When the 60 Minutes piece went to air, it used the failed attempts to show just how many factors are at play in the sport, and how the success of a dive can hang in the balance of any of them. ‘It sounds like a technicality,’ commented Bob after describing the failed protocol, ‘but he has to prove that his mind is as tough as his body.’
I would have another chance to prove that toughness later in the year, when I would come up against Alexey Molchanov at Vertical Blue, for the first serious face-off since my rivalry with Herbert Nitsch.
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We had decided to shift the dates for Vertical Blue to November, as this favoured the northern-hemisphere athletes who make up most of the numbers at the event. It would allow them to train over their summer with the goal of peaking at the event in the late autumn. This edition of Vertical Blue would be our biggest so far, with a total of 50 athletes (31 male, 19 female) from 18 countries. I finished my base training in Tenerife early, and by the end of September was back in the Bahamas to prepare for the showdown.
Over the summer Alexey had succeeded where I had failed, diving to 125 metres CWT to claim his first depth world record in the waters of the Red Sea in Egypt. The discipline of Constant Weight came naturally to the Russian, who had been training as a monofin swimmer in the pool since he was a child. His physique was also more adapted to the dolphin kick: a long torso and shorter legs meant that he was able to generate more force in the core and not lose it in the transmission of energy through the legs. These same features became a disadvantage in No Fins, where short levers (arms and legs) transfer less torque to the water.
For now, though, we were both focused on Constant Weight. I had done a number of training dives dolphin-kicking with short plastic snorkelling fins, culminating in one long and leg-slaughtering freedive to 100 metres. It felt almost like it was harder than the same depth without fins! After that I returned to using the monofin, and gradually returned to the world-record mark. Just before Vertical Blue I attempted a personal-best dive to 126 metres. In preparation, I embedded in my mind the idea that my hands would be like blades, scything through the water while the fin powered me from beneath. It worked well, with a strong speed in the ascent and two reports of it being the best surfacing of recent CWT dives. The dive time was 3:38. Now all that remained was to do it in competition.
As is my custom, I sat out the first day of competition to help troubleshoot the inevitable first-day niggles, while Alexey logged a CWT dive of 121 metres to warm up. On day two I surfaced strongly from a dive to 97 metres without fins, and added a 117-metre FIM to my tally on day three while Alexey got on the board in CNF with an 80-metre dive.
The duel began in earnest on the first day of Act Two, when Alexey and I both announced a world-record attempt of 126 metres CWT. Alexey won the coin toss and dived first, surfacing cleanly with the tag after 3:46. I had failed to program my depth alarms correctly, and not knowing where I was in the descent disconcerted me; I turned early at 108 metres. On my next attempt two days later I made the plate, returned to the surface — and blacked out after taking the first breath. Straight afterwards, Alexey dived to 128 metres, attempting to shift the Constant Weight record beyond my reach. In the darkness, more than halfway to the bottom of Dean’s Blue Hole, he became confused by the lights beneath the plate and couldn’t find the tag — he discovered later that he’d been searching for it on the camera arm! Despite the lost time he still managed to surface and complete the protocol, but without the tag the massive dive couldn’t be judged a world record.
With three days of the event left, I still needed a dive in CWT and Alexey required FIM points. We both waited until the penultimate day; then I announced 121 CWT and Alexey 107 FIM. I had decided to take a more moderate approach to the ascent, and my speed was slower but more constant. However, after a certain point it felt uncoordinated and lopsided, as if the blade of my fin was only bending on one side. My vision was also affected, perhaps by the narcosis, and when I surfaced I missed the line on my first two attempts at grabbing it. Despite this, I managed to stay calm and to kick to hold my shoulders above the waterline, and completed the surface protocol without any signs of low oxygen.
Alexey had made a successful dive too, but when the points were added up it was clear that he was out of the running for the overall prize. Although he had the deepest dive in Constant Weight, he was too far behind in the other two disciplines to be able to catch up on the last day. Instead, he chose to again try to improve his record in CWT, with an attempt at 127 metres, but this time he surfaced with a samba and flunked the surface protocol.
Meanwhile, I was attempting to add 2 metres to my Free Immersion world record, with a dive to 123. The Spanish FIM specialist Miguel Lozano was attempting to break the same record, with an announced dive to 122 metres, and went first. A lanky Barcelonan nearly 2 metres tall, Miguel always brought a jovial mood to the platform during training. Now, as Sam shouted out readings for depth and dive time in Miguel’s ascent, the mood was more subdued. He was coming up slowly — far too slowly. Even though I was trying to blot the dive out and focus on getting ready myself, I knew that something was going wrong. At 4 minutes Miguel was still 40 metres below the surface. Somewhere around 20 metres he stopped moving altogether, and the safety divers converged to grasp him under the arms and swim him quickly to the surface. It takes longer to regain consciousness after a deep blackout, and while the surface team supported Miguel on his back and started to give him rescue breaths to oxygenate his lungs, blood started bubbling from his mouth — evidence of a lung squeeze suffered at depth.
This was the first lung squeeze of Miguel’s career, although other athletes experienced them more regularly. The cause is primarily a lack of adaptation of the lungs to the pressure at depth: if the diaphragm, rigid airways or ribcage are not flexible enough, then at a certain depth the lungs can no longer accommodate the pressure change through a continued reduction in their internal volume — the ‘container’ that surrounds them will prevent this. At that point, capillaries inside the lungs will begin to rupture, leaking blood into the airspaces. Once on the surface this blood is coughed up, but if there is enough of it then it can start to obstruct the diffusion of oxygen into the bloodstream. A secondary factor contributing to lung squeeze is any sudden or strenuous movements at the maximum depth. These movements, or any strong breathing reflexes, can ‘tweak’ the lungs, adding extra negative pressure to their internal volume and causing ruptures of blood vessels.
The advent of more efficient training and diving techniques, as well as better equipment, had meant that divers were making much quicker progress through the depths than they had ten years earlier. Whereas I had logged literally thousands of dives over hundreds of days of training before I started exceeding 60 metres, nowadays athletes who had trained extensively in the pool, developing long breath-holds and a powerful swimming technique, might be able to reach this depth within just a couple of weeks of open-water training. However, their lungs weren’t fully prepared for the drastic changes in pressure at depth, and at some point they would reach the limits of their chest flexibility. This was when ‘lung squeezes’ occurred. If the underlying shortcomings weren’t addressed, then the squeezes could become worse as scar tissue in the lungs rendered them more susceptible to repeat incidents, and a fear of squeeze itself rendered the divers less relaxed and consequently less flexible at depth.
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As I lay on my back in the water, preparing for my own dive, I heard the safety team administering to Miguel. Once he had regained consciousness and was moved across to the platform, the depth was adjusted to 1 metre deeper and I was finally allowed access to the line to clip myself on. ‘Three minutes to Official Top,’ came Sam’s call. A few seconds later, I felt some kind of hard surface make contact with the underneath of my body and lift me out of the water. It was the housing of an enormous camera being wielded by someone from a media crew filming Miguel’s dive, who had misjudged his ascent. It felt as if a subm
arine was surfacing underneath me, and I strained to try to maintain my relaxation as the safety divers quickly manoeuvred the cameraman and his equipment away from the competition area.
Thankfully, this would be the last distraction before the dive began. At a dive time of 2:15 I turned smoothly, while plucking a tag from the base plate, and at 4:23 I surfaced, removed my goggles and nose clip, made an ‘okay’ sign and spoke the words ‘I’m okay.’ As the judges continued to watch me for the required 30 seconds, Vertical Blue media manager Francesca Koe was doing the commentary for our live internet audio feed: ‘You can just tell, his facial expression — he’s smiling, he’s glad that dive’s over!’ I reached down to my leg, where I had attached the tag to the Velcro patch, and my smile disappeared. Where there should have been a small rectangle of fur clinging to my leg, there was only the stubble of the male Velcro patch it should have been stuck to.
A groan passed around the spectators crowded around the edge of the competition zone, but I was soon laughing, along with the safety team, at the absurdity of it all. As things had turned out, my record was still intact — although had it been broken by Miguel in his dive before mine, perhaps I might not have been so accepting of the misfortune!
I finished the event with 295 points out of a possible 300, 25 clear of Alexey in second place.
Throughout the event, one athlete had been unable to log any points at all: having burst his eardrum on his first dive, Nicholas Mevoli was forced to sit out the rest of the event while it healed. All the same, he still came to the beach every day to stand quietly by the rocks and offer encouragement and support to those who were about to dive. In 2013 Nick would become one of my best friends among competitive freedivers, and I was able to witness his meteoric rise to an elite level in the sport. Then came the event that rocked the freediving community to its core.
CHAPTER 9
FATAL ERROR
A dive too far
The ocean is like a god for a freediver. You talk to the ocean, you pray to the ocean, you love the ocean — sometimes you even hate the ocean — but in the end you know you cannot live without the ocean.
Umberto Pelizzari
IT WAS A WARM LATE AFTERNOON on Roatan when Nick Mevoli and I put on some basic snorkelling gear and swam across the tepid lagoon to the reef in front of the condo apartment we were sharing. We were looking for a bit of recreational relief after the mental stress of training and competition dives. We reached the drop-off, where the coral reef descends vertically down to 20 metres before a mostly sandy bottom slopes steeply away into the depths. This edge formed a kind of highway for the larger sealife such as jacks, dogtooth snappers and turtles. The devoted management of Roatan’s marine park meant that the coral was healthy, and alive with the activity of its myriad denizens. Shoals of blue damselfish hung like a mobile constellation in the midwater above the reef, and would dart downwards in response to any sudden movement.
At first we spent our time taking turns to do lazy dives to the sandy bottom, lying there for a period while the marine life around us resumed its bustling activity. A colony of tiny garden eels would gradually extend their heads and bodies back out of holes in the sand, like stubble growing on a smooth yellow cheek. A nervous stingray skimmed over the surface, with a bar jack riding behind its shoulder for protection. We drifted further along the reef, coming across a turtle resting under a ledge in the side of the coral cliff. A sleeping turtle can hold its breath for an incredible four to seven hours while wedged under overhanging rock or coral; the loggerhead turtle has even been documented as staying underwater for 10 hours, making it easily the most accomplished breath-holding animal on the planet. This particular shell-dweller was a small green turtle, and as I filmed it with my GoPro it started to manoeuvre out from the shelf and use its front flippers to slowly row its domed body across a small gully in the reef. I drifted with it, watching its bird-like eye watching me back. It didn’t seem to show any concern as it paddled slowly in a semi-circle around me.
I felt a tap on my shoulder, and turned to see Nick watching. Since I was already filming, I thought that he would swim into the frame so that I could capture footage of him with the turtle. That’s probably what I would have done. Instead, he reached for the camera I was holding, and gestured for me to swim into the shot while he filmed. I did so, and spent the next minute or so twisting and sashaying in time with the turtle as we moved across the reef.
Six months later I would tell this story to a gathering of grieving freedivers, as a glimpse into the gentle and selfless character of Nicholas Mevoli. Although we were not friends for long, the year 2013 holds many precious memories of the time we spent together; training, cooking and gradually sharing our thoughts. Nick’s deferential way of expressing himself would include phrases such as ‘My unsolicited opinion would be . . .’, and he was someone with whom you could sit in silence and not feel uncomfortable. It seemed as if Nick had been able to isolate our truly mortal enemies — laziness, impatience, indifference and prejudice — and mount a crusade against them in his own psyche; in turn, this kindled a similar change in the minds of those who spent time with him. He was not without his demons, but they were controlled to the point where they fed only from his own flesh; to those around him, his language was only kindness. For these reasons, and also because he had experienced some volatile relationships, he was one of the few people to whom I felt I could confide the problems I was continuing to face in my marriage.
With Nicholas Mevoli during the 2013 Caribbean Cup, Roatan, Honduras.
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Esteban Darhanpe, who was organising the inaugural Caribbean Cup in Roatan, had asked me whether I would be okay sharing accommodation with Nick; although I didn’t know Nick very well at all at that point, I was sure we would get along. He had brought fresh curry spices from his trip to Honduras by boat via Jamaica, and we took turns at cooking as we trained and competed during the event.
The sport of freediving puts huge oxidative and acidifying stress on the body’s systems, so our diet has to address this with alkalinising foods that are rich in anti-oxidants. Basically, this translates to lots of fresh fruit and vegetables. As soon as I get out of the water I’ll have a glass of fruit juice mixed with chia seeds; then, when I arrive home, I’ll make a smoothie that combines large helpings of fresh aloe, frozen banana and papaya, almond milk, spirulina, cacao, hemp protein, beetroot juice extract and bee pollen. As I drink the thick green gloop, I can almost feel a soothing balance being restored to my body. Half an hour later I have a more solid lunch, then comes the post-prandial nap while my body digests and recovers from training.
In preparation for a deep dive, my diet centres on complex carbohydrates. Compared with fat or protein, carbohydrates are a more oxygen-efficient energy source, as well as the best means of ensuring that the muscles have adequate glycogen stores. Protein-rich and low-glycaemic carbohydrates such as quinoa or oats (my breakfast of choice) are always preferable. But for versatility, there is no beating pasta. My Sicilian friend Jimmy Montanti and his partner, Stella, introduced me to what is now my favourite dish — for flavour, healthiness and ease of preparation. I make it so often that friends refer to it as ‘Pasta alla William’, even though I try to explain that it is an old Sicilian pesto recipe. It was, in fact, developed during times of poverty after World War I, when meat was scarce — the almonds that feature in the sauce give it a similar kind of body.
It’s real name is Pesto Siciliano, and it’s made with these ingredients: three large tomatoes (the equivalent in cherry tomatoes is even better); two or three cloves of garlic; one fresh chilli (or more if you’re keen); salt (if you like the taste, otherwise your body doesn’t need it); a handful of fresh basil; three tablespoons of olive oil; half a cup of almonds; and half a cup of freshly grated aged Parmesan cheese. All you need to do is blend the ingredients, except the cheese and almonds, in a food processor or blender. Add the almonds to the blender last, and stop before they are completely blended. When t
he pasta is cooked, drain it and add first the cheese, then the sauce, and mix before serving.
In general I avoid land-based animal protein, both at home and at restaurants. You can take your pick of the reasons — animal welfare, ecology or health. It’s a clear finding (disputed, of course, by the meat industry) that consumption of beef, pork and chicken in Western and Westernised countries is heavily implicated in the epidemic of ‘diseases of affluence’ (cancer, heart disease, diabetes), as well as responsible for as much greenhouse-gas emission as the entire travel industry. Not to mention the inconceivable suffering of sentient animals that (in the case of pigs) are more intelligent than the animals we bring into our homes as pets — animals that are protected from similar inhumanities by humane societies.
Of course, some of the practices that bring seafood to the table are just as bad, or worse. For every serving of wild shrimp, as much as 20 times the amount of bycatch (unwanted fish, seabirds, turtles and mammals — many of them endangered) that is trapped in the shrimp nets is thrown back into the ocean, dead. Shrimp farms come at the expense of the coastal ecosystems they replace, which are often mangrove areas vital for the breeding and survival of juvenile sealife. Marine ecosystems all around the world are collapsing, and according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, 76 per cent of all fish stocks are depleted or fully or over-exploited.
Nowadays, pretty much the only animal protein I eat is fish I catch myself, from stocks of sustainable species and using a selective method (spearfishing) with no bycatch. Naturally this way isn’t an option for most people, especially those who live away from the coast, but making an informed choice that takes into account the provenance of what you’re eating is something that we’re all capable of. For example, mussels, oysters and farmed tilapia (a group of freshwater fish species) are in most cases sustainable and healthy choices.
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