I spent my days in Utila quietly, using a kayak to paddle to a point off a coral wall where I could train in 45 metres of water. This depth quickly became comfortable in CNF, to the point where I could even spend 30 seconds lying on the silty bottom before beginning my ascent. Often a lazy school of ocean triggerfish that showed absolutely no interest in me on the surface would follow me down for the entire dive, for reasons I could never decipher. Their grey diamond shape and triangular fins could make them resemble a shark when caught out of the corner of the eye, but after a while I got used to having them around. Their curious faces, with puckered white mouths that looked as if they were wearing dental braces and dark eyes that rolled around in leathery grey skin, gave them a goofy, bashful look. In all my time diving in Utila I never once saw a single shark, not even a reef shark, and I now know that this is testimony to the devastating effect of shark-finning in these poorer nations of the Caribbean. At first I would sometimes get the ‘shark jitters’ in the water and look around constantly, but by the end of my time there I could happily close my eyes while resting on the bottom, without any real apprehension.
*
The summer in Italy that followed was very different to the previous year. I took care of my ears and sinuses, and was able to continue my progress in depth training. Before long I had maxed out the depth available in the waters of Santa Teresa, and was even doing short pauses on the sandy sea floor at 53 metres, much to the concern of my safety diver waiting on the surface. The lack of depth beyond 55 metres and the frequent interruptions when the maestrale (cold nor-westerly wind) blew foaming swell into the strait led me to investigate flights to the Red Sea for a session of depth training. Mike Lott, an English student in the freediving course I had helped Umberto to teach, and whom I had kept in touch with afterwards, was living in Dahab, Egypt — a low-cost version of Sharm El Sheikh about an hour’s drive north through the desert. Mike invited me to join him to dive in Dahab’s Blue Hole, which is a Mecca for European freedivers looking for warm water and reliable conditions coupled with a cheap cost of living. Mike was a long-time surfer and recent convert to freediving, and made a living writing computer code. His unruly mop of blond hair hid half his vision; it also hid him from the world somewhat, a position he seemed to prefer. In the following years he would become my most loyal training partner and safety diver, travelling with me for weeks and months at a time to support world-record attempts, and all for no pay.
We stayed in the small stone building Mike was renting on the outskirts of Dahab. Egypt in August is a furnace, and the nights offer little respite. With no air-conditioning and only a weak fan for cooling, I would wake at night in a puddle of sweat, toss and turn to try to position myself on a dry portion of the bed, then fall back into a soupy sleep. The taxi rides we took to the Blue Hole were no more comfortable. Most of the time we were sandwiched into the back of a jeep, clutching our dive gear on our laps as the vehicle bounced and rattled over a vicious unsealed road. At times it seemed like the surrounding desert would have offered a smoother ride than that rutted track. Alongside it, dispassionate camels toted tourists in the same direction and at almost the same pace, and we passed herds of goats feasting on piles of cardboard.
My most loyal friends and crew members from my early years of freediving.
Nic Rowan, Mike Lott and Michael Trousdell.
I’ll paint a rough picture of Dahab’s Blue Hole, if only so that the reader can contrast it with Dean’s Blue Hole in the Bahamas, which I first visited later that same year. The Dahab Hole is a shaft, easily reached from the shore, that descends into the reef to a depth of 92 metres. Water can enter the hole both over the top of the reef, which is always underwater, and through a tall opening (known as the Arch) that makes a connection at 55 metres down between the Blue Hole and the open sea. A collection of restaurants crowd around the access to the Blue Hole. A floating pier extends from the shore out into the deeper water, supporting a waddling file of be-flippered Italian, Russian and English snorkellers, with all the belly fat but none of the coordination of a penguin march. These same snorkellers, trucked up from Sharm El Sheikh on fleets of Toyota Land Cruisers, would prove an all-round hazard in the water, whether to themselves (they swam either poorly or not at all), to the living reef (which they trampled over when they became exhausted from trying not to drown), or to the freedivers training in the centre of the Blue Hole (onto whom they would clutch for flotation if they couldn’t make it as far as the reef). Many a relaxed breathe-up was ruined by careless or floundering snorkellers, and many tempers burst at the sight of delicate staghorn corals, which take years to grow, being snapped underfoot by those who became stranded.
Scuba divers, with whom freedivers also shared the limited underwater space of the Blue Hole, could also be a hazard. During a deep freedive, looking in the direction of motion would compromise one’s hydrodynamics, relaxation and equalisation, so the freediver keeps the head aligned and sees only the rope next to them. If an oblivious scuba diver decided to use one of the freediving lines to hold onto during a decompression stop, then some kind of collision was almost inevitable. That meant a ruined freedive, followed by a heated altercation as soon as the scuba diver surfaced. In one of the worst cases, a scuba diver being tongue-lashed by a fuming, red-faced Danish freediver pulled out his dive knife, in what he probably thought was a defensive measure. Luckily, things de-escalated rapidly from that point on.
Absent the human element, Dahab’s Blue Hole is a beautiful dive site. Reef fish, abundant in shape and colours, populate the shallow rim and sides of the hole. This provides a beautiful vista, especially during the freefall phase of the descent, when you can relax and watch the coral walls and resident fish-life gradually slide by. Beginning at about 45 metres, if you’re facing the right direction, you can witness one of the most incredible underwater spectacles: the Arch. This huge passageway frames a view of the open water of the ocean, and what a view it is. A single colour, blue, in its most pure and radiant form, it speaks of emptiness and completeness, untold volumes and possibilities.
My training in Dahab started strongly, and on just my second dive I had turned in front of the Arch at a depth of 57 metres and swum back to the surface to set a new personal best without fins. The next day I aborted my first dive after straying too far from the line and grazing the rock wall. But on the second attempt I reached 60 metres, equalling the depth that had been a world record when I first began freediving two and a half years earlier. That record had inched up to 66 metres; then, in April of 2005, it had been flung all the way to 80 metres by the Czech freediver Martin Štěpánek. Many freedivers considered that mark unbeatable. After all, only a few years earlier Umberto Pelizzari had signed off his unparalleled career with a world record in Constant Weight to the same depth, wearing metre-long carbon fins. I had been astounded and, if we’re being honest, just a little demoralised by Martin’s incredible dive, but I didn’t share the view of it being unassailable. I had seen the video, and thought that his swimming technique was careless and left a lot of room for improvement. If Martin wasn’t realising the full potential of efficiency underwater, then someone who did could swim deeper still.
Over the remainder of my time in Dahab I gradually increased my dives to 65 metres, a depth that was approaching the limits of my tolerance to hypoxia (low oxygen) at that time. As well as this spurt of progress in maximal depth, there was another experience that Dahab’s Blue Hole introduced me to: narcosis. Narcosis in diving is a state of stupor, drowsiness or euphoria, caused by the way that gases — principally nitrogen and carbon dioxide — interact with our nerves at high pressure. Scuba divers, who keep their CO2 levels constant by exhaling, are mostly affected by nitrogen narcosis, at depths greater than 30 metres. This is one of the reasons why the recreational limit for scuba diving is 40 metres: if the mind is severely impaired by narcosis, then the diver might lose track of time and not monitor their depth or gas levels. In freediving the absorption of nitrogen in
to the body’s tissues is limited, but the accumulation of carbon dioxide, which cannot be off-gassed, is much more pronounced. Combined with the pressures experienced at depth, high levels of CO2 can bring on a state of wooziness. This starts off being dreamy and pleasant, but on deeper and longer dives takes on a more sinister tone, and may even result in hallucinations. I would start to experience this in 2008, when I first dived past 100 metres in the Free Immersion discipline, sometimes in complete darkness. For now, in Dahab, the narcosis was of the pleasant variety. It dampened most of the urge to breathe in the ascent and shortened my perception of time, to the point where it felt like the ascent was abridged and there must have been some kind of mistake made with the line being set too shallow. Gradually, over the years, my tolerance to CO2 increased and so did the depth at which I would become ‘narced’. I even developed a training exercise that targeted ‘narcosis resistance’ and as a side effect provided a shortcut into the most refined state of consciousness — a kind of yogic samadhi-like bliss — but that came later, and in a different Blue Hole.
*
While in Dahab I had asked my peers whether they had ideas about places anywhere in the world with good conditions for training during the northern winter. It may seem strange that on a planet covered mostly by water there is such a small selection of dive sites adequate for freediving training, but we’re a fussy bunch! The water must be warm, or our lean bodies start to shiver in our thin wetsuits; it must also be clean and clear, to leave enough light at depth to see the line. Currents and swells are impractical, and this rules out most exposed areas; the remaining sheltered areas are almost always too shallow. The site can’t be too remote from shore either, or boat transfers consume too much time and fuel. The ideal freediving location would be a bottomless pool in the corner of a tropical lagoon, right next to a white sand beach that you can drive right up to. As it turns out, there is one such place in the world, and it was Sebastien Murat (proponent of the theory of exhale diving for humans) who tipped me off to it. Although he hadn’t dived the site himself, he told me of this little-known Blue Hole on a remote Bahamian island where he had been a dive master several years previously: Dean’s Blue Hole; at the time the deepest known Blue Hole in the world, at 202 metres.
My ears were pricked. I knew that if I could train consistently for several months in good conditions, I would be able to improve on the 65-metre mark I had reached in Dahab. When I returned to Italy I tried to research Dean’s Blue Hole, and Long Island where it was located. There was almost nothing on the internet other than some ambiguous photos of the surface of the Blue Hole. I communicated with a resort on the island, but despite lengthy questioning still couldn’t ascertain whether there was something critically wrong with the site. Did the shaft of the Blue Hole go straight down, or at an angle? Were the currents just on the surface of the lagoon, or did they move the water column vertically? The fact that no one had yet freedived the Blue Hole kept me thinking that it was flawed, that if it sounded too good to be true then it probably was. As it turned out, however, Dean’s Blue Hole was even better than it sounded.
Before travelling back to the Caribbean I consolidated on my progress with a dive in Syracuse, Sicily, at a competition in memory of the freediver Rossana Maiorca, daughter of the great Enzo Maiorca. There was no CNF category, so I competed barefoot alongside the other CWT divers who were wearing fins and monofins. To this day I can still picture the wide-eyed face of the scuba diver stationed at 65 metres when he saw me freefalling towards him and the base plate. I was told afterwards that he was the club’s veteran, who had seen ‘everything there is to see underwater’, but I had given him the surprise of his life, as he could only think that I must somehow have lost my fins on the way down without knowing it, and he was going to have to intervene to take me back to the surface! That dive, my second ever in competition, would prove a milestone for me, and the words I wrote in my journal motivated me for many dives to come: ‘On the 18th of September 2005, when you were tired from the sun and sea of the previous day, when a black cat had crossed your path that morning, when there were waves and current and countless other niggles, you performed a personal best to 66 metres. You overcame the negative psychology and influencers. For, after all, the dive is up to you, and you alone.’
*
I arrived with Tiziana in the Bahamas at the start of October. The monosyllabic owner of the apartment we were to rent collected us in a single-cab utility truck. We stopped at a sparsely stocked supermarket to buy provisions, and the meagre selection of canned goods, weevil-infested grains and wilting vegetables began to convey an idea of how barren Long Island was at that time. For two of the next three nights we ate corned beef with onions and potatoes. The apartment was next to one of the most beautiful beaches on the island, but its beauty was the bait in a mosquito trap for humans; the mosquitoes were, according to the locals, at their very worst during this period. Returning from the beach, we would have to break into a run to outpace the whining black nebulae that formed above our heads — and this long before sunset. A local man I met later that week drove his pick-up truck with a bottle of Guinness and a can of full-strength DEET insect repellent, in side-by-side cup holders. Before opening his car door he would take a swig of the Guinness, scrunch his eyes and mouth closed and spray the DEET (which will melt plastic) liberally across his face.
With such a plague of marauding bloodsuckers trying to get in, our apartment was not the impregnable haven it needed to be. The window nettings were torn and punctured, and the buckled aluminium window-frames displayed wide breaches that mosquitoes could sail through in double file. We were a kilometre from the main road, with no neighbours, phone or other means of communication. Somehow we survived the night, and the following day received a dying old truck that we rented for a few days, at an exploitative price, before we could find better lodging and transport. Those first days were the antithesis of the image of an island paradise that the Bahamas invokes. Tiziana was at the limit of her tolerance for hardship, and I wasn’t far behind. Within a week of landing I was at the only place I could find with an internet connection (a telephone store where the shopkeeper begrudgingly stepped aside to let me use her desktop computer and 14.4 kbps dial-up modem), writing e-mails to contacts in Hawaii and elsewhere to enquire whether I could escape and train where they were instead. Looking back, it’s fortunate that the difficulty connecting to the outside world meant that by the time I received any replies I had already met a kindly local couple with a rental cottage and spare car, and with the generosity to help us adjust to the many trials of life on a secluded island.
Long Island is a very different place now. In part due to the exposure that freediving has brought it, tourism is better catered for, with a variety of hotels, apartments and villas available. High-speed internet, cellphone towers, better-stocked supermarkets and farmers’ markets provide for most of the creature comforts of our age, and the bountiful shallow seas around the island mean that seafood dinners are easy to obtain. In 2005, however, the only thing that kept me on the island was Dean’s Blue Hole. I still recall with clarity the morning of 7 October that year, when I walked the few steps from the end of the grass-and-sand road onto the beach and came face to face for the first time with that lens of deep blue water in the corner of the sandy lagoon. It was a brooding liquid mystery that swallowed the light from the sky. Limestone cliffs collared the hole on three sides, creating a natural amphitheatre with an abyss in place of a stage.
As I swam from the shore out over the edge, where the rock cuts far back underneath to form the second-largest known underwater cavern in the world, I found myself gazing down into a darkness more impenetrable than the depths of the open ocean. It’s impossible not to be awed, and not to feel just a little trepidation, when suspended for the first time over the centre of Dean’s Blue Hole. Nietzsche noted that the abyss also looks back into you, and I needed no leap of imagination to feel that giant iris of deep water penetrating my mind and r
eading the thoughts, hopes and expectations lying therein. Right from the first day, I realised that Dean’s Blue Hole could not have been designed more perfectly for freediving, and that more than anywhere else on the planet it would enable me to unlock the aquatic potential that was in my species; that was in myself. I felt those possibilities, and the turbulence of dreams and aspirations they triggered, as I gazed. And then I lifted my legs, spread the water with my hands, and let my body follow my eyes downward, past the lip of the hole to where the chamber opens and the side walls retreat into the shadows. Suspended in that underworld I turned in a slow circle, taking in the immensity of the volume of water it contained, and only sensing the untold greater mass of inky liquid lying beneath. Everything was muted: light, sound, thought and identity. I felt naked and intensely alone, but I also felt a sense of belonging. In 2003 I had found my calling, but in 2005 I had found my home.
Reaching for the surface in Dean’s Blue Hole. Diving without a wetsuit is the most exhilarating way of moving through the water. (Igor Liberti)
I settled into my new quarters very easily. The perpetual twilight of the depths beyond the rim of the Blue Hole became familiar and soothing. Within two weeks I had hit 70 metres, and because of the simplicity of the training I was able to follow the deep dive with a training table of six to eight dives to 32 metres with short recoveries. In the evenings I would do yoga or exhale static apneas, and on rest days I explored the island or swam from shore to spear fish and lobsters on the shallow reefs.
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