Deep

by James Nestor

What feels like thirty seconds pass. I’m extremely nauseated. My head throbs. I imagine for a moment what it must be like to be a hundred feet underwater and feeling this awful. This thought triggers panic. A few seconds later, my body starts convulsing. I try to keep still but can’t. Prinsloo stops the watch and tells me to exhale, then inhale. I sit up, shaking my head, feeling like a failure.

  “Not bad,” she says. “You’ve more than doubled your breath-holding on the first try.” She shows me the stopwatch. I’ve just held my breath one minute and forty-five seconds.

  I ask about the convulsions. She explains that the body responds to extreme breath-holding in three stages. Convulsions are the first-stage response. “You start reacting not from the lack of oxygen, but from the buildup of carbon dioxide,” she says. “When that starts, it’s just a caution that you’ve only got a few minutes to go before you really need to breathe.” The second-stage response occurs when the spleen releases up to 15 percent more fresh, oxygen-rich blood into the bloodstream. This usually occurs only when the body goes into shock, an extreme state whose symptoms include low blood pressure, rapid heartbeat, and organ shutdown. But it also happens during extreme breath-holding. A freediver anticipates the spleen’s delivery of fresh blood, feels it happen, and uses it as a turbo-charge to dive even deeper.

  The third-stage response is the blackout, which happens when the brain senses that there’s not enough oxygen for it to support itself and so shuts off, like a light switch, to conserve energy. Though the brain represents only about 2 percent of the body’s weight, it uses 20 percent of the body’s oxygen. The presence of liquid in the mouth or throat triggers another reflexive line of defense: the larynx automatically closes, stopping water from entering the lungs. Freedivers learn to sense the arrival of convulsions and spleen release, and they know exactly when to head back to the surface so the third-stage blackout won’t occur. A freediver survives by understanding and respecting these mechanisms.

  “There’s a reason we’re built with all these amazing rows of defense,” Prinsloo says. “It’s that we are meant to be underwater!” She shifts me into yet another yoga pose. “You are born to do this!”

  I lie on my back for my final breath-holding attempt of the day. Inhale, exhale, big inhale, hold. Prinsloo starts the stopwatch. I close my eyes.

  After what feels like about twenty seconds, I start gently convulsing again. I tell myself this is natural, to concentrate, keep relaxed, wait for the spleen to kick in. It’s hard to wait. My chest feels pressurized and my heart pounds so forcibly that I can sense it in my hands, legs, crotch. I feel miserable.

  “Stick with it, you can do this for so much longer. You’re just at the first stage,” Prinsloo reassures me. I stick with it. After what feels like ten more seconds, my stomach begins constricting, and my throat tenses. I feel claustrophobic. “Just a little longer . . . a little longer,” she says gently. Soon my body feels electrified. I noticed I’m wriggling on the mat like a fish out of water. “Right now, your spleen is filling your body with fresh, oxygen-rich blood,” she says. Moments later, I think I can sense what she’s talking about. My body calms. The darkness of my closed eyes grows somehow darker; the ambient noise of the pool area fades; and I feel like I’m drifting off to . . .

  “Breathe!” she says. I exhale, inhale, exhale. I’m dizzy, have trouble focusing through fluttering eyes, but I feel good. “How long do you think that was?” she asks me. I shrug and guess about a minute or so. She smiles. I didn’t just double my breath-holding record during this lesson; I tripled it. The stopwatch reads three minutes, ten seconds.

  HUMANS MAY WELL BE BORN to freedive, as Prinsloo insisted, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. You still have to hold your breath a long time, exert yourself to your breaking point, and not freak out. I could now hold my breath for more than three minutes, but I hadn’t tried diving any deeper than ten feet or so. And after what I’d seen, diving to even a few dozen feet was out of the question.

  And yet, I was still determined to find out what it was like down there.

  Three hundred feet is the halfway point to the photic zone. Even in the clearest oceans, with blazing sunlight overhead, visibility at this depth is about .5 percent of what it is at the surface, so the water is perpetually gray and hazy. Without artificial lighting, you can see maybe fifty feet in any direction. Because the light is so diffuse, all directions at –300 feet look the same.

  With less light, there is less life than at shallower, brighter depths. The creatures who do live here must adapt to the twilight: fish have evolved large eyes to see better; sharks use electromagnetic senses to seek out prey; squids, microorganisms, and bacteria use a chemical process called bioluminescence to light their own way.

  Getting down to this depth is arduous and often dangerous. Scuba divers can make it to three hundred feet breathing mixed gases, but it takes years of training and is a logistical nightmare. The danger isn’t going down—although that certainly is dangerous—it’s coming back up. For a scuba diver, a one-hour descent to two hundred feet breathing regular compressed air would require a ten-hour ascent to purge the deadly levels of nitrogen gas in the blood that accumulate on the way down. A three-hundred-foot ascent on compressed air would most likely kill you.

  My best bet in the short term was to talk to William Trubridge. He dives to three hundred feet all the time. Trubridge and other freedivers who use nothing but their bodies to reach this depth have a physical advantage over scuba divers: decompression sickness doesn’t affect them. There simply isn’t enough nitrogen in a single breath to bubble the blood. At the surface, this nitrogen is quickly purged from the system in a matter of seconds—another function of the Master Switch.

  Between 2007 and 2010, Trubridge broke fourteen world records (mostly his own) in the disciplines of constant weight without fins and free immersion. Today he is considered the world’s top no-fins and fins-assisted freediver, so he knows as much about the experience of diving down to three hundred feet as anyone who’s ever lived.

  “FREEDIVING IS AS MUCH a mental game as a physical one,” says Trubridge. We are sitting poolside at the Messinian Bay Hotel the day after my freediving lesson with Prinsloo. Trubridge, with his cropped hair, wraparound dark glasses, and a worn T-shirt, fits right in with the rest of the freedivers gathered here. He’s got the quiet, nerdy energy of a software engineer.

  Like almost all competitive divers, Trubridge says he dives with his eyes closed. He’ll open them for a moment when he reaches the plate at the bottom of the rope, but that’s it. By diving blind, he prevents his brain from using up the energy—and oxygen—it would take to process visual information.

  So, Trubridge can’t tell me what it looks like at three hundred feet down, but he can certainly describe how it feels. He leans back in his chair and takes a deep breath. And as he starts talking, my stomach starts tightening once again . . .

  In the first thirty or so feet underwater, the lungs, full of air, buoy your body toward the surface, forcing you to paddle as you go down. As you blow air into your middle-ear canals to equalize the pressure, you’ll feel a much more intense version of the discomfort you would feel in an airplane as it gains altitude. If you fail to equalize the ears completely, the pressure becomes debilitating, and if you don’t return to the surface, you risk damaging your eardrums.

  And you’ve still got 570 feet of swimming to go.

  As you descend past 30 feet, you feel the pressure on your body double and your lungs shrink. You suddenly feel weightless, your body suspended in a gravityless state called neutral buoyancy. Then something amazing happens: as you keep diving, the ocean begins pulling you down. You place your arms at your sides in a skydiver pose, relax, and effortlessly dive deeper.

  At 100 feet, the pressure quadruples. The ocean’s surface is barely visible, but you’re not looking anyway. You’ve closed your eyes at the surface. Your skin cools as you prepare for the deep water’s tightening clutch.

  Farther
still, at 150 feet, you enter a dream state caused by heightened levels of carbon dioxide and nitrogen in your bloodstream. For a moment, you can forget where you are and why.

  At 250 feet, the pressure is so extreme that your lungs shrink to the size of fists and your heart beats at less than half its normal rate to conserve oxygen. Heart rates of freedivers at this depth have been recorded as low as fourteen beats per minute; some freedivers have reported heart rates of seven beats per minute. These reports have not been independently verified by physicians or scientists, but if they’re accurate, they would be the lowest heart rates for conscious humans ever recorded. According to physiologists, a heart rate this low can’t support consciousness. And yet, according to the divers, somehow, deep in the ocean, it does.

  At 300 feet, the Master Switch really kicks in. The walls of your organs and vessels, working like pressure-release valves, allow the free flow of blood and water into the thoracic cavity. Your chest collapses to about half its original size. During a no-limits dive in 1996, Cuban freediver Francisco Ferreras-Rodriguez’s chest shrank from a circumference of fifty inches at the surface down to twenty inches by the time he reached his target depth of 436 feet.

  The effects of nitrogen narcosis at 300 feet down are so strong that you forget where you are, what you’re doing, and why you’re in this dark place, fumbling around. Hallucinations are common. One diver told me that during a very deep dive, she forgot that she was underwater. She began to have strange thoughts about her dog. She pictured herself in a dark park looking for him. As she headed back toward the surface, and the haze of nitrogen narcosis faded, she remembered that she didn’t own a dog.

  Nitrogen narcosis affects more than just your brain; it affects your entire body. You lose motor control. Everything around you appears to slow down.

  Then comes the really hard part. Your dive watch beeps, alerting you that you’ve reached your target depth at the plate attached to the end of the rope. You open your eyes, force your semiparalyzed hand to grab a ticket from the plate, and then head back up. With the ocean’s weight working against you, you tap your meager energy reserves to swim toward the surface. If you lose concentration now, cough, or even slightly hesitate, you could pass out. But you don’t hesitate or slow down. You hurry and kick back toward the light.

  As you ascend to 200 feet, 150 feet, 100 feet, the Master Switch slowly reverses its effects: the heart rate increases, and the blood that flooded into your thoracic cavity now floods back out into your veins and arteries and organs. Your lungs ache with an almost unbearable desire to breathe; your vision fades; and your chest convulses from the buildup of carbon dioxide. You need to hurry or you’ll black out. Above you, the blue haze transforms into a sheen of sunlight. You’re going to make it. The air in your lungs is now rapidly expanding, and your body is desperately trying to pull oxygen from the lungs and feed it into your blood. But there is no oxygen to pull; you’ve already used it all up. Your body literally starts being sucked inward. If this vacuum grows too strong, you will black out. You can stay submerged in a blacked-out state for about two minutes. At the end of two minutes, your body will wake itself up and breathe one last time before you die. If you’ve been rescued and carried to the surface by the time you take your last gasp, you’ll inhale much-needed air and will probably survive. If you are still underwater, your lungs will fill with water and you’ll drown. Ninety-five percent of blackouts happen in the last fifteen feet, usually as a result of this vacuum.

  But it’s not going to happen to you. You’ve learned well, and you know to exhale most of your air as you get to within about ten feet of the surface.

  Some three minutes after you started down, you pop your head up out of the water; the world spins; people yell at you to breathe. You take off your goggles, flick an okay sign, and say, “I’m okay.”

  And then you get out of the way and make room for the next competitor.

  UNTIL 2009, ONLY TEN FREEDIVERS in the world had reached the three-hundred-foot limit in the freediving discipline called constant weight (CWT), which allows the diver to use a monofin—a three-foot-wide wedge of plastic attached to neoprene boots. This Thursday in Greece, the second day of the world championship, fifteen competitors will be attempting that depth.

  British diver David King will be one of them. King surprised everyone the night before by announcing that he would try a 102-meter (335-foot) dive, which, if he succeeded, would set a new national record in the United Kingdom. According to his teammates, he hadn’t gone deeper than eighty meters in the past twelve months. Progress in freediving is made meter by meter, several freedivers told me yesterday. Attempting to better a record by more than seventy feet is not only audacious but borderline suicidal.

  This morning, the waters of Messinian Bay are gray and wind-chopped from a storm that blew through yesterday. It’s not raining now, but clouds loom overhead, and subsurface visibility has diminished to about forty feet.

  I take a seat at the bow of Georgoulis’s boat, next to Prinsloo, who will be coaching her friend Sara Campbell, a women’s freediving champion from the United Kingdom who will be making her own world-record attempt a little later. Meanwhile, on the line directly below me, David King takes the last few breaths before his dive. The judge starts the countdown. King dunks his head, upends, and kicks his monofin violently. His silhouette fades into the gray water below like a headlight disappearing in fog. In about ten seconds, he is gone.

  The official follows King’s descent: “Fifty meters, sixty meters, seventy meters . . .”

  “My God, he is flying down,” says Prinsloo. Speed isn’t necessarily a good thing in freediving, she reminds me. The faster King goes, the more energy he burns and the less oxygen he’ll have for his ascent.

  “Eighty meters, ninety meters . . .” the dive official says. King is now traveling so fast that the official has trouble keeping up. “Touchdown,” he announces, and King starts coming back.

  “Ninety meters, eighty meters.” Then the official pauses. King is coming up at about half the speed of his descent. This is troubling; King will need to ascend faster or he’ll run out of oxygen.

  “Sixty . . . fifty . . . forty meters.” The gaps between the announcements lengthen. Then the official stops altogether. A few seconds later he repeats: “Forty meters.” Ten seconds pass in silence. King has now been underwater for more than two minutes.

  “Forty meters,” the official repeats again. King has stopped, it appears. A sickening anticipation sets in. I look around the sailboat. The officials, divers, and crews all stare at the choppy water and wait.

  “Thirty meters.”

  King appears to be moving, but too slowly. Five seconds pass.

  “Thirty meters,” the official repeats.

  “Oh God,” Prinsloo says, holding her hand over her mouth. Five more seconds. The official is staring at the sonar screen, but he’s no longer announcing. In the water, we see nothing—no sign of King, no ripples at the surface.

  “Thirty meters.” Silence. “Thirty meters.”

  “Blackout!” a safety diver yells. King is unconscious some ten stories below the surface. The divers kick down into the water.

  “Safety!” the judge yells. About thirty seconds later, the water around the line explodes in a cauldron of foam. The heads of two safety divers reappear. Between them is King. His face is bright blue, and he’s not moving. His neck is stiff.

  The divers push King’s head out of the water. His cheeks, mouth, and chin are slicked with blood. “Breathe! Breathe!” the divers yell. No response. Bright drops of blood drip from King’s chin into the ocean.

  “Safety! Safety!” the judge yells. A diver puts his mouth over King’s blood-covered mouth and blows. “Safety now!” the judge yells. King’s coach, Dave Kent, is yelling into King’s ear, “Dave! Dave!”

  No response. Ten seconds pass, and still nothing. Someone yells for oxygen. Someone else for CPR. Georgoulis screams, “Why isn’t anyone calling a medic? Get a h
elicopter!” Georgoulis is yelling at me, at Prinsloo, at no one in particular. “What the fuck is going on here?” he shouts.

  Behind us, on line one, another diver heads down. Then another surfaces, blacked out. The safety divers move King’s supine form to the flotilla and put an oxygen mask to his face. Still no response. His neck is stiff; his facial muscles are frozen into a sickly smile; his eyes are wide and lost, staring into the sun.

  King is dead. That is the consensus on the sailboat. But we are forty feet away from him now, and through all the yelling, nobody can tell what’s really happening. The safety crew on the flotilla are pumping King’s chest, tapping his face, yelling at him.

  “Dave! Dave?”

  Around the flotilla another diver submerges, and another lifts his head to the surface. The competition just keeps going on. I turn to the side of the boat so I can look away. A Czech diver stares at me, closes his eyes, and goes back to mumbling a mantra in preparation for his dive.

  Then, miraculously, King’s fingers quiver, his lips flutter, and he breathes. Color returns to his face; his eyes open, then softly close again. His limbs loosen. He is breathing deeply, tapping his coach’s leg as if to say, I’m okay, I’m okay. A motorboat arrives. The safety crew carefully places King in its bow.

  As the motorboat carrying King takes off for shore, Trubridge attempts a 387-foot dive on line one, but he turns around early and fails his surface protocol. Next, British contestant Sara Campbell turns back after just seventy-two feet of her world-record attempt. “I couldn’t do it,” she says, hopping back on the sailboat. She was too shaken by King. There’s another blackout on line two. Then another on three.

  “My God, this is getting messy,” says Campbell. The west winds grow stronger, chopping the ocean, fluttering the sail above us. “It’s like dominoes. Everything’s falling apart. This is the worst I’ve ever seen.” And yet the competition goes on for three more hours.