Deep

by James Nestor

  On the last dive of the day, a Ukrainian, new to the sport, attempts a beginning descent of forty meters. He dives, surfaces, and removes his mask—and a stream of blood gushes from his nose. He completes the surface protocol and is awarded a white card, meaning the dive is accepted. Blood is okay.

  THAT NIGHT AT THE HOTEL, the divers cavort; some laugh, others casually shake their heads at all the drama. Of the day’s ninety-three competitors, fifteen of them attempted dives of a hundred meters or more. Of those, two were disqualified, three came up short, and four blacked out—a 60 percent failure rate. King is in the hospital. Nobody knows for sure, but the rumor is that the pressure tore his larynx, which is fairly common on deep dives and, they say, a minor injury.

  Regarding the day’s events in general, the contestants are less blasé. “This kind of thing never happens,” they insist over and over that night in the courtyard, rolling their eyes. It sounds like a practiced response. This kind of thing probably happens all the time, it’s just that nobody here wants to admit it. The challenge now is to see who among them can erase today’s “messy” events from their minds and dive to even greater depths on the final day of competition.

  One person who seems unfazed is Guillaume Néry, a twenty-nine-year-old French freediver and the winner of yesterday’s CWT competition. The day after King’s near drowning, I meet Guillaume midmorning at a table crowded with other members of the French team.

  “I was not there, so don’t know exactly,” he says in his thick accent. “But I think the main mistake is not for Dave King but for all freedivers. They were focused on this one-hundred-meter number and not on their feelings, not what they really want to do.” Néry, who started freediving at fourteen, gained international fame in 2010 with the release of Free Fall, a short film that follows him on a thirteen-story freedive in the Bahamas. Since its release, the clip has been viewed on YouTube more than thirteen million times.

  “I learned long ago that patience is the key to success in freediving,” he says. “You have to forget the target, to enjoy and relax in the water.” Néry smiles and runs his fingers through his mop of sandy hair, mentioning that he hasn’t blacked out in more than five years of steady freediving. “What is important now is trying to do the dive, surface, and have a smile on my face.”

  SATURDAY, THE FINAL DAY OF competition, brings scorching sunshine, still air, and clear, calm waters—perfect conditions. The discipline today is free immersion, where divers are allowed to pull themselves down the line to reach their target depth. Free-immersion dives are a little shallower than CWT dives, but they can take a while, sometimes more than four minutes, making them excruciating to watch. The divers got a wrist slap last night from event director Stavros Kastrinakis, who told them, “Dive your limits.” The announced dives today appear to be more conservative. Still, there are a number of world- and national-record attempts planned.

  “Two minutes,” the official from the flotilla announces to the divers. The first competitor is slowly towed by his coach to line three. The diver turns over and descends into the clear water, pulling himself along the guide rope. He touches down and begins the ascent. As usual, the official narrates his progress: “Thirty meters . . . twenty meters.”

  Another blackout. The safety divers plunge down. Moments later, they bring the diver up. His face is blue; his mouth open. I turn to walk below deck, no longer interested in watching this sport. But seconds later, the diver shakes his head and smiles, then apologizes to his coach.

  “See, that wasn’t so bad,” says Prinsloo, standing behind me on the sailboat. It wasn’t, or maybe I’m just getting used to seeing unconscious bodies pulled from sixty feet down. Either way, I return and watch as the next dozen divers all make their dives without incident. Then the elite divers start going; Malina Mateusz of Poland breaks a men’s national record with a dive of 106 meters. The women’s reigning world champion, Russian Natalia Molchanova, sets a world record of 88 meters. Antoni Koderman dives 105 meters to set a new Slovenian record. Néry breaks the French record with 103. Trubridge does 112, almost effortlessly. Seven national records are broken in an hour. Everyone is in control. The sport, again, is beautiful.

  Then, at line two, a commotion breaks out. The safety divers have lost a Czech contestant named Michal Rišian. Literally lost him. He’s at least two hundred feet down, but the sonar is no longer picking him up. He has somehow drifted away from the rope.

  “Safety! Safety!” yells the judge. The safety divers go down but come up a minute later with nothing. “Safety! Safety! Now!” Thirty seconds pass. There is no sign of Rišian anywhere.

  On line one, Sara Campbell is preparing to dive. From below her, three and a half minutes after he went down on line two, Rišian emerges—some forty feet away from the line he was first attached to.

  There’s confusion. Campbell jerks away, frightened. Rišian snaps off his goggles, saying, “Don’t touch me. I’m okay.” Then he swims back to the sailboat under his own steam. He plops down beside me on the hull, laughs, and says, “Wow, that was a weird dive.”

  That’s one way of putting it. Before Rišian’s dive and per the usual routine, his coach attached the lanyard around Rišian’s right ankle to the line. As Rišian turned and plummeted, the Velcro securing the lanyard came loose and fell off. The safety divers saw it floating, unattached, and rushed down to stop Rišian, but he was already gone, a hundred feet deep. Rišian, unaware, closed his eyes, meditated, and drifted downward. But he wasn’t going straight down—he was angling 45 degrees away from the line, into open ocean.

  Rišian’s coach, realizing that death was the likely outcome of this screwup, floated motionless at the surface, gazing at the safety divers, who were too stunned to blink. “I’ll remember their looks for a long time,” he said later. “Terror, awe, fear, and sadness.” Meanwhile, Rišian was diving farther down and farther away, oblivious to his peril. At 272 feet, the alarm of his dive watch sounded. He opened his eyes and reached out to grab the metal plate, but there was no plate. “I couldn’t see any tickets, any plate, any rope, nothing,” he said. “I was completely lost. Even when I turned up and looked around, I saw only blue.”

  When you’re twenty-seven stories down, even in the clearest water, all directions look the same. And they all feel the same—the water pressure makes it impossible to gauge whether you’re swimming up, down, or sideways.

  For a moment, Rišian panicked. Then he calmed himself, knowing that panic would only kill him faster. “In one direction there was a bit more light,” he told me. “I figured that this is where the surface was.” He figured wrong. Rišian was swimming horizontally. But as he swam, trying to remain conscious and calm, he saw a white rope. “I knew if I could find the rope, I would be okay,” he said.

  The chances of Rišian finding a line two hundred and fifty feet down—especially one so far from his original line of descent—were, I would estimate, about the same as hitting 00 on a roulette wheel. Twice. But there it was, the line Sara Campbell was about to descend, some forty feet away from where he had first gone down. Rišian grabbed it, aimed for the surface, and somehow made it up before he drowned.

  ON THE FINAL NIGHT, the divers, coaches, and judges gather on the beach for closing ceremonies. Strobes and spotlights glare from an enormous stage, Euro pop blasts from a DJ booth, and a crowd of a few hundred dance and drink beneath a night sky sequined with stars. Behind the stage a bonfire rages, heating the bare, wet bodies of those who couldn’t resist one last splash.

  The winners are announced. All told, the divers broke two world and forty-eight national records. Competitors also suffered nineteen blackouts. Trubridge won gold in both constant weight and free immersion.

  “Rišian is the real winner here,” says Trubridge, sipping a beer beside his wife, Brittany. Behind us, every twenty minutes or so, a video screen shows the chilling footage of Rišian’s tetherless dive, which was recorded by underwater cameras. At the end of the video, the crowd cheers, a
nd Rišian, who’s now drunk on “birthday” drinks (to celebrate his new life after his near-fatal dive), rushes to the stage to take a bow. Dave King, the diver who suffered the horrific blackout just two days ago, walks through the crowd with the British team, smiling and seemingly in perfect health. Néry, in quintessential French style, is smoking a cigarette.

  “There is such a strong community here,” says Hanli Prinsloo, drinking a cocktail by the bonfire. “It’s like all of us, we have no choice. We have to be in the water; we’ve chosen to live our lives in it, and by doing that, we accept its risks.” She takes a sip.

  “But we also reap its rewards.”

  −650

  A MONTH LATER, I’M INVITED to view a different kind of freediving, one with a purpose. A handful of freelance researchers plan to spend ten days diving, studying, and attaching tracking transmitters to the dorsal fins of man-eating sharks. It’s all taking place along the coastal waters of an island on the other side of the globe that I’ve never even heard of. Getting there is the first challenge.

  IT TAKES FIFTEEN HOURS, THREE meals, four small bottles of wine, seven films, and five trips to the bathroom to fly from San Francisco to Sydney, Australia. Next, there is a four-hour layover in Sydney International Airport (one bagel, a twenty-minute nap on the floor, one bag of cashews, forty-five minutes at the newsstand reading Rolling Stone) before the connecting flight to Saint-Denis, the capital of Réunion. The airplane is an old Airbus A330, a model infamous for inflight malfunction, and the paint job makes it look like it’s from the 1980s. The interior is just as shabby: seats are stained; the handles of the overhead luggage compartments are loose and scratched, and their color, once white, has faded to yellow. The cabin is only 20 percent full, occupied mostly by elderly couples. Everyone except me speaks French. Within an hour after we take off, passengers are splayed across empty rows, fast asleep. More wine, more movies, more meals. Night dissolves into day.

  Twelve hours later, the seat-belt lights come on. The airplane arcs west, and looking through the portside windows, I see a tiny island appear in the distance. The captain noses the plane down, and an otherworldly landscape appears: Crowns of miles-high volcanic peaks poke through billowing white clouds. Blue water laps on white beaches. Forty-story waterfalls spray mist on green jungle floors. It’s such a clichéd scene of tropical wonder that it might as well be computer-generated, like a backdrop from Jurassic Park: The Lost World. But this isn’t a movie set or a screensaver. The exotic, prehistoric landscape below is what France looks like four thousand miles from Paris.

  Réunion is the southernmost outpost of the French Republic and an outermost region of the European Union. At just 970 square miles, about a quarter of the size of the big island of Hawaii, it’s a tiny dot situated six thousand miles west of Australia and about four hundred miles from the east coast of Madagascar. The French came here in the 1600s, named it Bourbon Island, and used it as a trading post and sugar plantation for the next few centuries. Today, Réunion is to the French what Hawaii is to Americans—a tropical getaway with all the modern conveniences of the mainland but none of the chilly weather. They come here for the same reasons: to retire, start a new life, honeymoon, or thaw out during long winters. Réunion’s biggest claim to fame is that, in 1966, it got seventy-one inches of rainfall in a single twenty-four-hour period—a world record. In 1671, the population on the entire island was ninety. In 2008, it was more than eight hundred thousand. Although the French claim Réunion as their own, immigrants from neighboring India, China, and Africa now predominate. Most residents live along the west coast near a string of former colonial outposts. There’s a Catholic church in every town center, and a beach bordered by grids of colorful low-rise houses. The local beer, called Dodo after the extinct bird that was (wrongly) thought to have inhabited Réunion, tastes vaguely of soap.

  The food, however, is delicious—Parisian quality with an African twist. The weather is always warm and inviting. The landscape and beaches are uncrowded, pristine, and as spectacular as any South Pacific island’s. Réunion would be a paradise if it weren’t for one notable problem: the constant threat of being eaten by sharks.

  In recent years, for reasons nobody can explain, shark attacks have been on the rise. In 2010, bull sharks suddenly started going on a rampage, killing and mauling swimmers and surfers along the island’s most luxurious beaches and resorts.

  The worldwide average for shark fatalities is six a year; two deaths and a half a dozen injuries occurred on tiny Réunion in the span of three months. It was the most dramatic increase in shark attacks that Réunion had ever seen, and it threatened to destroy the island’s delicate tourist-based economy.

  It was particularly vexing for Fred Buyle, a photographer and shark conservationist I’d met at the freediving world championships in Greece. He called me a week after I returned home to discuss the upside of freediving—the side without bleeding mouths or death throes. He explained how useful it can be in shark research.

  “Freediving, it is also a tool,” he told me over the crackling phone line in his lilting French-Belgian accent. It was a way to get in touch with the ocean’s animals and, he hoped, to help save them.

  I first met Buyle in a hotel bar in Kalamata, with a small group of other freedivers. When I asked what he did for a living, he demurred. “I freedive some,” he said, “and I take a few pictures.” It wasn’t until I Googled him later that night that I discovered he was legendary—one of the earliest competitive freedivers and one of the most sought-after underwater photographers in the world. Websites were filled with photographs of him diving inches away from great white sharks, swimming among swirling schools of hammerheads, and arm to fin with whitetips.

  Buyle was traveling to Réunion, he said, to stop a shark slaughter. In the wake of the most recent attacks there, angry locals were trying to catch and kill the entire local bull shark population. This would decimate Réunion’s pristine ocean ecosystem.

  His plan was to join a troop of voluntary marine researchers, including a Réunion-based engineer named Fabrice Schnöller, and freedive down about eighty feet, to the seafloor. There he would place satellite tags on the bull sharks’ dorsal fins. These tags would track the sharks’ swimming patterns and locations, alerting locals if they came too near shore. It would be the world’s first real-time shark-tracking system.

  Buyle believed that the recent wave of attacks were accidents. Bull sharks, he said, don’t like to eat people. There had to be some other reason they were approaching shore. By tracking their movements, his team might be able to identify the cause, help remedy it, and save the bull sharks from annihilation.

  One could understand why locals might see things differently. Bull sharks are among the toughest and deadliest marine predators. They can grow up to twelve feet long and weigh as much as five hundred pounds. Their highly evolved kidneys allow them to flourish in both fresh and salt water, and they have been observed in a variety of extreme environments: over two thousand miles up the Amazon in the foothills of the Peruvian Andes, in floodwaters along city streets in eastern Australia, and on seafloors at six hundred and fifty feet deep. They eat almost anything with a face—fish, other bull sharks, sea turtles, birds, dolphins, crabs. Along with tiger and white sharks, bull sharks are responsible for more attacks on people than any other shark species on Earth.

  Like most sharks, bulls spend much of their time in deep water, where visibility is extremely limited or nonexistent. This makes them almost impossible to study. Submarines, robots, and divers in atmospheric diving suits can make it to six hundred and fifty feet and deeper, but those devices don’t allow enough speed or flexibility for a diver to follow the bull sharks, tag them, or make any worthwhile observations. Even on the sunniest days, in the clearest water, the ocean at that depth—called the twilight or mesopelagic zone, which extends from 650 feet down to 3,300 feet—gets less than 1 percent of the light at the surface. That’s not enough to support photosynthesis, and as a result,
food at these depths is scarce.

  Bull sharks adapt by hunting for prey in shallower water, then returning to deeper waters to migrate. The only way to conduct long-term studies of them—and almost any other kind of shark—is to wait for them to feed closer to the surface and tag them with tracking devices that will monitor their movements on the way down.

  Tagging isn’t easy, however. Scuba diving or tagging from a boat is dangerous, and sometimes it just doesn’t work. The sharks get nervous and swim away, or they’re injured in the process. Sometimes they bite.

  Buyle told me the safest, most effective way to tag Réunion’s sharks is to meet them on their own terms by freediving down deep enough to slap on a transmitter. Still, he acknowledged, it was a risky operation with no guaranteed results.

  He would meet me in Réunion in three weeks.

  A SHORT HISTORY OF THE mesopelagic.

  In 1841, a British naturalist named Edward Forbes dredged samples from the deep water along the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas and came up empty. Not a shell, plant, fish, or any sign of life. Forbes declared the water below nine hundred feet to be a black desert, and he named these depths the azoic (“lifeless”) zone. His declarations held, uncontested, for two decades.

  Then, in the 1860s, a contrarian scientist in Norway decided to check Forbes’s work. Michael Sars sailed out to the middle of the Norwegian Sea, dropped some nets and buckets down a few hundred feet, and then hoisted them back up. He did this again and again, and he discovered that the “lifeless” depths were full of life. Within a few years, Sars had found more than four hundred animal species in this netherworld, some of them discovered as deep down as twenty-five hundred feet. The most startling discovery was the sea lily—a flower-shaped animal with a long stalk of a body and a crown of petal-like pinnules that, scientists believed, had thrived in the time of the dinosaurs, one hundred million years ago.