With my depths increasing through the seventies, under the watchful gaze of Mike Lott who was coordinating this new attempt, the progression was on track. But something else was happening. My blood pressure had dropped, and this could make me lightheaded before dives, an ominous sign that I might also be more susceptible to blacking out. Even worse, my resting heart rate was faster than that of a dormouse. Thinking that I was dehydrated, I started taking a rehydrating powder containing, among other salts, 11 milligrams of anhydrous zinc acetate. In addition, I was becoming frustrated with the food served up at the buffet restaurant in the resort where we were staying. Not only did it lack variety, but also it was bland and completely devoid of salt. I asked the chefs to add more, and they obligingly did so while I watched, but there must have been a problem with the salt they were using, as it had little effect. In my diary I commented: ‘The salt they use in cooking and put on the table might as well be talcum powder for all it salts: I poured some on my tongue and couldn’t taste anything other than the rice they use to keep it dry.’ So, I asked a friend to buy me some real sea salt from the market, as well as some good honey, since the brand used by the resort was hardly sweet at all.
Strangely, the new condiments were no improvement. I put it down to the general quality of Egyptian food, but at the same time I noticed that my mouth was producing saliva like I was some kind of frothing psychopath. And my blood pressure was continuing to drop. To test the severity, I asked Mike Lott to spot me while I took a full breath and stood up from the floor. A few seconds later I woke up to him holding me and patting me on the cheek. Who needs to dive to 81 metres when you can black out just by getting out of bed too quickly?
On 5 October I blacked out just before surfacing on a 76-metre dive. The next day I stepped things back to what should have been an easy 70-metre dive, and still had a samba on the surface. Now this was just plain stupid: I had done more than a hundred 70-metre-plus CNF dives (sometimes back to back on the same day), and it was a depth that should have been a walk in the park for me. Something was definitely up. It seemed that no matter how slowly and shallowly I breathed, I was still getting the pins-and-needles signs of over-breathing. After a day of rest, I decided to attempt another 70-metre dive. During the breathe-up I actually had to stop, exit the water to raise my CO2 levels, then get back in and breathe extremely slowly, with 20- to 40-second apneas between inhale and exhale. Even then, I started the dive with slight finger-tingling. The dive was clean, albeit a lot more difficult than it ought to have been. There followed a sequence of training days where I played snakes-and-ladders with the bizarre physiological condition that was wreaking havoc in my dives, not to mention destroying my sense of taste. Every time I felt like I was starting to make progress and dive more easily again, I would have another difficult dive, surfacing on the edge of a blackout. It culminated with several clean and confident 78s, then two big sambas on dives to 80 and 81 metres.
But why stop at mere physical woes? After all, I’d shipwrecked on that reef in the previous attempt. A fresh form of persecution was provided by the coastguard informing us that we would not be allowed to anchor our dive boat at the site intended for the attempt. The reason: Hosni Mubarak, the president of Egypt, was hosting British prime minister Tony Blair in the resort next door, and for security all boat traffic was prohibited within a certain distance. Mike and I tried first to vent our anger and make ourselves look presentable before walking over to the adjacent property, where we asked to speak with the distinguished guests. Whether we were actually wearing shoes is a detail that escapes my memory, but it’s certain that there were no trousers, let alone suits, in our wardrobe at the time. The guards on duty must have marvelled at the audacity of these two foreign drifters standing before them and requesting — or more likely demanding — an audience of their head of state. Of course we were turned away, and I doubt that the two leaders were ever aware of the debacle their presence had caused. At the time, it might have consoled us to know that their days of spending taxpayers’ money on luxury getaways were numbered: the following year, Tony Blair would be pressured to resign over his role in what many saw as war crimes in Iraq, while Mubarak was found guilty of worse when the dust settled on his country’s revolution, and he languished for six years in a military prison.
Because of the ban, we lost the first three days of our window for the record attempt. This meant that I would only have one day remaining, 27 October, to try to complete an official dive to 81 metres. My mother, Linda, had travelled from New Zealand for the event; it would be her first experience watching me freedive. Michael and Nic were back to help take my mind off the diving by recalling stories from our schooldays, but the comic relief took a fresh turn when they both came down with ‘pharaoh’s revenge’ (severe diarrhoea) and supplied running commentaries of the logistics and pitfalls involved when two room-mates with volatile digestive tracts share a single bathroom. After weeks in Egypt I had guts of steel, but the same wasn’t true of my nerves. The undiagnosed disorder, the setbacks and the failed dives had all undermined my confidence. I told myself not to think about the objective, but rather to concentrate on doing the best dive that I was capable of.
On the day itself, at 11.00 a.m., I walked with one of the judges down to the beach and swam the short distance out to the boat. The rescue boat wanted to pick me up to transfer me, but I was wary of their outboard motor, which was spewing carbon monoxide over the water. Aboard the dive boat, I escaped to the top deck again while the crew lowered the rope and got into position. At 11.30 I went down and entered the water, which was the signal for the two deepest technical-support divers to start their descent to 81 metres, followed by the two who would be stationed at 55 metres. A team of four video operators and two photographers also got into position to capture the attempt.
After about 8 minutes of gentle breathing I lifted my head, took the last breath and started to move forward for the duck-dive. It was at this moment that I realised my right arm was caught up in the cord attached to my snorkel. The air came out of me as from an unknotted balloon, and I had to repeat the last 2 minutes of my breathe-up. By this point a feeling of despondency had enveloped me, and if I’d had more experience I would have known to listen to the voice quietly advising me to call it all off. One of the hardest skills in freediving is to distinguish between instinct and fear. They both communicate through the same visceral channel — the ‘gut’ — but there’s no return address to trace where the missive came from, and where it came from makes all the difference. Whereas fear is an emotive response that can be completely irrational or out of proportion with the threat (such as arachibutyrophobia — the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth), instinct is actually the result of a reasoning process that happens behind the veils of the constant mental conversation we have with ourselves. Our subconscious mind has access to more data and can work at a greater speed than our rational mind, which is limited to about the same pace that we can say words. But most of the time our subconscious isn’t allowed access to the ‘situation room’ in our brain, so it has to send messages; and unfortunately these get delivered to the same inbox as all the spam we receive from our emotions.
In those last minutes before the dive began, I was clearing the emotional spam out of my brain every few seconds, and the soft-spoken misgivings of my subconscious were deleted along with everything else. At a guess, my heart rate was between 100 and 110, and despite breathing as slowly as possible I still had slight hypocapnic signals in my hands. When I started the dive, the seven descent strokes I take before freefall were over so quickly that I wondered if I had miscounted. Then, almost straight away, between 30 and 40 metres, I started to feel narcosis. Normally this begins during the ascent — not halfway through the descent. I kept a watch on the narcosis, ready to abort the dive if it became too severe, and this may have meant that I wasn’t as relaxed as normal. With no way of knowing how deep I was, I kept on falling, trying to find the ‘infinite regressio
n’ that I train through exhale static apneas. Finally the 75-metre marker flashed past, and I readied myself for the turn. Just above the plate I grabbed the line with my left hand, reached out with my right for a Velcro tag and slapped it onto my thigh as I pulled on the line to start my ascent.
I was telling myself that, one way or another, by now the dive had already been decided and all I had to do was swim. I felt the heat from a video camera light burn through my closed eyelids when it was thrust too close to my face by an overzealous cameraman. At this point I was still feeling okay — no contractions and plenty of strength — but, as always, hypoxia won’t rear its ugly head until the finish line is in sight, like a wolf that waits by the door of your house for your return. Just below 30 metres Mike Lott came into view, and I waved my head from side to side to indicate that I wasn’t sure I was going to make it. The last memory I have is of reaching for the line at about 15 metres and starting to pull for the surface, then feeling Mike grab me to help me ascend. It was the worst blackout of my career. I was unconscious as I was dragged from 10 metres to the surface, and didn’t come round for another 20 seconds after that; long enough to have a short dream about something completely irrelevant that I forgot soon after.
To be there again, aboard another sinking ship as it headed for the bottom in a sea of disillusionment, was a hard reality to accept. The warm words of sympathy and encouragement from all those around me should have floated any old wreck, but I wouldn’t allow it. Perhaps part of me needed to dwell for a while in that murky chasm, to let the experience of it seep into my skin so that I always could keep a part of it with me, as a reminder and as an incentive.
Sebastien Murat wrote a succinct e-mail that helped me to assimilate the disappointment: ‘Success without some hardship doesn’t make for good story, at least not with the script you’ve chosen; there needs to be hardship (continued) and failure (at least twice) before there can be empathy, support and rejoice. Otherwise, it’s an empty experience, at least socially, which by the way is all that will really matter in the long-term, for those emotionally smart enough to work that one out. This is why many of the “guns” of the sport are like shooting stars: people are impressed by their feats, but quickly move on to the next spectacle. Aim for a lasting impression.’
So far, I had made no impression at all. Not just socially (which I liked to think I didn’t care so much for, but then again I was never emotionally very smart either!), but also on the particular journey I had chosen: the quest to measure the depth of our species. My personal resources and self-belief were finite resources that had been all but consumed. The patience of my friends, who had supported me with their time and energy, was being tested as well, though I suspect that their loyalty might have outlasted my perseverance. I decided to admit to myself that my career in the sport depended on being successful on the next occasion. Third time lucky, third time’s a charm; no one ever mentions anything about the fourth time around. No, it had to be the next attempt.
In this way my mind fixed on the concept of inevitability. It is one thing to say ‘I’m going to do my best!’ or even ‘This time I’ll do it for sure’, but when we make the statement ‘Next time it’ll be inevitable’, then that is in an entirely different category. It discounts even the most remote possibility — or, shall we say, even the possibility of there being a possibility — of an alternative scenario. Having made such a declaration, as I did, and having meant it, then I was locked into an entirely different mindset. I knew I would have to go far deeper than the current world record in training, and that I would have to ensure that the attempt itself replicated my training dives in almost every detail. I would have to insulate myself from any kind of sickness and any influence from the outside world. I would train and I would have patience, and when I was ready, when I knew that there could be no other outcome, then I would allow what was inevitable to have its day.
*
My taste never did come back after that time in Egypt, and I have never deciphered the cause, although some research showed correlation between the condition and the dubious Egyptian medicines I had been taking to clear cold symptoms. Ageusia is a very rare disorder, in which the tongue loses ability to taste salt, sour, sweet and bitter. All the other myriad flavours of the food we eat are actually perceived by our sense of smell, when the aroma travels up our retronasal passage and across our olfactory sensors (this is why food tastes bland when you have a cold). While I can still detect the nuances in flavour between blackberries and raspberries, I wouldn’t have a clue whether either was sweet or sour. Both salt and sugar are like sand in my mouth, and I can only distinguish between them by the texture. All told, however, it is a painless sense to lose, especially since my training diet already prohibited any food with added sugar and I had also stopped adding salt to food when I learnt that it has absolutely no function in the body other than to make us drink more water in order to eliminate it. Now I rarely think about it, or perceive any lack in my experience of eating. The only complication might be if I were marooned in a lifeboat; in that case I’m sure I would be the first to start drinking the seawater, as in my mouth it is indistinguishable from fresh!
CHAPTER 5
CONFIRMATION
A mantra of inevitability
In wantonness of spirit, plunging down Into their green and glassy gulfs, and making My way to shells and sea-weed, all unseen By those above, till they waxed fearful; then Returning with my grasp full of such tokens As showed that I had searched the deep
Lord Byron, The Two Foscari
CHEMISTS USE TEST TUBES so they can control the exact contents, isolating the experiment from any external influence. If they repeat the experiment with the same base materials, they can expect the same result. What I needed was a giant test tube to dive in. If I surfaced smiling from 81 metres on Tuesday, then dived again on Thursday under exactly the same conditions (of the sea and of my body), I should be able to expect a similar result.
Luckily, I had a 200-metre-deep test tube right under my nose: Dean’s Blue Hole. Flying in safety divers and judges for a record attempt in the Bahamas would be more expensive than diving elsewhere, but at least I would not have to travel and change time zones myself. And I had hatched a plan to maintain even more uniformity between my training and the attempt itself. When the time came, I would tell my team that I needed a rehearsal before the big day, in which I would do a training dive to the attempt depth with all the judges and cameras in place. Of course the judges themselves had to be in on the plan, so that if it was successful they could register it as an official record, but for everyone else it would be ‘just another training dive’. My team might have questioned why I didn’t just make it an official attempt in case I made the dive; but at the same time, everyone knew that I had been trying to have my training replicate as accurately as possible the conditions of an attempt.
I won’t bore readers with a blow-by-blow account of the road back to full strength and greater depths after the second failure in Egypt. Suffice it to say that within three weeks of that nadir of morale, I had returned to the Bahamas and was diving with renewed vigour and enthusiasm.
Another effect of setting a goal of ‘inevitability’ was that it lifted a ceiling on depth. I knew that achieving an 82-metre dive in preparation wouldn’t suffice to make success in the record attempt inevitable: I had to go to 86, or deeper, in training. Invention is not necessity’s only child: her first-born is the belief in the very existence of a potential solution. If it’s imperative to us, then we have no choice but to believe in its possibility. Then, armed with belief, we go out and invent. I didn’t stop to smell the roses at 80 metres, or at 82 or 84. I wasn’t thinking about record attempts, competitors (of whom one, the Canadian William Winram, was also trying to break the same record), or the naysayers, such as AIDA president and judge of my previous attempt, Bill Strömberg, who had scoffed that I was 5 to 10 years too early for a world record. Anything that didn’t relate to the technique and proces
s of diving I was using was irrelevant to me.
I wrote glorifying e-mails to entice freediving friends to come and dive with me in the Bahamas over the winter, so that I would always have training partners. I analysed every dive, honed and refined every movement. And one day, in March 2007, I swam decisively to the surface from 86 metres, removed my mask and made an ‘okay’ sign to Tyler Zetterstrom, a Canadian who was safetying me, and knew that this time I was truly ready.
For this attempt there would be no extra cameras or photographers; the entire team numbered nine people. Below the plate at 82 metres, would be stationed two of the most experienced cave divers in the world, Brian Kakuk and Paul Heinerth, with rebreather equipment and lift bags that they could clip onto my wrist if I suffered a problem at depth. In midwater, at 55 metres, would be Charlie Beede and Michael Trousdell with twin tanks of regular air and extra lift bags. Mike Lott and Tyler Zetterstrom were my safety freedivers, ready to escort me to the surface in the final 30 metres of the ascent. Nic was stationed on the platform to film the surfacing, and the AIDA judges were Dimitris Vassilakis and Karoline Meyer.
When I walked out onto the beach on the morning of 9 April, only the judges knew that I was going to be diving for a world record. The atmosphere was relaxed, as everyone went about their business doing final checks. In the midst of the scene, a tiny seahorse — the first I had ever seen in the Blue Hole — was found clinging to one of the platform’s mooring lines, its tail coiled tightly around the rope.
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