I was nervous and tense as I prepared myself on the small fibreglass platform that had been constructed for the attempt. I’m sure my heart rate was pushing three digits. But whereas in 2006 the feverish anxiety had permeated all the way to the core of my subconscious, this time there was a calm in the eye of the mental storm. It’s easy for me to say now that I knew it was ‘my time’. Is that really true though? I’m sure that if I’d been asked then, I wouldn’t have claimed such a degree of certainty. We seem to resist admitting (to ourselves or others) any premonition of an agreeable future, lest we tempt fate to contradict us. However, this means that if the premonition is realised, we’re left wondering whether it isn’t just the distorted view of hindsight that created our memory of the premonition itself.
I was successful in tricking my team into thinking that this dive was just a rehearsal, and their relaxed behaviour helped maintain the illusion in my own mind. It really was like a training dive, and for most of it I was barely conscious of the significance of the occasion. Even the bizarre sight, during the start of my descent, of a large barracuda being chased at blinding speed by an even larger tarpon didn’t disrupt my mental state. It wasn’t until I had returned to the surface, removed my mask and handed the tag to the judge that it dawned on me. I turned to Nic, who was on the platform filming me, and said, ‘Well, that was actually the official record.’ His face displayed a brief struggle between jubilation and the indignation of a prank victim. ‘You bastard!’ he shouted. Meanwhile, beside me Mike Lott was laughing and claiming ‘I knew it!’ as he tried to push me back under the water while making it look like he was giving me a hug. We whooped and hooted together, letting out all our relief at having finally achieved what we had set out to accomplish a year before. It was made all the more special by having the same core group of the four of us who had stuck it out through three attempts.
The fourth member of that core group, Michael Trousdell, was still underwater with Charlie, Brian and Paul, so I dived down to where they were decompressing at 10 metres and tried to communicate the news using sign language. It was easy to trace the shape of a globe with my fingers, but for ‘record’ I resorted to miming a DJ, with one hand on my ear and the other scrubbing an invisible record table. Michael, who’d had 15 years of practice at deciphering my addled thoughts, was the first to twig, and he almost lost the regulator from his mouth as it widened into a broad grin. I shook hands with everyone, and tried to communicate my thanks for the role they had played in getting me to that upside-down summit and back again.
Back on the surface, I was amazed to discover the seahorse still gripping tenaciously to the mooring rope. The exhaust air from the divers was creating a blizzard of bubbles and powerful up-currents, but that miniature water dragon was still weathering it out, its long snout nodding like the bowsprit of a ship on high seas. I silently thanked the seahorse for its allegiance; soon afterwards, it unhitched itself from the rope and floated slowly away. Having removed my wetsuit and mask, I ducked back under the water and thanked the ocean, too, as I do after all my deep dives. For a few seconds I open my eyes underwater and try to extend my awareness to the water on all sides of me. I have no reason to believe in an ocean god, or that the ocean is itself an entity. When I speak to it, thank it or, more commonly, just smile in its presence, it is with the understanding that on a certain level I am indistinguishable from the ocean, and am thus really only thanking myself. (More later on why I think this.)
There was nothing anticlimactic about finally claiming the world record, but I still wanted to prove to myself that I was capable of doing it without the mental trick of dressing the attempt up as a training dive. I also wanted to share a record attempt, from start to finish, with my team. And so, two days later on 11 April, I dived again to 82 metres and this time the team’s celebrations required no cue.
The same day, the ocean kept for itself another world-record holder, French sled diver Loïc Leferme. During a training dive, the equipment he relied on to ascend had somehow malfunctioned, and by the time he could be brought to the surface he had drowned. In the ‘No Limits’ discipline, the diver descends with a weighted sled and ascends by inflating a lift bag using an air cylinder. Although only a dozen or so divers train in this modality, it has claimed the lives of four and seriously injured several others. None of the official freediving organisations ratifies No Limits anymore, and nowadays it is regarded by the freediving community as a stunt and a relic that the sport has outgrown in favour of the more athletic disciplines. Nevertheless, Loïc was a true waterman who was in search of profondeur absolute (absolute depth), within himself as much as within the ocean.
*
Having finally broken the world record, and proved to myself that I could play a role in discovering the extent of human aquatic potential, my mind turned to another lofty goal that had been making regular appearances in the showreel of tantalising dreams my mind displays as I drift off to sleep at night. The Dahab Arch. Its ethereal blue, framed by shaggy walls of coral and sponge, was an image I could not forget. It awed me, and haunted me with temptation, like the locked basement door in a horror film. There was a singularity to the idea of my freediving through it. A world record could be any depth, measured as a whole number of metres — and what was a metre anyway, other than an imperfect and fairly arbitrary division (one ten-millionth) of the distance between the equator and the North Pole? But swimming into Dahab’s Blue Hole, through its arch and ascending into the open Red Sea — that would be a unique accomplishment, like climbing a sheer rock wall for the first time.
There was also something transformational about the idea of passing through that portal into the open sea. Almost as if, wherever I went back then, I was still bounded by the walls and floor of an enclosed volume of water; to dare to pass through into that limitless empty blue might somehow yield access to a greater level of ability in freediving.
I began training specifically for the endeavour, doing drills of dives to 55 metres and then swimming an increasingly longer horizontal distance away from and back to the line before ascending again. I also announced on the freediving forums my intention to be the first human to pass through the arch with no fins (at this point, a couple of freedivers had made the trip with fins or a monofin), and set a date in July. This might not have been the smartest move, however, as it alerted the team of one of my few competitors, William Winram. Winram had been a Canadian national breaststroker, so had a clean and powerful technique for swimming underwater without fins. He had also made two attempts at the CNF world record, suffering logistical complications in the first and a blackout 20 metres below the surface in the second, which had taken place in Hawaii the week before my 81-metre dive. A narrow, goateed face and a long mane of sun-bleached hair gave him the look of a pirate, and his rascally antics and crazed toothy laugh confirmed the suspicion. In true pirate fashion, he snuck in ahead of me and stole the booty before I could get to the X on the map. In truth, William had only had idle intentions of attempting the dive, as after his deep blackout in April his confidence was low. Also, four harrowing root canal procedures had left air bubbles in his jaw that caused severe pain when subjected to the pressure of a deep freedive. He was persuaded to make the attempt by the Russian freediver Natalia Avseenko, who wanted to become the first woman to swim through with a monofin. Natalia bailed, but William carried on through; speaking about it years later, he said that in the moment when he committed to the crossing it was less about the arch itself and more about regaining trust in himself and his own abilities after the demoralising failures of the previous year. In the back of his mind, he felt that if he turned back then, his career was over.
My trip to Egypt was already booked, so I had to try to salvage some kind of purpose for it. I decided that the only way to make the dive even more pure (and difficult) would be to attempt it without a wetsuit, wearing only my Speedos. Hairy man-flesh is rough and wobbly material underwater, especially compared with the taut silicone-coated surf
ace of my Orca wetsuit, so I would be wasting a lot of energy in both form and surface drag. Diving mostly naked would also expose my weakness to cold (I have poor stores of body fat, or ‘bioprene’, and get cold even in tropical water), and this would mean that I’d shiver my way through more oxygen stores before the dive even began.
The way my preparations had been going, I’d been confident that I would be able to swim the arch unassisted — but doing it sans suit made me more nervous. I started to fear that the project might go the way of most of my other Egyptian escapades, which cut my newly won confidence right back to the ground. That anxiety gnawed at the back of my mind until the day I arrived at the Blue Hole to attempt the dive, whereupon it sat up and sank its jaws right into the middle of my adrenal glands. From the shelter of a shaded restaurant on the beach, I watched as my support team set up orange buoys for descent lines to hang on the inside and outside of the Blue Hole, to give me references for the vertical parts of the swim-through. The distance between these two lines was terrifying. I literally had to sweep my head from left to right across the horizon to identify first one, then the other buoy. I’d been told by technical scuba divers that the horizontal distance I would have to swim to pass through the arch was 30 to 35 metres, but what I was looking at had to be at least 100. Later I would discover that there’d been an error in the positioning of the outside buoy; this was corrected just before my descent, but the image I carried in my head as I swam out to take position on the inside buoy was of a chasmic distance — an insuperable gulf that would have been difficult to swim underwater even just below the surface, let alone at 55 metres.
I told myself that I would swim to the arch, take a stroke or two into it, and then decide whether to commit or to return the way I came. I knew that I would have to be quick with my breathe-up, or risk descending into a fit of shivering from where I could never attempt a maximal dive. Sure enough, after barely a minute of lying relaxed on the surface, the first twitches and ripples had arrived. My nerves had teamed up with the cold, and with every breath they gained more control. ‘What the hell, let’s just go and have a look,’ I told myself, and sucked a full gust of air into my lungs.
Without the buoyancy of a wetsuit it took just six easy strokes before I could feel gravity starting to take over. I tucked my arms to my sides and enjoyed the novel feeling of water flowing across the entire surface of my body as I picked up speed in the freefall. Through half-closed eyes I watched the walls of the Blue Hole loom out towards me as the diameter of the hole narrowed. The delicate tendrils and filigree of the softer corals that adorned the structure made an elaborate tapestry that slowly slid upwards through my view.
My depth alarm went off to tell me that I was at 45 metres; I should be able to see the opening of the arch soon. I cast my gaze downwards — and there it was, that immaculate blue, coming into sight. By good fortune I was already oriented in the right direction, and wouldn’t need to swivel to locate the opening.
Using a scull of my hands, I changed course to angle downwards towards that beckoning blue light. This put me in a belly-up orientation, but I had already visualised this when I had planned my swim, and over the course of two kicks and strokes I slowly rolled over onto my stomach. I glided past the first of two scuba divers stationed at the openings on either side of the arch. I had requested that no diver enter the arch itself during my dive, since bodies and exhaust bubbles could easily obscure or obstruct my path through it. The flip side to this was that if something did happen to me while I was in the very middle of the arch, then I would sink faster than the scuba divers would be able to intercept me, towards a sea floor that sloped steeply down from a depth of 90 metres into the abyss of the Red Sea trench. In that (I hoped unlikely) event, I had instructed them not to try to reach me. They were already beyond the limit of regular air diving, and to go deeper would expose them to nitrogen narcosis that could spell their end also. After all, this was the most dangerous dive site in the world. Over the 2002–2017 period, it claimed the lives of over 150 scuba divers (by comparison, Mount Everest took 120 climbers in the same period), and veterans refer to it as the Diver’s Cemetery. The first of the victims were remembered by plaques on the cliff next to the Blue Hole, but once the tally started to mount up they stopped the practice — otherwise it really would have looked like a cemetery.
As I passed the first scuba diver, I felt the heat from the lights on his camera rig trail down my back and off my feet. From here through to the other side, I was on my own. A thrill like I had never experienced before passed through my body. ‘I’m really in it!’ I thought to myself. After all the dives where I’d witnessed the enchanting but foreboding spectacle of that massive gateway, now I was actually inside the picture. It was really happening.
The moment of committing to swimming through the Arch at the Dahab Blue Hole.
Somewhere in the preceding moments I had subconsciously made the decision to keep going. I felt completely in control and powerful, and the uncertainty I’d had on the surface about the distance I would have to swim was quickly subsiding with the realisation that I was already halfway through and the ceiling was starting to slope upwards again. I was following this curve, to take the most direct route out, when I narrowly avoided colliding with a low-hanging outcrop of coral — a last-minute flinch of my shoulders ducked my head low enough to clear it. A swarm of tiny orange fish exploded away from my body as I took another stroke to exit from under the overhang, and then I was shooting free from the confines of the reef, soaring into a blue so clean and boundless that it felt as if I had been flung into outer space.
Swimming now in a vertical ascent, I spun to face the wall; and there was the second descent line, only metres away from me. I angled towards it, counting my strokes. An ascent from this depth was no more than 15 strokes, even without a wetsuit, and I knew I had many more than that in me. There was even the slightest sense of remorse that this epiphanic journey would soon be over. As I met my safety diver at 30 metres I slowed my strokes down, feeling as if for the first time the joy of parting the water above my head and sweeping it down to my sides in long, powerful flourishes. There was a rush of turbulence around my head as my body was propelled upwards towards the light with each stroke.
I broke the surface next to the buoy, took one breath while I removed my mask, then leant back into the water as I pumped my fist triumphantly into the air. There was something so innately complete about this dive, so satisfyingly conclusive. It had taken me through all three stages of matter: from air, down into liquid, then seemingly through solid rock itself, before returning up through liquid to air again. I was back more or less in the same place as where I had begun — on the surface of the sea beside the Egyptian desert — but I felt as if I had swum through into an alternate version of that world, one that presented open vistas of possibility in every direction. It was an immersion into confinement that ended with delivery into a limitless sea, having shed the restraint of all beliefs — my own and those of others. It was the ultimate rite of passage.
*
Shortly after returning to Italy and resuming a regular training pattern, I heard that Martin Štěpánek, whose record I had recently broken, was going to attempt to retrieve it with a dive to 83 metres in Egypt, in the same Blue Hole I had just left. The day of the attempt came, and news of Martin’s successful dive quickly spread online. My ego felt a twinge as it found itself demoted to second-best in the world, but this was vastly outweighed by an almost jubilant wave of fresh motivation. Martin’s success was a prime incentive for me to train harder and answer the challenge laid down, and on that same day I set a personal best in exhale apnea during my dry-training session.
However, the record was destined to be short-lived. When the official video was released the following day, I noticed that no tag had been used in Martin’s dive. The AIDA rules had recently changed to require that a tag be retrieved from the bottom plate as proof of arrival at the announced depth, and both the AIDA offici
als and Martin (himself an AIDA judge) should have known this. Somehow I was the only person who picked up on the fault, and so it fell on my shoulders to notify AIDA that the record should not have been validated. I did so immediately, so that Martin would have enough time to re-attempt the record, since it would be better for AIDA, the sport, and my career if he did so. Instead, his team chose to dispute the overruling, and by the time the attempt was confirmed as invalid Martin had lost the opportunity to try again. It was a tense moment in the freediving community, with opinion divided between those who saw the tag as an irrelevant feature of an otherwise perfect dive, and those who argued that the reputation of AIDA was at stake if it allowed records to be given to dives that didn’t satisfy its requirements. In the end, the critical detail in the AIDA jury’s decision was the fact that collecting a tag from the bottom plate and attaching it to one’s body, however simple an action it might appear to be, does in fact add a certain margin of difficulty to the dive itself. For my world record in the Bahamas I had used a rectangle of female Velcro as a tag, with a patch of male Velcro on the leg of my wetsuit to attach it to; this has now become the standard in freediving competitions. However, locating the tag, breaking it free from the plate and securing a good contact on the leg, all while executing a turn at the maximum depth, is still undoubtedly one of the most delicate phases of the whole performance. (Not to mention the niggling uncertainty during the ascent as to whether the tag is holding fast where you put it!)
Of course, with video cameras and accurate depth-gauges supplying fairly unequivocal proof of whether a particular depth has been reached, the tag has become more of a symbolic testimony. It harks back to the actions of the earliest freedivers, who dived to retrieve sponges or pearls from the sea floor. However, it also allows for a triumphant moment when the tag can be brandished to the judges and spectators as tangible evidence that, yes, I was there, and I brought this thing back to prove it.
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