, and wanted an audience for it. Afterwards, aboard the dive boat, the guide scolded me as he swung his tank and buoyancy jacket onto the deck: ‘Stay out of my way when you’re doing that — it spooks the guests.’ For the rest of my time in Belize, and subsequently in Honduras, I kept a respectful distance from any scuba divers. When we did encounter each other on occasion, rounding the corner of a submerged buttress or approaching from opposite directions of a coral alleyway, it was like coming across a busload of package-tour sightseers while hiking in the forest.
Instead of the scuba divers, I played with the full-time residents of the sea — like sting-rays, nurse sharks and barracudas. The rays looked like stealth bombers as they approached, hovercrafting inches above the sandy seabed. In a game of underwater chicken their bluff is easy to call — at the last minute they would wing up and glide over the top of me, revealing soft white underbellies broken only by a quirky mouth like that of a mischievous child.
I visited the Great Blue Hole, a murky aperture in Belize’s reef that only really looks good in aerial photos. As the sun set on each day, I practised the yogic breathing exercise pranayama, sitting on the end of a long pier that extended towards the waves breaking over the barrier reef. After half an hour with my eyes closed, concentrating on slowly measured inhales, exhales that were twice as slow again, and a hold between the two that was twice the exhale, I would open my eyes and witness a scene that seemed almost too real. For a period my gaze had no focal point or periphery: I could take in the sight of everything in front of me, all at once. The waves, reflecting the evening sun and forming a flickering pattern that gradually compressed into the crisp line of the horizon. A pelican, resting atop an old dock post, its bill smugly tucked into its ruff. The scarlet clouds that blushed the twilight sky over the ocean . . .
I had made arrangements to meet with Dwayne, who had been in Los Angeles pursuing his acting career. One day, as I walked back to my hostel, I heard a hiss from the bushes — and there he was, the friend I called ‘Snake’ due to the influence he’d had on me in Auckland. We took a bus into the depths of the Central American jungle, to Bullet Tree Falls near the border with Guatemala. There a different kind of water, the cabbage-green Mopan River, slid through the steaming jungle, bearing Dwayne and me afloat on our inner tubes with bottles of warm beer in our laps. I felt like Bilbo in his barrel, drifting through Mirkwood.
Belize was fun, but expensive, and there was nowhere close to the islands where I could reach deep water. Scuba divers I talked to recommended that I travel to the Bay Islands in Honduras, where prices for rooms and meals were in single digits. (Honduras was the name allegedly given to the area by Christopher Columbus in 1502 and literally means ‘depths’.)
Nowadays I wouldn’t travel without an itinerary, but when I set off for Honduras from Belize I had only a vague idea of how to get there, and that could be summarised by one word: south. From Belize City a bus took all day to travel a hundred miles down the coast to Punta Gorda, which was the end of the line as far as roads were concerned. To continue into Guatemala required a boat, but the next to leave wouldn’t go until the following day. So, I walked down the dusty streets past greasy chicken-fry stalls and the occasional convenience store until I found a place advertising rooms. There were cockroaches on the walls even before I turned off the lights, and the bed was made up with damp sheets stretched over a landscape of broken springs. Later that year I would sleep on a granite slab with only a towel for bedding, so this was by no means a low point.
The boat ride across to Puerto Barrios in Guatemala took about an hour, and from there I negotiated a taxi to take me to the border with Honduras. A bribe and a bus took me onwards to San Pedro Sula; this seemed like a pretty shady city to me at the time, and I held my bags close while waiting for my connection. I would later find out that San Pedro Sula is the most violent city on earth, with 187 homicides yearly per 100,000 people (over 100 times the rate in Auckland). The bus from there followed the coastline, which in this part of Central America runs east–west, to La Ceiba, the main Caribbean port of Honduras. After a night in a backpackers’ with huge open rooms that reminded me of dormitories at school camp, I bought a ticket for the ferry to Utila almost directly north. The smallest of Honduras’s three ‘Bay Islands’, the locals are descendants of English, French and Dutch pirates, including Henry Morgan, who used it as a base for his raids on gold-laden Spanish armadas returning from the New World.
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Huddled together off the protected western end of Utila lie a series of tiny football-field-sized islands called The Cays, which have become a kind of Waterworld community of fishermen and boat builders. It’s impossible to know the true shape of these tiny islands, covered as they are by a mass of tightly packed houses that all front onto the same central walkway. Bridges connect the islands, and the houses are backed out over the water on poles, with their toilets at the rear. A cool sea breeze blows over your nether regions as you soil the clean blue water below.
As I walked past the playground of the tiny school, children taunted me with the name ‘Miguelito’, for reasons I never deciphered. They also taunted an old man who was unlucky enough to live next to the school, and who answered the rocks the children threw on his roof with brayings of broken Spanish insults to their mothers.
I lived with some scuba instructors on a tiny island called Little Rock, squared off with cement walls and connected to the main walkway by an actual drawbridge. I slept in my bed perhaps twice; the hammock outside under the stars was a far more luxurious, air-conditioned and mouldable nest. In a hammock you need to lie on a slight angle in order to be flat, and when you do this the edges of the hammock curl up around you to create a kind of cocoon that you can line with thin bedsheets to protect against mosquitoes. I relished the sensation of being immersed in nature while I dreamt: the wind in the willowy casuarina trees, the slap of the waves, the creaking of boats at the dock. These sounds became familiar and soporific. I was like a parrotfish, which in the evening finds a coral alcove and secretes a mucus sleeping bag around itself to shield it from predators and parasites. Next to us, a formidable lady operated a fishing business employing a dozen or more ‘Caribs’, an ethnicity descended from African slaves who had bred with Native Americans. They somehow all slept in a tiny shack not much larger than a bedroom. We were woken one night to find one of these men stealing the stereo and CDs from our living room. Startled, he abandoned his loot and jumped into the sea to swim the short stretch back to his shack, and was gone the next day on an early boat.
Each morning the dive boat would arrive from Utila town to pick up those staying on The Cays, and would continue on to the north side of the island, where the best dive sites were. Our captain was John Wayne. Although born the same year as me, he had consumed twice the quota of years, teeth and rum. But he kept the old dive boat and its diesel engine running, and drove it prodigiously, once managing to surf it over a shallow reef by perfectly timing his approach to coincide with the swell and ride its steep face across to deeper water.
Honduras is where, over the course of two months early in 2003, I became a freediver. I was always the first off the dive boat and into the water, quickly pulling on mask and fins while the scuba divers were shouldering their heavy aluminium life-support. Choosing a direction that normally followed the shoulder where the reef drops from shallow to deep water, and which is a kind of coastal highway for underwater life, I would set off in search of a new discovery, be it sea creature, coral garden, grotto or swim-through. Barracudas would s
talk behind me, gunmetal tubes of muscle that can accelerate faster than any other fish. Ocean triggerfish kept a wary distance but were intrigued by my descents, and I would often find that they had followed me from the surface to 30 metres or more down. Groupers and moray eels rested their chins on the thresholds to their lairs. Tiny electric-blue fish swarmed with small wrasse above coral heads, waiting for mouths to clean.
Gliding above the reef of Utila, Honduras. (Adam Laverty)
In many dive sites there was a maze of sandy gullies through the reef, and these were my favourite places to enjoy being underwater. The depth was only 10 metres and after relaxing and breathing on the surface I would slowly swim to the soft seabed. There I was barely negatively buoyant, meaning that I could lie almost weightless on the sand, resting on my feet, knees and elbows. Tiny fish with cartoon eyes would swim out on bouncy trajectories from their safe spots to have a closer look at this massive interloper. Shrimp with limbs like glass spindles rummaged through the sand along the edge of the gullies. The closer you looked, the more activity, life and vivacity there was to see. Just as enjoyable was closing my eyes and surrendering to my environment, trusting it and its populace. In these moments my consciousness would go inwards. The sensation of not requiring breath, of being completely integrated into the underwater world, could last minutes.
At other times I ventured out from the sheer drop-off that marked the edge of the reef. I would spend a few minutes floating over the bottomless water, before duck-diving and swimming to just below the level of the adjacent reef table. There I stopped finning, and let my negative buoyancy draw me deeper. In front of me I watched the underwater cliff face, draped like a Christmas tree with bright sponges and sea fans, slip past at increasing speed. Spotted eagle rays soared past a distant outcrop. I plummeted down, changing my trajectory with subtle movements of my tail-fins. The decision as to when to turn and come back up was made by consulting two things. One was a crude scuba gauge measuring depth in feet, which had been popped out of the ‘octopus’ of a scuba rig. I held it in my hand, glancing at it periodically to check the position of the needle. The first 30 feet (9 metres) were shown in blue, the next 30 in green, 60 to 90 feet (18 to 27 metres) was yellow, and this was where I would become negatively buoyant and stop finning. From 90 feet (27 metres) onwards the dial was orange, and here I imagined I was entering the ‘danger zone’. I felt the pressure of the water column above me as a constriction in my diaphragm and windpipe, and had to make an effort to equalise my ears and my mask, which was being crushed onto my face. I didn’t know it then, but my lungs had been compressed to their residual volume, which is the volume of air that remains after a full exhale. To continue below this depth means that the lungs are reduced to volumes that are physically impossible to attain by exhaling on the surface. The day I saw the needle pass into the red zone deeper than 120 feet (37 metres) — red because it is beyond the limits of recreational scuba diving — filled me with a sense of both awe and pride at having visited such a profound stratum of the ocean. In my career I would reach a depth more than three times as great, but I wouldn’t have believed anyone who told me that at the time.
The scuba gauge I held in my hand in order to tell depth during my first year of freediving.
The other meter I would consult to determine when to turn back towards light and air was an internal gauge. Our bodies’ levels of carbon dioxide rise while we hold our breath, in concert with the falling level of oxygen. Carbon dioxide is the waste gas of cellular respiration and stimulates the urge to breathe, provoking a suffocating feeling when we resist it. However, with time and familiarity we can learn to make peace with the sensation and use it as an indicator of how far we are through our reserves of oxygen. This is why it is so important not to over-ventilate (breathe too deeply or rapidly) before a dive, as the signal to return to the surface may come later than normal — when you have used up too much oxygen and don’t have enough left for the return journey to the surface. Only through gradual increments over the course of weeks and months, and through learning how to read my body more accurately, could I feel confident in inching that needle a little further round its dial; in waiting a little longer, sinking a little deeper, before turning back for the surface.
The ascent is where we freedivers pay for our free ticket down. As soon as I turned upright I had to push hard with my fins to counter gravity’s pull on my negatively buoyant body. I kept my hands by my sides and was careful never to look upwards, which would break my streamline as well as possibly cause alarm if the surface appeared further off than I expected. Gradually the ambient light increased, and the reef wall in front of me passed from the slumber of deep blue to lighter greens, yellows, and finally the shortest wavelength colours of oranges and reds. Pillars of exhaled bubbles extended from the location of nearby scuba divers. John Wayne, my safety diver for the day and himself a proficient freediver, appeared in front of me, studying my face for signs of difficulty. Each surfacing, and there were hundreds during the two months I spent in Honduras, was a rebirth, a whoop of exultation for the journey I had just completed, and a surge of excitement at what I had discovered, within myself as well as within the waters I penetrated.
Once a week there would be a night dive, which offered a completely different experience of the underwater world. At night, shrimps, lobsters and other scavengers inherit the reef, while the daytime reef-grazers like parrotfish sleep in their mucus cocoons. The beam of an underwater light would pick out tiny transparent fish and crustaceans, and bigger nocturnal prowlers like jacks and barracuda would flash through the beam to grab at these suddenly illuminated morsels.
At first I couldn’t ignore an awareness of how small the window of light I created was, and how much of the water around me was an unknowable black. When paranoia bubbled over I would swing my light beam around to slash at the shadows, expecting to see — what else? — a shark, but there was never anything there and I gradually grew calmer.
The first time I switched off my light, the sensation of fear-tinged surrender was exhilarating — a delicious flutter below the sternum. Underwater darkness is blacker than anything above the surface, since, like ink or pitch, the darkness has a liquid medium. The water isn’t just dark; it is darkness as a substance. Coordinates in this empty nothingness are picked out by phosphorescent organisms that are excited into light by movement. After swimming to a sandy bottom at 15 metres I would turn off my light and ascend with arms stretched out above me. Streams of phosphorescent sparks were ignited by my fingertips and cascaded in a flurry down my body. I was travelling at warp speed through a river of stars and galaxies that collided with the glass lens of my mask and ricocheted into my peripheral vision. As I burst through the skin of the water’s surface my journey ended, and the stars congealed into the fixed constellations of the night sky above.
This was my life for two months. It seemed as if my childhood life on the boat had been spliced seamlessly with this new experience of the water; as if the intervening 15 years had never happened. Such is the timeless quality of the ocean. One night early in my stay I had one of those dreams that are so vivid and heavy with meaning that they seem more like a visitation. My oldest childhood friend, Damien Duff, appeared and told me repeatedly, ‘Stand in your dream,’ before shaking my hand and vanishing. I forgot to e-mail to ask him whether he was okay, or at least whether he had developed powers of witchcraft that allowed him to infiltrate others’ dreams, but I never forgot the message he delivered. It was a confirmation that the life I had begun was my dharma, my ‘personal legend’ as Paulo Coelho’s alchemist calls it. This was my dream, but to inhabit it I would have to stand true, and weather the winds of opposition that challenge us in our course. As the Māori proverb says,
Tama tū, tama ora (He who stands lives)
Tama moe, tama mate (He who sleeps dies)
I swam with dolphins, sharks, turtles, eagle rays, moray eels and one very bashful little seahorse. I lay blissfully in sandy-bottomed
caves where groups of scuba divers would come across me, become alarmed and attempt to shove a regulator in my mouth. I came face to face with a whale shark as it ascended under the boat in the same moment that I dove into the water. These slow-moving leviathans are the biggest fish in the sea, and were easy to locate as they followed the balls of bait fish, which in turn were indicated from a distance by diving seabirds and jumping tuna.
In a group e-mail at the end of my stay in Honduras I wrote, ‘On my last day I asked John Wayne to take the boat a way offshore, and jumped in with a dive instructor, Adam Laverty, for surface backup. I took a few hundred breaths, jackknifed, flapped down to 152 feet [46 metres], turned around, shut my eyes and hurtled back up again. The extreme pressure, panic and exhilaration on breaking the surface are going to take some getting used to, but I am taking a course with the world champ, Umberto Pelizzari, in Sardinia which should address these. My hair has been bleached the same light brown that my skin has been tanned to, so I am now a universal shade of shit. I am also growing a 24-carat mullet to remind me of home, or at least Henderson. In short, I look like your typical Kiwi travelling tramp.’
I celebrated breaking the milestone of 150 feet (46 metres), as well as the end of my stay on Utila, with a night at Bar in the Bush, where I guzzled the local brew (somewhat misleadingly named Salva Vida, or ‘lifesaver’ in Spanish) until I ate the napkin along with my burger and danced a Scottish jig . . . or so I’m told.
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My time in Honduras had re-acquainted me with the underwater world of my youth, and introduced me to the concept of freediving as a sport. I knew that if I wanted to pursue it further I would need to learn from an expert. Together with my close high-school friend Michael Trousdell, who had first grabbed my attention with his talk of freediving, we planned to attend a course run by the Italian maestro Umberto Pelizzari. Pelizzari was the greatest freediver of his generation, having set world records in all disciplines throughout the 1990s before retiring in 2001 and founding a school called Apnea Academy.
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