Oxygen
Page 15
‘What the hell were you doing? You were supposed to be keeping them off,’ I fumed in Italian.
‘You wait till you see this footage!’ he replied triumphantly.
Wearily, we once more swam back along the coastline, dragging the laden catch-bucket behind us as the sun set over the island. The water was dusky and full of brooding shadows. But the ordeal wasn’t over yet. As we were swimming through a narrow channel into the lagoon where we started from, a freak wave capsized the bucket, emptying its entire contents of fish and blood into the water. I was ready to call it quits. Like a train of spurned suitors, the sharks had shadowed us desultorily back up the coast, and it would only take seconds for the dispersing blood to reach their nasal ducts. There was no way I was swimming into what would quickly become the centre of a feeding frenzy. Jimmy, however, had different priorities. He let out a primal cry, and in a flash he had righted the bucket and was grabbing the fish bobbing in the water around him and throwing them back in it. I watched, astounded, as he collected every last one before kicking — with the bucket — away from the bloody slick just as the sharks converged on it. We laughed our way back into shore, before staggering on exhausted legs up the beach to begin the business of cleaning and preparing the fish for dinner.
*
In the year 2007, I clinched the no-fins world record, and in 2008 I had added the Free Immersion title. As we headed into 2009, I wanted to improve my diving in Constant Weight (with monofin) to see how close I could get to the world record in that third discipline. The record was then held by French monofin specialist Guillaume Néry, who had taken it from Herbert Nitsch the year before with a dive to 113 metres. Herbert had reserved a place at Vertical Blue in April 2009. Although he was already being heralded as the greatest freediver in the history of the sport, at the start of that year he didn’t hold a record in any of the disciplines. Everyone knew that he would be attempting to redress this fact.
After the success of 2008, I felt that if I could make friends with the monofin, learning to use and feel it as an extension of my legs, then 113 metres should be within my reach. It was only 5 metres deeper than the record I had set the previous year in Free Immersion. Between December 2008 and the end of January 2009 I trained mostly with the monofin, improving my personal best from 94 to 111 metres in the space of those two months. Then came one of the worst winters that I have seen on Long Island. For weeks, the winds blew unrelentingly from the east, churning the water of the lagoon, and the Blue Hole that adjoined it, into milky white froth. Worse still, the wind created a current that travelled north up the island, trapping any seaborne material in the south-facing bays. And there was plenty of it. Far out in the Atlantic Ocean there is a vast area called the Sargasso Sea, where surface-floating seaweed blooms in huge volumes. The currents turn it in a massive gyre the size of India, which mixes and tangles with man’s plastic flotsam. Somehow, that year the trade winds had pushed great swathes of this seaweed out from the gyre and distributed it across the islands of the Bahamas, piling it up against the northern corners of lagoons such as the one that holds Dean’s Blue Hole.
Initially, the visibility was reduced by the cloudy water, and drifts of seaweed and plastic cluttered the surface around our dive platform. As the seaweed kept coming in, it started to form a covering over the Blue Hole, and we had to use our fins to clear a window in this before we could dive. The covering became thicker until it formed a complete lid over the Blue Hole. At this point we had to use a scuba tank to blast a pillar of bubbles up from 5 metres below the platform, opening a gap in the mat of brown weed so that divers could breathe up and start their descent unobstructed. By the depth of 50 metres, the water was pitch-black. This wasn’t so much of a problem for the descent, as we could skim against the descent rope with the side of the face or with one hand in order to stay on course. But on the way up, losing the rope was at best disconcerting and at worst a serious hazard. In several dives I finned almost all the way to the surface with no reference line, and burst through the carpet of seaweed to claim a breath of air. Some of these dives ended with sambas, and after one blackout I decided that I would have to rein in my training until the conditions improved. After all, it didn’t look like they could get any worse.
I was wrong. The matted lid over the Blue Hole became so thick that islands formed — the surface seaweed had been pushed up so much by all the weed below it that it was drying out on top. Diving under it, I measured the thickness at 2 metres. Birds trotted around these islands, feasting on the entangled shrimp and crabs. Finally — barely a week before the start of the Vertical Blue event — the winds changed and the tide began the job of moving the weed out of Dean’s Blue Hole. It was deposited on the beaches, in huge rotting mounds and banks, but was better there than in the water. At last I was able to attempt a training dive to 113 metres in CWT, which would equal the current world record. The dive finished with a samba, but I felt I knew what I needed to do to complete the dive cleanly.
Vertical Blue began, and straight away Herbert announced a world-record attempt of 114 metres Constant Weight. He was having difficulty equalising, though, and on this and the next two days he didn’t reach the plate at the target depth. The same applied to me on the third day, when I announced 109 metres and turned just 3 metres above the plate. While 3 metres isn’t much, and it’s possible to ‘ride’ the ears a little bit, allowing the thin membrane of the eardrum to stretch with the pressure in order to get a little extra depth, it’s a game of Russian roulette. At that depth, a burst eardrum can mean severe vertigo and the inability to swim in a straight line upwards, and normally ends with a deep blackout. At the minimum, it would spell the end of deep diving for a period of weeks while the ear healed. I’ve always chosen the conservative approach, even when it means turning agonisingly close to the target; but as a result I still have two perfectly intact eardrums. Since the scar tissue of a healed rupture is prone to breaking again, it is definitely an advantage to never suffer this injury in the first place.
On the fourth day of the event (day one of Act Two), Herbert finally succeeded with his equalising. With the record now standing at 114 metres, I felt that it would probably be out of my reach this time. I switched to No Fins, in which I had reached 93 metres in training, although that was a long time ago, back before the seaweed hiatus. On my first attempt at 88 metres I suffered another surface blackout. I still hadn’t logged a clean white card dive, and when Herbert broke my world record in Free Immersion with a dive to 110 metres the following day, I felt as if the event was slipping away from me. I returned to Constant Weight, and built up my confidence through dives to 101, 107 and 109 metres; then, on the penultimate day, I had another attempt at 88 metres without fins. This time the dive was clean — enjoyable, even. I ascended to the surface flanked by my safety divers and good Italian friends Marco Cosentino and Antonio Cavallo. My last stroke, at 6 metres below the surface, sent me gliding towards the light, and after two measured hook-breaths (recovery breaths with a pause and squeeze of the exhalatory muscles after the inhale) I tore the Velcro tag from its attachment on my leg and pumped it in the air to celebrate my fifth world record in the purest discipline.
With freediving world record holders Herbert Nitsch and Sara Campbell at Dean’s Blue Hole during Vertical Blue 2009. (Franck Vieljeux)
Nonetheless, the event that year belonged to Herbert. He had also made an attempt at 88 metres CNF, aborting it during the descent, but on the last day he sent shockwaves around the freediving community by announcing a depth of 120 metres in Constant Weight. A jump of 6 metres beyond his still-fresh world record was an unprecedented increment in the sport, and there were discreet conversations about whether such an announcement should be allowed to proceed. No one dared deny him the opportunity, however. The next day, Herbert filled his voluminous chest with Caribbean air before slowly meandering downwards, his arms by his sides, at such a slow speed that the idea of a dive to 120 metres seemed absurd. After a full minute he was
still only at 40 metres. However, from that point on he started to accelerate as his lungs compressed and negative buoyancy took over, and by 70 metres he was freefalling at 1.2 metres per second (4.3 kilometers per hour or about normal walking speed). Just over 2 minutes into the dive he turned at the plate and began finning powerfully upwards, but by halfway up he had exhausted most of the energy in his legs. When he met his safety divers at 35 metres, they were presented with a bizarre sight. Herbert was ascending with arm strokes only, his legs and fin trailing behind him. There was still plenty of oxygen in his body for him to complete the dive, but his leg muscles had become fused with lactic acid. After a dive time of nearly 4 minutes, Herbert broke the surface and completed a quick protocol to take his twenty-fifth world record and cement his position as the world’s number one.
*
The conclusion of Vertical Blue 2009 left me feeling cut short. I was happy with the no-fins dive, but had been hoping for 90 metres; and in the other disciplines Herbert had blown me out of the water. It was now May, and that year the World Championships would be held in November at Dean’s Blue Hole (Vertical Blue had made a successful bid to host the biennial event). I was determined not to be shown up again in my own backyard.
My plan was to spend the summer pool training and teaching in Europe before returning to the Bahamas at the start of October to resume depth training before the Championships. It was another summer of criss-crossing the Mediterranean, but I tried to reserve chunks of time in Verona, Sicily and Tenerife, where I could build momentum in my training in the pool. For the first time I swam 200 metres (eight lengths of a 25-metre pool) in dynamic apnea without fins, and all other indexes of speed and efficiency were at their highest.
Towards the end of the summer I was visited in Sicily by my girlfriend of one year, Brittany, an American girl whose relatives on Long Island had introduced us. We shared a common interest in philosophy, and she was beginning a practice of yoga that would see her become an accomplished instructor. I had fallen for her tender and playful spirit, and the fact that her dream had always been to live a simple life on an island seemed to indicate some kind of providence to our meeting. Brittany quit her job in Florida to travel with me, and around this time we decided we would marry, and — why not? — that it would be when we returned to the Bahamas in the autumn. A wiser man might have been suspicious at the apparent urgency to tie the knot, but I could still count the number of long-term relationships I’d had using my thumbs — wisdom would arrive too late.
It wasn’t until after the ceremony that I felt as if a guard was let down and I was meeting a different layer of the person with whom I had fallen in love and committed to spend my life. For the next several years I tried to be patient and understanding, believing that what I was experiencing was a recycling of old hurt. I waited for signs that the cycles were receding, like a sea that calms after the storm passes, but there was no respite — the turbulence was self-sustaining. It was inevitable that these marital problems would affect my confidence and peace of mind in freediving. It took a while for the effects to really register, perhaps because I had built up momentum in the progress I was making and, like an ocean-going ship, it took time to turn that around.
In any event, my training prior to the World Championships was building strongly on the base I had created in the pool during the summer months. My dives were quick and powerful, and on every surfacing I felt lucid and in control. It was important that I try to ride this wave of confidence right into the event. It was also important not to give my competitors, Herbert Nitsch and William Winram, any indication of what depths I was achieving in training. In the World Championships each athlete has just one dive per discipline, and the depth attempted has to be announced the night before, without any knowledge of what the other competitors might attempt. It comes down to a kind of poker game, in which you try to decipher what your opponents might announce and calculate whether you can safely attempt a deeper dive. Your opponent is, of course, making the same kinds of calculation, so you also need to be thinking about what your opponent thinks you are going to announce . . .
Some athletes wisely avoid these mental contortions by simply announcing a conservative dive without taking anyone else’s performance into consideration. However, I had played chess for too long as a kid, and on some level, even if subconsciously, I couldn’t escape calculating how the pieces across the board from me might move. I was training with a fellow Kiwi, Kerian Hibbs, and together we devised a system for obscuring the depths I was attempting. The line would be set for 95 metres, regardless of my actual target, and I used the depth alarms on my Suunto gauge to program the actual depth at which I would make my turn. As I surfaced at the end of my ascent, Kerian would shadow me to make sure that none of the other divers in the water around the platform could see my wrist, where the maximum depth was displayed. The technique worked: when the event started, there was no one other than myself and Kerian who knew that I had reached a personal-best depth of 95.8 metres just over a week before the event.
The night before the finals, the announcements were revealed: William Winram had announced 86 metres, while Herbert Nitsch had posted 89 — one metre deeper than the world record I had set earlier that year. I discovered that I’d played the poker game perfectly with my announcement of 90 metres — which, if successful, would earn me my first World Championship gold medal. Although I’d achieved 95 in training, the mental pressure of a record attempt in competition was still a significant factor that I knew I had to accommodate with a healthy margin.
Since my AP (Announced Performance) was 1 metre deeper than Herbert’s, it looked as if I’d been able to predict his thinking, and it’s possible that this was enough to get under his skin and affect his own dive. I would compete immediately after him, and knowing that might have affected his ability to concentrate on what was already a difficult dive for the Austrian — six metres deeper than his personal best.
While I prepared, I tried not to pay attention to the dives that were happening before mine, but it was impossible not to discern the results from the noises the crowd made. An agonising collective sigh as Alexey Molchanov blacked out on the surface after his dive to 83 metres. Jubilation and applause when William Winram surfaced clean from 86. Winram was guaranteed a medal with this dive; its colour would be determined by the result of Herbert’s and my world-record attempts. I waited on the edge of the platform as Herbert dived and the surface team announced his progress from the depth readout on the sonar. A murmur of excitement passed around the crowd when he turned at 89 metres. But he was slow — too slow even for Herbert — in ascending. A few seconds short of 4 minutes dive-time, he appeared on the surface, fighting to stay conscious. His mouth dipped below the waterline, and with that the fate of the dive was decided: a red card and disqualification for the reigning World Champion.
I was already in the water, lying on my back with my feet supported on a float as the line was adjusted to 1 metre deeper. The perimeter of the competition zone was crowded with spectators, their waggling fins and treading feet visible from below like a cluster of tadpoles. On the beach, an even bigger crowd of spectators had gathered; they could easily see everything that was taking place in the water just 20 metres in front of them. I closed my eyes, focused on keeping my breathing shallow and slow, and tried to empty my mind. To relax everything. Without any obvious motive, a part of my brain chose that moment — two minutes before my Official Top — to insist that I consider what would happen if I failed. It was quite adamant that I should reflect seriously on what that would be like. Which, of course, was the worst possible thing for me to think about right then. I tried to placate the voice, telling it that there would be plenty of time after the dive to consider any number of possibilities. Just give me a little bit of a breather for now, will you?
I would find out later that Nitsch, Winram and many other divers strongly doubted that I would make the 90-metre dive. They believed that the pressure of the occasion, as wel
l as the pressure of having overseen the organisation of the competition, would be too much, and I would turn or black out. The voices in my head mirrored the murmuring of my competitors. It was almost as if they were on the same team. In order to succeed, I would need to shut out not only the crowds around me but also my own self. But there is no point in trying to throw your own mind out the door, like an angry bouncer, for it will just come straight back in through a side door or window, each time with renewed vigour. The negative voices in your mind enjoy playing that game. Instead, you have to leave the doors open and let the rabble of dissidents storm in to find an empty house, with no one home to badger or bully. Then, they quickly lose interest.
By the time the dive started, I wasn’t even listening to my own mind. Everything was rehearsed, everything was programmed; my body knew exactly what to do. I left home, and let it go do its thing.
Three minutes and forty seconds later, I surfaced. The crowd around the platform was hushed. Only the voice of my surface coach, Kerian, could be heard, giving me cues for the protocol, but I didn’t need them. Within three breaths I had completed the protocol and was showing the tag to the judges. It was my first title as World Champion, and the first unassisted dive in history to 90 metres.