Deep

by James Nestor

  On September 17, 2011, I traveled to Kalamata, Greece, to watch the modern-day masters of the Master Switch—one hundred of the world’s best freedivers—test the absolute limits of our amphibious nature.

  AT 7:00 P.M., THE OPENING ceremony of the Individual Depth World Championship is in full swing. Hundreds of competitors, coaches, and crew members from thirty-one countries are waving national flags and screaming their countries’ anthems from an enormous stage built on a crowded boardwalk overlooking Kalamata Harbor. Behind them, a forty-piece marching band plays a ragged version of the Rocky theme as video highlights of freedivers plummeting three hundred feet are projected onto a thirty-foot screen. The whole scene looks like a low-rent Olympics.

  Competitive freediving is a relatively new sport, and almost every year since Raimondo Bucher’s hundred-foot dive in Capri—considered the first official competitive freedive—freedivers have been breaking records. The current world record for breath-holding underwater, held by Frenchman Stéphane Mifsud, is eleven minutes, thirty-five seconds. In 2007, Herbert Nitsch, an Austrian freediver, dove down seven hundred feet on a weighted sled to claim a world record in absolute depth.

  While nobody has ever drowned at an organized freediving competition, enough freedivers have died outside of competition that it ranks as the second most dangerous adventure sport. The numbers are a bit murky; some deaths go unreported, and the statistics don’t distinguish between deaths due to freediving alone and deaths due to freediving as part of other activities, like spearfishing. But one estimate of worldwide freediving-related fatalities over a three-year span revealed a nearly threefold increase: from 21 deaths in 2005 to 60 in 2008. Of the 10,000 active freedivers in the United States, about 20 will die every year, which works out to about 1 in 500. (In comparison, the fatality rate for BASE jumpers is 1 in 60; firefighters, about 1 in 45,000; and mountain climbers about 1 in 1,000,000.)

  Just three months before the 2011 world championship, two deaths drew attention to the sport’s dangers. Adel Abu Haliqa, a forty-year-old founding member of a freediving club in the United Arab Emirates, drowned in Santorini, Greece, during a 230-foot dive attempt. His body was never found. A month later, Patrick Musimu, a former world-record holder from Belgium, drowned while training alone in a pool in Brussels.

  Competitive freedivers blame such deaths on carelessness, arguing that the fatalities are often associated with the divers going it alone or relying on machines for assistance—both very risky practices. “Competitive freediving is a safe sport. It’s all very regulated, very controlled,” said William Trubridge, the world-record freediver, when I talked to him before the opening ceremonies. “I would never do it if it wasn’t.” He pointed out that, during some 39,000 freedives over the previous twelve years, there had never been a fatality. Through events like the world championship, Trubridge and others hope to change freediving’s dangerous image and bring it closer to the mainstream. Trubridge said he’d like to see it as an Olympic sport someday. The 2011 opening ceremony here in Greece, with all its blaring music and fast-edit videos, is meant to spread the word.

  Onstage, the lights suddenly darken, the video screen dims, and the PA system goes silent. Moments later, strobe lights flash. The metronomic thump of an electronic bass drum pumps out of the speakers, joined soon after by canned handclaps and a bass riff that borrows heavily from “Another One Bites the Dust.” Fireworks explode overhead. The freedivers cheer and dance around, waving national flags.

  The freediving world championship is on.

  FOR ALL ITS MAINSTREAM HOPES, competitive freediving has one glaring problem: It’s almost impossible to watch. The playing field is underwater, there are no video feeds beamed back to land, and it’s a logistical challenge to even get near the action. Today’s staging area is a ragged twenty-foot-by-twenty-foot flotilla of boats, platforms, and air tanks; it looks like it was swiped from the set of Waterworld. To get there, I walk to the Kalamata marina and board a sailboat owned by a Québecois expat named Yanis Georgoulis. His is the only boat going to the competitions. Georgoulis tells me it will take about an hour to reach the flotilla. I use the time to further brush up on the complicated rules of today’s competition.

  The contest officially starts the night before a dive, when each competitor secretly submits the proposed depth of the next day’s attempt to a panel of judges. It’s basically a bid, and there’s gamesmanship involved as each diver tries to guess what the other divers will do. “It’s like playing poker,” said Trubridge. “You are playing the other divers as much as you are playing yourself.” The hope is that your foes will choose to do shallower dives than you can do or that they’ll choose deeper dives than they can do and end up busting.

  In freediving, you bust if you flub any one of dozens of technical requirements during and after the dive, or if you black out before you reach the surface, grounds for immediate disqualification. While not common in competitions (I’m told), blackouts happen often enough that layers of safety precautions are in place, including rescue divers who monitor each dive, sonar tracking from the flotilla, and a lanyard guide attached to each diver’s ankle that keeps him or her from drifting off course—a potentially fatal hazard.

  A few minutes before each dive, a metal plate covered in white Velcro is attached to a rope and sunk to the depth the competitor submitted the night before. An official counts down, and then the diver submerges and follows the rope to the plate, grabs one of the many tags affixed to it, and follows the rope back to the surface. About sixty feet under, the competitor is met by rescue divers who will assist him if he blacks out. If this blackout occurs so far down that the safety divers can’t see him, the sonar will detect his lack of movement. The rope will then be hauled to the surface, dragging the freediver’s body like a rag doll.

  Divers who successfully resurface are put through a battery of tests known as the surface protocol. This regimen gauges the diver’s coherence and motor skills by requiring him to, among other things, remove his facemask, quickly flash an okay sign to a judge, and say, “I’m okay.” If you pass, you get a white card, validating the dive.

  “The rules are there to make freediving safe, measurable, and comparable,” said Carla Sue Hanson, the media spokesperson for the Association Internationale pour le Développement de l’Apnée (AIDA) or, as it’s known in English, the International Association for the Development of Apnea, the freediving federation that has overseen the world championship since 1996. (Apnea is Greek for “without breathing.”) “They are set up to ensure that, through the whole dive, the diver is in full control. That’s what competitive freediving is all about: control.”

  As long as you’re in control, it’s all right if blood vessels burst in your nose and you come out looking like an Ultimate Fighter who took a beating. “The judges don’t care how someone looks,” Hanson said. “Blood? That’s nothing. As far as the rules go, blood is okay.”

  After an hour, Georgoulis ties up to the flotilla. In the distance, a motorboat cuts a white line from the shore to deliver the first competitors to the site. Because of the extremely limited room on the flotilla and an adjacent motorboat, only judges, competitors, coaches, and a handful of staff are allowed at the event. There are no fans present. Luckily, I was able to talk my way onto Georgoulis’s sailboat, which will be used as a makeshift locker room for contestants.

  The first divers show up wearing hooded wetsuits and insectoid goggles, each moving with syrupy-slow steps as they warm up on the sailboat, staring with wide, lucid eyes. One, two, three—they slide into the sea like otters, then lie back looking semi-comatose as their coaches slowly float them over to one of three lines dangling from the flotilla. A judge issues a one-minute warning, and the first competitor begins his descent.

  Freediving is broken down into multiple disciplines. Today’s is called constant weight without fins, or CNF. In CNF, a diver goes down using his lungs, body, and an optional weight that, if employed, must be brought back to the surface.
Of the six categories in competitive freediving—from depth disciplines like free immersion (the diver can use the guide rope to propel himself up and down) to pool disciplines like static apnea (simple breath-holding)—CNF is considered the purest. Its reigning champion is Trubridge, who broke the world record in December 2010 with a 331-foot dive. Today he’s trying for 305 feet, a conservative figure for him but the deepest attempt on the schedule. Before he arrives, a dozen other divers get things started.

  An official on line one counts down from ten, announces, “Official top,” and begins counting up: “One, two, three, four, five . . .” The countdowns let the divers know when to start gulping their last breaths of air and prepare to go deep. A female diver on line three, Junko Kitahama of Japan, has until thirty to go. She inhales a few final lungfuls, ducks her head beneath the water, and descends. As her body sinks, the monitoring official announces her depth every few seconds.

  Two minutes later, a judge on the surface yells, “Blackout.” Safety divers kick down along the rope and reemerge a half a minute later with Kitahama’s body between them. Her face is pale blue, her mouth agape, her head craned back like a dead bird’s. Through her swim mask, her wide eyes stare into the sun. She isn’t breathing.

  “Blow on her face!” yells a man swimming next to her. Another man grabs her head from behind and raises her chin out of the water. “Breathe!” he yells. Someone from the deck of a boat yells for oxygen. “Breathe!” the man repeats. But Kitahama doesn’t breathe. She doesn’t move.

  A few agonizing seconds later, she coughs, jerks, twitches her shoulders, and flutters her lips. Her face softens as she comes to. “I was swimming and . . .” She laughs and continues. “Then I just started dreaming!” Two men slowly float her over to an oxygen tank sitting on a raft. While she recovers, another freediver takes her place and prepares to plunge even deeper.

  Meanwhile, a diver on a different line takes one last breath, descends two hundred feet, touches down, and then, after three minutes, resurfaces. “Breathe!” his coach yells. He smiles, gulps, then breathes. His face is white. He tries to take off his goggles, but his hands are cramped and shaking. Lack of oxygen has sapped his muscle strength, and he just floats there, with blank eyes and a clownish grin.

  Behind him another competitor resurfaces. “Breathe! Breathe!” a safety diver yells. The man’s face is blue, and he isn’t breathing. “Breathe!” another yells. Finally he coughs, jiggles his head, and makes a tiny squeaking sound like a dolphin.

  For the next half an hour, divers come and go, and similar scenes play out. I stand in the sailboat with my stomach tightening, wondering if this is normal. All the competitors sign waivers acknowledging that heart attacks, blackouts, or drowning may be the price they pay to compete. But I have a feeling that competitive freediving’s continued existence has a lot to do with the fact that the local authorities don’t know what really goes on out here.

  Trubridge arrives, wearing sunglasses and headphones, his arms appearing spidery next to his oversize torso. I can see his gargantuan lungs heaving even though I’m thirty feet away. He’s so lost in a meditative haze that he looks half asleep as he enters the water, latches his ankle to the lanyard, and gets set to go.

  A judge announces, “Official top,” and a few seconds later Trubridge dives, kicking with bare feet, descending rapidly. The official announces, “Twenty meters,” and I watch through the clear blue water as Trubridge places his arms at his sides and sinks effortlessly, drifting into the deep, and then is gone. The image is both beautiful and spooky. I try to hold my breath along with him and give up after thirty seconds.

  Trubridge passes a hundred feet, a hundred and fifty feet, two hundred feet. Almost two minutes into the dive, the sonar-monitoring official announces, “Touchdown”—at 305 feet—and begins monitoring Trubridge’s progress upward. After an agonizing three and a half minutes, Trubridge rematerializes. A few more strokes and he surfaces, exhales, removes his goggles, gives the okay sign, and says in his crisp New Zealand accent, “I’m okay.” He looks slightly bored.

  THE NEXT TWO DAYS ARE rest days. The courtyard at the Akti Taygetos Hotel buzzes with a dozen languages as teams gather around patio tables to sip bottled water, talk strategy, and e-mail worried relatives. The group here is largely male, mostly over thirty, and generally skinny. Some are short, a few are pudgy, and many have shaved heads and wear sleeveless T-shirts, action-strap Teva sandals, and baggy shorts. They hardly look like extreme athletes.

  I find an empty table in the shade. I’ve scheduled an interview and a freediving lesson with Hanli Prinsloo, a national record holder from South Africa whom I met the previous day on Georgoulis’s boat. She told me that for the past three months, she had been in Egypt training to break a world record, but she had come down with a sinus infection the previous week and had to pull out. She was now coaching friends, spreading good cheer, and patiently answering my many questions about the sport. She had also been urging me to try freediving myself.

  So far, the mere thought of freediving made me claustrophobic. Aside from a few graceful and awe-inspiring dives from champions like Trubridge, most attempts looked awkward and dangerous. On the first day, seven competitors blacked out before reaching the surface; if they hadn’t been rescued by the safety divers, they’d now be dead on the seafloor. The human body was no doubt uniquely equipped to dive deeper than I had ever imagined, but it still wasn’t meant to descend to the depths these divers were attempting. It was just a matter of time before someone got hurt, or worse.

  Prinsloo insisted that there was more to freediving than descending along ropes and trying to beat your opponents. “It offers a stillness,” she told me on the boat, a kind of full-body meditation that could be found nowhere else. And there was no need to force yourself down to three hundred feet to find it. The most incredible transformation, she said, happened at around forty feet down. There, the force of gravity seemed to reverse; the water stopped buoying your body toward the surface and instead started pulling you deeper.

  This was the “doorway to the deep,” where everything changed, and anyone could pass through it—even me. To prove it, Prinsloo offered me an introductory, out-of-water session where we’d work on increasing my breath-holding capacity, the first step in learning to freedive. My personal breath-hold best was around fifty seconds; she promised that within two hours of training, I’d double it.

  “WELL, HELLO!” PRINSLOO EXCLAIMS AS she approaches my poolside table. At thirty-four, she’s tanned and fit, with long, dark brown hair; she actually looks like a natural athlete, unlike most of the freedivers I’ve seen. She grew up on a farm in Pretoria, South Africa, and spent her summers with her sister swimming in rivers and, she joked, speaking “a secret mermaid language.” After discovering freediving in her twenties while living in Sweden, she moved back to South Africa. She now lives in Cape Town, where she runs the nonprofit conservation program I Am Water and works part-time as a motivational speaker and a yoga and freediving instructor.

  We walk to a covered patio overlooking Messinian Bay and roll out yoga mats. The lesson begins with some basic poses to loosen the muscles around our chests. “If you could take your lungs out of your chest, they are completely flexible and you could blow them to whatever size,” she says, then she puffs up her chest and exhales. What stops the lungs from expanding is the musculature around the ribs, chest, and back. Through stretching and breathing exercises, freedivers develop up to 75 percent more lung capacity than the average person. Nobody actually needs this extra capacity to start freediving, but, like a larger tank of gas, it can help you go deeper and stay under longer. Stéphane Mifsud, who set the world breath-hold record in 2009, boasts a 10.5-liter lung capacity; the average adult male’s is 6 liters. Prinsloo can hold up to 6 liters of air in her lungs, compared to the average female, who can hold about 4.2.

  Next, Prinsloo takes me through a few human-pretzel poses designed to help open up my lungs. While we’re stretching, she expl
ains how pressure works in water, and how it affects our lungs and bodies.

  In the water, the deeper we go, the more the pressure increases and the more the air contracts. Seawater is eight hundred times denser than air, so diving down just ten feet causes the same change in air pressure as descending from an altitude of ten thousand feet to sea level. Anything with a flexible surface and air inside it—a basketball, a plastic soda bottle, human lungs—will be at half its original volume 33 feet underwater, a third of its original volume at 66 feet, a quarter at 99 feet, and so on.

  When the basketball, plastic soda bottle, or pair of lungs returns to the surface, the air inside will quickly reinflate to its original volume. For freedivers, this plays hell on the body, especially the chest area. The breathing exercises and stretches Prinsloo is leading me through are meant to keep the chest muscles flexible so that if I start freediving, I’ll be better able to handle these dramatic changes in volume and not black out or die.

  We are now sitting cross-legged and facing each other, breathing into the three chambers of our lungs: the belly area, the sternum, and the top of the chest, just beneath the collarbones. Prinsloo says that most of us spend our lives breathing only at the very tops of our chests, meaning that we’re accessing only part of our lungs. To store more oxygen for longer dives, I’ll need to learn to breathe into the total volume of my lungs.

  She directs me to draw a twenty-second breath into the belly area, sternum, and top of the chest. Doing this makes me feel nauseated, but I acclimate after a few minutes. Then Prinsloo pulls out her stopwatch and gets ready to time my first breath-hold attempt. I lie down on my mat, take one more enormous three-chambered breath and hold it. She starts the clock.