For the last performance of the competition, Herbert had announced another head-scratcher: 130 metres FIM. This time, however, he didn’t even enter the water, stating that there were insufficient supplies of oxygen to mitigate the risk of decompression sickness after his dive. It’s possible that he was misinformed, since we finished the competition with enough oxygen for an athlete to have spent an hour decompressing at 5 metres.
This would be the last time I would compete against Herbert Nitsch, and the 120-metre dive would be his last successful world record. Two years later, in June 2012, he suffered a severe accident while attempting to set a world record in sled diving, leaving him comatose and paralysed. When he woke, he was told by doctors that he would be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, but after weeks of decompression treatment and a self-devised regime of rehabilitation, he made an inexorable recovery in much the same way that he would somehow find his way back to the surface from the longest and deepest dives. Now he has even returned to freediving, although not competitively, and works with the marine conservation group Sea Shepherd.
*
My own attention turned to the Teams World Championships event, which would be held on the subtropical island of Okinawa, 600 kilometres south of mainland Japan. In this event, a national team is made up of three athletes, who each have to attempt performances in three disciplines: Constant Weight, Static Apnea and Dynamic Apnea. One metre of depth, 2 metres of dynamic distance and 5 seconds of static time were each all worth one point: a 100-metre dive would be equal to 200 metres in dynamic and 8 minutes 20 seconds in static apnea. The country with the highest aggregate score across all nine performances of its three team members would win.
I spent May and June in Tenerife, training in the pool at T3 (a state-of-the-art training facility in Costa Adeje), to try to raise my level in both static and dynamic apnea. The New Zealand team would be me, Guy Brew (a pool specialist with an everlasting breath-hold) and Kerian Hibbs (an excellent all-rounder). If we could all log reasonably strong performances, we stood a good chance of taking gold at the event; however, a single disqualification would typically put a team out of the running.
The competition started with the CWT dives, and having announced the deepest depth — 105 metres — I was one of the first to compete. We were several miles off the west coast of Okinawa, diving in the open sea from a chain of boats straining against a single mooring. Conditions had taken a turn for the worse, with large sea-blown waves that buffeted me on the surface. I tried to time my breathing to avoid getting slapped in the face by a wave during an inhale. Once I finished my final inhale and ducked under, the water congealed back into its familiar timeless calm, and I was on my way. Kerian and I were both successful, but when Guy spent too long in his dive trying to overcome an equalisation block, he had a short surface blackout and received a red card. There was a period of dismay as our title hopes sank quietly out of reach. However, the silver lining was that we could now focus on our own individual performances.
The next event was Static Apnea: my least-favoured of the pool disciplines, although in training in Tenerife I had managed 8:01 and was starting to develop mental techniques to motivate myself through the interminable minutes of self-torture. My first contraction, signalling the urge to breathe, came shortly before 3:00, and from there I battled through to 7:28. It would end up being the second-longest static of the competition, behind my team-mate Guy Brew who astounded the spectators lucky enough to witness his valiant duel with the survival instinct. I was coaching him in the water, letting him know the time at regular intervals as well as ensuring that he was still conscious through the standard system of signal requests (my tap on the shoulder asks ‘are you okay?’ and his raised finger replies ‘yep, still here’). When he passed 7 minutes he was already fighting very hard, his torso bucking like a rodeo bull with each contraction. I assumed that he would soon lift his head to breathe. ‘Only 15 more seconds to go to 8 minutes,’ I told him, before counting down the remaining time. ‘That’s 8 minutes there, Guy, good stuff! Uh . . . you should probably think about coming up now?’ A finger was lifted above the surface and waggled from side to side. He wasn’t done yet. The crowd was holding its breath too at this point, and when Guy finally raised his head above the water and the judges stopped their watches at 8:27, there was a roar of exhaled relief and applause.
Controversy surrounds the world record in Static Apnea, and it is confused further by Guinness-record attempts where pure oxygen is inhaled before a breath-hold. The longest performances in competition have been around the 10-minute mark, but these are by athletes with massive lung volumes and incredibly lean bodies, meaning that they have a lot of fuel and very little mass to burn it with. Guy doesn’t fit this description, and his astounding breath-hold and long dynamic swims are testimony to his mental control and determination.
The final discipline was Dynamic Apnea. In training I had gone a little over 200 metres a few times, but the water of the outdoor pool in Okinawa was so warm and cloying that I didn’t expect to be able to match that. The bloodshift that happens when you hold your breath, even if you’re not diving, has the effect of preserving heat in the body’s core. If you’re already hot to begin with, the effect can be stifling. For a maximal performance I would much rather be shivering than too hot. With this in mind, I told myself that I would only commit to swimming three laps (150 metres) and turning — then I would assess how I felt and whether I was able to carry on. I began my swim slowly, finding relaxation in the first lap while I settled into my practised rhythm of kicking twice with the fin and then gliding for a couple of seconds before repeating the cycle. During the second lap the urge to breathe started to intrude into my relaxation a little, but I told myself I had only one more lap after this. When I arrived at the end of that third lap and turned, I was still feeling very comfortable and the oppressive heating I had feared still hadn’t shown up. I cruised through the fourth lap in what seemed like very little time, and turned again.
Suddenly, I was in uncharted territory. In almost all of my training, which is predominantly for depth, I have a set target that I cannot exceed (the bottom plate), as well as a fairly consistent level of ability. I would never wake up one day and decide that I was feeling so good I was going to add 10 metres to my depth. So, as I left the wall at 200 metres I had no reference point and was becoming increasingly perplexed at how comfortable I still felt. My longest dynamic apnea up until then had been 208 metres; I had long since eclipsed that as I continued to kick and glide through the warm water. The world record at the time was 250 metres, or five laps. Either because I had never even considered the possibility of being able to surpass that mark (as dynamic apnea was far from being my forte) or because the uncanny feeling of not having a reference point finally got the better of me, I abruptly popped up to the surface, did a clean and easy surface protocol — and then saw just how close I was to the wall. Another two kick cycles and a small push away from the wall, and I could have broken the record. There is, of course, no way of knowing whether that actually was in my reach, but judging by how lucid I was at my final distance of 237 metres, I might have been capable of coming close. Such is the power of entering a performance with no expectations or obligations.
*
I finished the World Championships with the highest individual tally of points, and the feeling that I could do no wrong in my competition dives. This was exactly the place I needed to be in order to attempt what was going to be the hardest challenge of my life to date.
Over the summer, I had begun stirring the pot around an idea that had been simmering since Vertical Blue. I still hadn’t mentioned my reaching 100 metres CNF in training to anyone other than my family and closest friends. To prove to my peers and the world that a human body could swim that deep and back on a single breath, I would need to attempt the dive officially. I wanted it to be a stand-alone world-record attempt in Dean’s Blue Hole, in order to maximise my chances of success — I didn’
t feel that there was another venue with similarly stable conditions. I also wanted to ensure that the entire attempt was filmed from start to finish, by technical divers stationed at intervals along the rope, and this would only be possible if my team was in full control of the timing. Making the attempt would not be cheap — the expenses for the crew and gear alone would run to over US$20,000. Crowdfunding was my only option. The only problem was that the concept of crowdfunding didn’t exist in 2010. Instead, I devised my own method of fundraising — auctioning off all 100 metres of the descent line to supporters, using a Facebook image for each metre so that people could bid on them through a comment. The winner of each of the 100 auctions would receive the actual metre of official rope used for the attempt, rolled into a spiral and mounted on a commemorative plaque. Their name or business name would appear on a scrolling list accompanying my descent in the official video, and of course they’d get the T-shirt. The response to this campaign was one of the most touching aspects of the whole enterprise. Family, friends, fans and even freediving rivals all became active in bidding on the rope lengths, which sold for between US$150 and US$500. It was a humbling experience to see that people weren’t just paying me lip service — my supporters genuinely wanted me to succeed. It was also, perhaps, the most perilous aspect of the attempt. Should I not be successful, and therefore unable to supply the supporters with a piece of record-dive line or an official video, what then? It would still cost the same, but I couldn’t in good conscience take people’s money for a task that had not been achieved. I preferred not to consider this contingency, although the prospect of failure was difficult to banish from my mind altogether.
I knew that 10 metres was a decametre, and 1000 a kilometre, so I was curious to find out whether there was a name for 100 metres. I thus discovered the hectometre and decided to name the event ‘Project Hector’. I googled hector to see its other connotations, and was surprised to discover that there was a species of dolphin by that name found only in New Zealand. I read on to learn that Hector’s dolphins were critically endangered, and the subspecies found in the North Island, known as Maui’s dolphin, was at extinction’s door with less than a hundred breeding adults remaining. I was amazed, and a little embarrassed, that as a New Zealander and an ocean-lover I hadn’t yet heard about the plight of this endemic dolphin.
And the parallels with my planned dive didn’t end with just the name. Hector’s dolphins are a coastal species, preferring shallow waters and almost never diving deeper than 100 metres. Their territory is therefore more or less defined by the zone of water between the shore and the 100-metre depth contour. This is why their numbers have been decimated — those same waters are the richest grounds for human fishing. Over the past 40 years the number of Hector’s dolphins has dropped by 75 per cent (from 29,000 to 7000), while the number of Maui’s has fallen by a tragic 97 per cent (from 1800 to just 50 in 2017). Population models have shown that Maui’s dolphins cannot now sustain more than one human-induced fatality every 10 to 23 years.
These Hector’s dolphins drowned in gill nets, before being washed onto a South Island, New Zealand beach.
These catastrophic reductions are almost entirely due to bycatch from set-net fishing and trawling in the dolphins’ territory. Currently, the dolphins are protected from set-nets in 19 per cent of their territory, and from trawling in just 5 per cent of it. With such limited protection, and a fishing industry that has been shown to cover up dolphin mortalities (according to the Department of Conservation’s Incidence Database, less than 1 per cent of bycatch was reported between 2000 and 2006) and hush government observers, it doesn’t take a mathematician to see that the status quo can only lead to the animals’ demise. Their only chance of salvation is full protection throughout their territory, out to the 100-metre depth contour. Every year, this is the recommendation made to the New Zealand government by the International Whaling Commission’s panel of world experts on marine mammals; and every year, it is ignored.
In any such case, the key to achieving change is the pressure that the public can exert once they are informed about the issue and start to care about it. I decided to make my record attempt a dive for the dolphins, and to ensure that if I was successful then all of the exposure and press attention would be used to sound an alarm for Hector’s and Maui’s dolphins. In turn, this idea — that I was attempting the dive for a cause far more important than just myself and my ideology around human aquatic potential — would help motivate me to train harder, and to stay the course when circumstances became difficult.
*
I arrived in the Bahamas at the start of October, just over two months before the anticipated date for the record attempt. I made quick progress, and like the previous year I was diving fast and strong after my months of pool training during the summer. Then sickness struck, and for ten days I was out of the water; when I returned, it would take me several days to build back up to where I had left off. In addition, the stress I was experiencing was destabilising my marriage with Brittany. It meant I was lacking in the patience and compassion that was required to prevent a small issue from turning incendiary. And so incendiary the whole thing became, at a time when peace of mind and good sleep patterns were critical.
With the attempt date looming on the horizon I reminded myself to have faith in the process, that ‘a smooth sea never made a skilful sailor’ and that my personal struggles were nothing compared with the annihilation faced by the dolphins I was diving to save. Slowly, my strength returned and the mucus cleared from my airways. Depthwise I quickly moved through the nineties, and on 19 November did my first no-fins dive of the season to 100 metres. My team for the record attempt was starting to land on Long Island, with safety divers Alfredo Romo and Brian Pucella joining Long Island resident Charlie Beede, and Igor Liberti doing the underwater photography, later joined by Paolo Valenti for topside images. Nic Rowan had made the long trip over from New Zealand, and his moral support and help on the platform during the attempts would prove invaluable. Brian Kakuk and Paul Heinerth, my original deep-safety technical divers from my first record attempt in 2007, returned along with a new underwater cameraman, Jason Sapp. My medic was Tomas Ardavany, who would have a key role in the development of freediving safety protocols in the following years. The team was rounded out by a young and talented film-maker, Matthew Brown, who had made his first trip overseas to create a short film of the event.
In the morning training sessions, I would look around and remind myself that everyone present on the platform had made the effort to be there for me. It filled me with gratitude and confidence, and this helped to dispel the negative internal voices that were ready to chirrup at the first sign of weakness.
The last two weeks of training were what they needed to be: a gradual and systematic final push, like the ascent to a mountain summit from the final, highest camp-site. In my dives I was maxing out all my systems: narcosis was strong in the ascent, my legs and arms were nearing saturation with lactic acid, and after the dive I would continue panting for as much as 10 minutes to purge the carbon dioxide from my system.
Friday 10 December would be the first day of the attempt window. I had decided to use it as a kind of dress rehearsal, with a dive to 96 metres that would be officiated by the AIDA judges Ute Geßmann and Ben Weiss. While this would still be an improvement on my world record of 95 metres, it was nothing like as difficult as the 100-metre attempt to follow. The dive was a success, although probably the least-celebrated of all my records: everyone knew it was just a stepping stone towards that coveted three-digit number.
Two days later, on 12 December, the line was lowered into the Blue Hole until the piece of black tape the judges had used to mark off the distance of 100 metres from the plate was flush with the surface of the water. My dive log has no written notes for this dive, and I remember little about it other than that it was very slow, and excruciatingly close at the finish. Part of the surface protocol involves removing all facial equipment before showin
g an ‘okay’ sign to the judges: on this dive, with a mind befuddled from low oxygen, I forgot to take off my nose clip and what could have been a world record was instead a dead duck. Worse still, I had managed to tweak a muscle in my neck during the dive.
That night, I took a dose of anti-inflammatories and (on my mother’s advice) propped towels under my back and neck while I slept. It worked, as I awoke rested and mostly pain-free. However, the weather would be next in the unfolding series of challenges. Overnight a cold front had moved across the island, bringing chilly winds and blotting out the sun with low cloud. Almost immediately upon entering the water at 11 a.m., I began shivering. I knew that I would have to keep my breathe-up short; but even so, by the time I rolled over to start the dive the shivering had become so strong that I wasn’t able to concentrate on my entry into the water. Just as it had in my first attempt at 100 metres in April, some of the air in my lungs ascended into my throat and was swallowed into my stomach. For a split-second I contemplated continuing; but it would have been foolhardy, so I aborted and rolled back onto the surface with a groan of dismay.
*
Now my problem was time. I had just a few more days before the judges and crew were due to fly out. If I didn’t bag the record today, it could come down to the wire on the last day, and the pressure would be immense. I felt as if I already had enough pressure to deal with: at 100 metres down it’s 160 pounds per square inch, which is basically equivalent to a guy of my size standing on every square inch of my body.
I couldn’t just go back to breathing up, and start the dive again in a few minutes. This carried a risk of ‘over-breathing’, or beginning the dive with too little CO2. The last time I’d tried this, in 2006, it had ended in a blackout 12 metres below the surface. I decided to swim ashore, seal myself in the cab of my truck, which was parked by the beach next to the Blue Hole, and turn the heater up to full. I think this was the first and last time I ever used the heater in the Bahamas. I sat there in my wetsuit for about 15 minutes, grilling myself in the hot air and also grilling myself mentally. Could I do this? Was I going to go bankrupt if I didn’t? How could I face myself if I let so many people down?
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