*
Although my year had oscillated between hiccups and home runs, I again finished on top of the rankings, with a total of more than 600 points across the six disciplines — the first time that this had been achieved by any athlete. I held world records in two of the depth disciplines (CNF and FIM) but was unhappy with my performance with the monofin in the third (CWT). I resolved after the World Championships to shift my focus to that discipline for 2012. In training I had reached 121 metres, and I felt that with a concerted effort to improve my technique I should be able to close the remaining 3-metre gap to the world record.
From the beginning of 2012 through to May of that year, I didn’t log a single deep dive without fins or in free immersion. At each training session I would do a deep Constant Weight dive (115+ metres), breathe pure oxygen to recover and rest for a bit, then do a gruelling sequence of dives to 30 metres with short recoveries between them. To add difficulty in these shallow dives, I started wearing a long-sleeved shirt over the top of my wetsuit, or wore plastic snorkelling fins instead of a monofin while dolphin-kicking. The only break I took was to visit the island of Roatan, Honduras, to which I had been invited by Argentinian dive instructor Esteban Darhanpe. In the Bay Islands archipelago, Roatan is the posh brother of Utila, where I had learnt to freedive in 2003. Whereas Utila attracts backpackers and boozers, Roatan attracts families, vacationers and boozers. It has perhaps one of the best-functioning marine parks in the Caribbean: the whole island is a marine reserve, with strict and efficient policing. The result is coral reefs teeming with life, none of it in the least bit timorous towards divers.
Esteban had seen the potential of Roatan as a freediving location and wanted to start a school and an international competition in the calm and deep waters off the south-western tip of the island. I was there to help him assess the feasibility, as well as to start to promote the sport on the island. Roatan is an aquaphile’s playground, providing every possible way of accessing the underwater world: snorkelling, scuba diving, glass-bottomed boats and even a submarine that can take two passengers down to a depth of 600 metres (2000 feet) to watch giant six-gill sharks feeding on a carcass attached to the submarine. American-born Karl Stanley built the submarine himself after extensive research and consulting, and it has no licence or insurance (‘Your only insurance is that I am going with you,’ he tells passengers). Yet when I climbed aboard for a scouting dive to 120 metres, I felt much safer than I had in the taxi on the way from the airport. The brief ride took us over the reef and down the face of the wall that drops away from the island, revealing how vertiginously sheer that edge was. At 120 metres I could look up the looming mass of rock and still make out the vague pattern of light piercing through the waves on the surface. Small black silhouettes passed overhead, and I asked Karl what fish those were. ‘Tuna, about 60 metres above us,’ he replied.
On a later dive we saw a scarred and grizzled sand tiger shark, gliding slowly southwards beside the wall. Its mouth was an eruption of teeth that curled away in rows from its bottom lip. There were bite marks on its gills and back, evidence of the violent struggles these sharks endure in mating. ‘Wait a second, I’ll see if I can get us a better look at it,’ Karl said from the command turret where he was standing behind us. He judged the shark’s languid movement, then steered the submarine further down the wall before turning it to face the rock and shutting off the electric motors. Sure enough, the shark’s path took it directly between our submarine and the cliff, and if it hadn’t been for the thick acrylic window I would have been able to reach out and touch its great barrelled torso.
It wasn’t the closest I would come to sharks on that trip. Waihuka Dive Center in Coxen Hole took me out on one of their skiffs to a shark-feeding site several miles offshore. A bucket of frozen fish bait placed on the sea floor was used to draw the reef sharks out. Most of them are returning customers, and can be recognised by hooks hanging from the corners of their mouths, or scars and gashes on their fins. The guides and video crew were all on scuba, and since the bottom was at 20 metres I set up a scuba tank on the sea floor that I could breathe from between periods of swimming free with the sharks. The sharks were almost always aware of my presence and treated me indifferently, with no signs of either fear or aggression.
The idea of sharks as bloodthirsty man-eaters is finally being outed as sensationalism — and not a moment too soon. All over the world, shark populations are collapsing, and one-third of the species are in danger of extinction. Shark-finning, the practice of catching sharks and removing their fins before throwing the carcass back in the water, is largely responsible for this collapse. The market is almost entirely in China, where shark fin soup is a sign of status, served at weddings and business dinners. The fin itself tastes bland and must be flavoured with chicken or other stock.
Sharks have a pivotal role in the food chain that sustains the marine ecosystems. It works like this: without sharks, the larger predatory fish like groupers become more abundant, which in turn reduces the numbers of herbivore fish, like parrotfish, that they feed on. The herbivores are responsible for cleaning algae off the coral, so when they disappear the reef becomes covered in green fur and slime. So fewer sharks equals more reef predators, equals fewer herbivores, equals less coral, and the whole reef ecosystem soon collapses. Although the threat to shark populations is serious, I’m aware that I can’t spread my voice too thinly in my efforts to encourage conservation of the oceans and ocean life. This is why I’ve chosen to use my exposure to support New Zealand’s dolphins, not because I hold one order of species to be more worthy than another.
In fact the argument that one species may be sentient or ‘conscious’ and therefore more important than another that isn’t is moot, when species are all mutually dependent. In fact, we’re so entwined with other life forms that it can make the boundaries between organisms difficult to define. A huge boulder of brain coral, or a forest of staghorn coral can seem like a single organism to a first-time snorkeller, when in fact it’s actually an animal species and an algae species living together in giant symbiotic colonies. They have merged their bodies and resources, and depend on each other for life (when water temperatures rise, the animal polyp expels the algae, and coral bleaching is the result — with climate change this is now happening to huge swathes of coral reef all over the world, especially off the coast of Australia). If the two organisms that make up coral are inseparable then are they really individual?
Each human or animal is arguably a similar colony: the mitochondria that are resident in our cells, and which give them energy, were once entirely separate single-cell organisms that have been incorporated into our cells — they’ve even kept their own DNA. We have ten times more microorganisms living in our gut than we have cells in our body, and their function is vital to our digestion. Welcome to the ecosystem that we call Homo sapiens. On the macro scale, our planet’s symbiosis and mutual dependence between CO2 breathers and O2 breathers — plants and animals — is really no more than an immense coral sphere, which if viewed from far enough away could appear to an alien as a single organism. It seems nature abhors a boundary as much as it abhors a vacuum. And if it’s hard to show boundaries between physical organisms then it makes it difficult to apply discrete boundaries to something as ineffable as consciousness.
Since we still don’t know how the brains of mammals create consciousness, we have no grounds for assuming it’s only the brains of mammals that do so — or even that consciousness requires a brain at all. Organised groups of animals, such as shoals of fish, or flocks of birds might have a communal consciousness, in addition to their own individual ones.
Such ideas are difficult to square with the notion we generally have of what consciousness is. But when we remove all the toppings and accessories (sight, arms, memories etc) that bind to consciousness then it reduces to that pure state of awareness. As philosopher Thomas Nagel described it: a creature is conscious if there is ‘something that it is like’ to be this cr
eature. It doesn’t require an exertion of will (and in any case neuroscientific research is increasingly concluding that there is no scientific grounds for free will — by studying neural activity our choices/decisions/speech can be predicted a moment before we are even aware of them ourselves). It just needs to be an experience, and an awareness of that experience. My own definition is an awareness of presence and a sense of presence in one’s awareness.
Maybe ‘what it is like to be’ a coral head is similar to what it would be like to be a human without sentience, memories, speech or any of those other faculties. And maybe there is a sensation of what it is like to be an ecosystem, or even the ocean: some kind of sense of presence and awareness without the locus or proprietorship that we feel as humans. Whether this is the case or not, the experience of the ocean itself — that mercurial and bustling mass — can make it very easy to believe in such a thing. When I am freediving I become part of that ‘body of water’, and (as I said earlier) it is for this reason that in thanking the ocean at the end of my training sessions I feel like I am also thanking myself.
During my time on Roatan I was also invited to swim with the ‘semi-captive’ dolphins kept by Anthony’s Key Resort. I visited the facility first, and saw that the dolphins were kept in pens and only let out to swim in the ocean in small groups of a single sex (to ensure that they would return to be with the rest of the pod). This was obviously an improvement on those hellish concrete prisons called marine parks, but it was still confinement and exploitation for entertainment. I declined the invitation.
*
Back on Long Island, I resumed my training in Constant Weight to try to exceed Herbert Nitsch’s last remaining record of 124 metres. I had set a date in May for an attempt, and a crew from the American show 60 Minutes — perhaps the country’s most esteemed TV news-magazine program — had arranged to come to follow my bid at the record. The reporting journalist would be Bob Simon, a 70-year-old ‘giant of broadcast journalism’, who had reported on the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam in the 1970s, the Egyptian revolution in 2011 and almost everything in between. During the Gulf War he had been captured by Iraqi forces after crossing a border and imprisoned for 40 days.
When Bob arrived on the island with a small crew of four producers and cameramen, it was hard not to feel intimidated — as if he were there to unearth some kind of hidden truth about me or freediving that even I was unaware of! Once we started chatting, however, his charisma and wit dissolved my guard, and I realised that he was there mostly to have fun and maybe a bit of a holiday. He even had a Kiwi joke up his sleeve! It might have all been a clever ruse, as later I would indeed feel the full power of his journalistic tractor beams focused on me.
My training had continued its Nepalese course of up and down, with, thankfully, a general trend towards an ascent. After two failed dives, with a samba on one and a 2-second surface blackout on the other, I finally completed a clean dive to 125 metres in mid-April, two weeks out from the record attempt. I now knew that I was capable of the depth, but it would be a matter of ensuring that all of my physiological and mental systems were operating at their peaks for the actual attempt.
We had a five-day window for the dive, and I decided to use the first day as a warm-up, to acclimatise to the attention of the cameras and the judges. I dived to 120 metres, surfacing comfortably. After a day of rest, the line was set to 125 metres on 6 May. Bob Simons stood, tall and formal, in the centre of the platform, observing the proceedings like a hawk. For the first time at a record attempt I had my whole family there as well, and my brother, Sam, was managing the instruments on the platform and giving timing readouts. Linda and David watched anxiously from the side of the Blue Hole.
Everything proceeded smoothly, and I was coasting towards the plate at about 1 metre per second when one of my ears jammed and wouldn’t equalise anymore. I grabbed the line to stop my fall, and gave three quick jerks — the signal to the surface team to release the counterballast so that I would get a free ride up and save my legs for another attempt the next day. After giving the tugs, I started pulling myself slowly up, knowing that it would take a few seconds for the team to activate the device. However, after pulling for a minute I realised that the rope still wasn’t moving upwards. As I hadn’t done any free-immersion training that year, pulling on the rope was feeling awkward and I started to become concerned that I wouldn’t make it to the surface. I switched back to using the fin, and powered angrily through the last 30 metres in 20 seconds.
‘Does anyone not know that the signal to release the counterballast is pulling on the rope?’ were the first words I spat out as soon as I had recovered my breath. I continued smouldering and panting in the water, coughing as well from the effect that the unaccustomed arm exertion had had on my lungs at depth. No one answered my question. It was probably a miscommunication between my team and the judges, who were monitoring my movements by feel on the line. Most of my anger really stemmed from having had to abort the dive, and it wasn’t fair to take that out on the team.
In an interview later that evening, Bob Simon grilled me on that moment. ‘When you came to the surface, you were furious! What made you so mad?’ he asked me. I replied that I didn’t think I had been that mad, just disappointed at having turned early. ‘No, no, that’s not what I saw,’ he said, before repeating word for word the rebuke I had made to my team. I hesitated, and tried to deflect the question again, uncomfortable with the idea that I could be so hot-headed after a freedive, but Bob wasn’t having it. In that dive he had recognised a piece of my character — a shirtiness — that wasn’t playing along with the rest of the composed, yogic equanimity I was trying to cultivate. With stern purpose couched in playful mirth, he forced me to confront it there and then. I was silent for a while; the cameras caught my contemplation and then, finally, my admission that, yes, I had been a bit of a dick.
Despite my mood, the first to console me after the dive had been Brian Pucella, who had put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Good job anyway.’ Originally from North Carolina, Brian was a surfer and adventurer who lived onboard his yacht, Puff, with his wife and their dog. He was chief of safety for that record attempt, as well as for Project Hector and several editions of Vertical Blue. His loyalty and dedication to Vertical Blue and my own projects had played a large part in their successes. When you’re drawing the last breath of air before a dive that will take you to your limit, it makes a big difference to have someone next to you in the water whom you can trust implicitly with your safety should anything go wrong. That was Brian’s strong point — but clearly it wasn’t always my strong point to appreciate the full value of my crew when my focus was inward and selfish during a record attempt.
*
I would need a day of rest after the aborted dive before feeling ready to attempt 125 metres again. On 7 May the conditions were still favourable. The surface of the Blue Hole was slick calm with a green hue from the overcast light, making it look like a fathomless mountain lake. I was likewise feeling calm and composed as I went through my equipment check before entering the water. There was very little sign of any nerves; this might have been because I had been able to shift my focus from the idea of a record attempt to one of ‘doing a good dive’ — a technically fluent and aesthetically pleasing dive. I thought that if I could achieve that goal, the record would follow.
After a quick and efficient kicking descent to 30 metres I brought my body close to the dive line and relaxed into a freefall that would last almost 2 minutes. This time there was no difficulty with equalising, and my turn at the bottom was calm and fluid. I struck off for the surface at a good speed — 1.6 metres per second to begin with — before starting to slow down as my legs lost strength. It is important for me to ‘escape’ from the depths at a good velocity to begin with: if I slow down too much, narcosis crowds in on me and I lose the feeling for efficient technique, which slows me down further. As it was, I was able to stay ahead of that effect, and my ascent rate never dro
pped below 1.2 metres per second. When Brian met me at 35 metres with a grouper call I felt confident, and afterwards he confirmed that I still looked comfortable at that depth. My finning continued almost to the surface, then I brought my arms to my sides and broke through the water to grab the rope in front of me. I was facing away from the platform and the judges, and as I took the first two quick breaths my arms contracted, pulling my body high out of the water. One hand went to my nose to remove the nose clip that I so often forget in the surface protocol. Then the hand shaped an ‘okay’ sign, and in the very moment that my thumb and forefinger touched together and my hand extended forwards came the realisation of what I had just done. My goggles were still in place over my eyes.
Descending into Dean’s Blue Hole, with a tarpon watching from under the overhang. (Igor Liberti)
By performing an ‘okay’ sign before removing all of my facial equipment, I had failed the surface protocol — and with it the record attempt. It had only taken me eight of the available 15 seconds to screw it up; had I taken two more breaths before starting the protocol, I might have been more clear-headed and capable of completing the actions correctly while facing the judges. Letting myself fall back under the water, I let out a groan as I realised how close I had come only to throw it all away with such an avoidable error.
Two days later I would make a final attempt at that elusive record. The depth and dive time were exactly the same, but the pressure would bear down on me a little more on this occasion. I surfaced, after having been underwater for 3 minutes 47 seconds, and grabbed the line high above the water. My whole torso and waist were completely above the waterline as I took full lungfuls of air. I was breathing in great gusts, like the bellows in a forgery, but I was not lucid. After a few seconds my arms started to shake and I fell backwards into the water, continuing to breathe as I stared upwards at the sky. Slowly I began to shake my head from side to side, in exasperation.
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