by James Nestor
On her first practice dive of the day, she took one last gulp of air, turned, closed her eyes, and kicked her way down the rope.
“Right at the beginning, I felt that this dive was different,” she says. “I was exhausted and tense, not feeling myself.” Prinsloo ignored the warning signs and forced herself to go deeper. At around 130 feet, she felt a contraction in her stomach. She rarely felt that, and never on the way down. She still had more than 200 feet to go.
Prinsloo managed to complete the dive and return to the surface still conscious. She exhaled the stale air from her lungs, took a big inhale, then coughed. Droplets of blood shot from her mouth. Her larynx had been torn under the pressure.
Ordinarily, the larynx can withstand the stresses at extreme depths, but only if the body is relaxed. If a diver tenses up, the soft tissues can rupture, sometimes causing serious or permanent damage, sometimes resulting in death. Sara Campbell shared a dire prediction with her. “She said I was lying to myself. I was so untrue that I was starting to hurt my own body.” For Prinsloo, it was a turning point.
Prinsloo dropped her world-record bid and officially ended her thirteen-year competitive-freediving career. Two months before coming to Dahab, she had traveled to Dharamsala, India, and lived for five weeks in a Buddhist temple, where she meditated for twelve hours a day, practiced yoga, read philosophical books, and, in her words, “spent one month just breathing.” At the end of her stay, she rediscovered a “stillness” in herself. It was the same stillness that had first attracted her to freediving fifteen years earlier, but it had been lost in her ambition to keep going deeper.
“In Dharamsala, I remembered that freediving was all about letting go,” she says. “After Dahab, I was reminded, again, that you can never force yourself into the ocean. You do that and”—she pauses—“you’ll just get lost.”
I’D COME TO KALK BAY for six days, hoping that Prinsloo’s holistic approach could help me get through the doorway to the deep. I needed something.
My course with Eric Pinon months back gave me all the tools to freedive, but I still didn’t know how to use them. My head and ears still ached on surface dives, and without Pinon beside me, my thoughts gave way to paralyzing fear whenever I felt the pressure of deep water below twenty feet. Then I’d immediately imagine the blacked-out faces of divers I saw in Greece. This sounds melodramatic, I know, but it’s true. Those dead eyes and bloated necks were powerful images—some of the most gruesome I’d ever seen. They returned to me inevitably every time I dived. My thoughts would snowball. I’d then imagine myself blacking out, turning blue. I’d lose concentration, feel an incredible urge to breathe, and scramble back to the surface for air. My dive watch would show a mere twenty seconds, most of it spent in anxious misery.
Prinsloo is a world expert in the art of letting go. The work keeps her busy. Last month, she tells me, she was hired by the Springbok Sevens, a rugby team in Cape Town. “Some of these guys were scared of the water; they didn’t even know how to swim!” she says. A few weeks later, they were swimming underwater laps.
“CAN YOU HOLD THIS FOR a sec?” Prinsloo says, handing me a stainless-steel water bottle.
It’s early morning the following day. I’m in the passenger seat of Prinsloo’s truck, a beat-up baby blue Toyota Hilux that she affectionately calls Freya. Prinsloo is flooring Freya through a Tolkien landscape of five-hundred-foot vertical cliffs and overgrown bushes along the shores of a turquoise ocean. She’s speaking Afrikaans into a cell phone she’s holding in one hand, steering the truck around hairpin turns with the other, and, between breaths, talking to me in English. “God, it’s just been so long since I’ve been in the water, it drives me crazy,” Prinsloo says. She steers with her knees for a moment as I pass her a water bottle. “Six days.”
She raps out a few Afrikaans words into the phone, laughs, then turns back to me. “But, for me, that’s forever.”
In the back seat of the truck is Jean-Marie Ghislain, a fifty-seven-year-old former real estate executive from Belgium who quit his job six years ago after having a life-changing encounter while swimming with sharks. Ghislain now runs a nonprofit conservation program called Shark Revolution and spends nine months of the year trotting around the globe photographing oceanic animals and freedivers, sometimes both of them at the same time.
As we ride, Prinsloo shares some maxims, a kind of Ten Commandments of freediving:
Freediving is more than just holding your breath, it’s a perception shift.
Don’t kick down the doorway to the deep; slide in on your tiptoes.
Never, ever dive alone.
Always enter the ocean in peace with yourself and your surroundings.
At the heart of the list is peaceful coexistence with the water and its inhabitants, whether they’re other freedivers, seals, dolphins, whales, even sharks. Prinsloo demonstrated this yesterday at the Two Oceans Aquarium in Cape Town when, for a photo op, she dove headfirst into a five-hundred-thousand-gallon aquarium filled with ragged-tooth sharks. The sharks didn’t attack. Most looked as though they couldn’t care less. The few sharks that took an interest in Prinsloo let her swim side by side with them, almost as if they were welcoming her into the shiver. It was fascinating to watch, but it made my skin crawl.
Prinsloo thinks my fear of sharks adds to my already lengthy list of freediving inhibitions. Perhaps she’s right. In thirty years of swimming in the Pacific Ocean, I’ve had some bad experiences. I’ve seen the teeth marks of a great white on the decapitated body of a seal along the shore of my favorite surf break. I’ve traced my finger along surfboards mangled by two-foot-wide bites. I’ve seen Frankenstein scars along the stomach of a surfer attacked by a shark just days after I’d surfed at the same site. I’ve been to Réunion Island twice. Yes, I know sharks are an essential part of the oceanic ecosystem, and I certainly don’t want them killed. But I also have no interest in encountering them in the wild.
Prinsloo believes that if I confront this fear, if I dive with sharks and see them for myself, I’ll experience the perception shift she keeps talking about. And that shift may carry over to my “unreasonable fear” about being unable to breathe underwater, of not seeing the surface. It’s all part of the art of letting go.
Thirty minutes after we headed out, Prinsloo pulls over at Miller’s Point, a popular freediving spot that’s also home to dozens of sevengill cow sharks. Cow sharks, which get their name from their large and innocent-looking bovine eyes, are considered a mellow species and not prone to attacking humans (at least, not often).
We suit up, walk down to the water, and swim toward the horizon until Freya is a speck of blue against the rocky landscape. Below us, morning sunlight cuts through columns of kelp to create what looks like crisscrossing spotlights in the brilliant green water. The visibility is good for these waters, maybe eighty feet.
“You see it?” says Prinsloo, lifting her head out of the water. Below us, a cow shark about the size of an adult human swims by, some twenty feet down on the ocean floor. Prinsloo takes a gulp of air, dives, approaches, and swims beside it. Once she’s at eye level with the shark, she kicks in rhythm with the shark’s back fin. The shark makes a sharp right turn; Prinsloo follows it, a bit closer this time. Then the shark turns right again, making a large circle. It quickly wiggles its backside back and forth. Prinsloo and the shark are playing with each other.
The shark eventually swims off, but another one arrives a few minutes later, and the scene repeats. This goes on for an hour.
Finally, curiosity trumps fear and I take a gulp of air and dive down about ten feet to join them. The sharks keep their distance; I make them nervous with my awkward movements and constant, hasty ascents to grab air. But they don’t swim off. After a while, the sharks and I edge closer.
I’ll admit, being with these animals doesn’t stir up any great affection for them, but I do feel a thin slice of camaraderie. We’re sharing turf. They can devour me, but they don’t. I could watch them from a boat,
but I’m down here. Perhaps this is all part of them casing the joint before raiding the store. Or perhaps that’s just my “unreasonable fear” talking again.
After a while, I just stop thinking about it and swim with the sharks.
The next few weeks, I work with Prinsloo to develop a regimen. I read the Manual of Freediving, a 362-page bible of the sport, cover to cover. I scour the Internet, watching countless YouTube instructional videos and reading freediving blogs. I practice and practice. I tell myself and Schnöller that I’m ready.
A MONTH LATER I’M IN the passenger seat of a white van, on a dusty, potholed road somewhere along the northeastern coast of Sri Lanka. It’s 9:00 p.m. And the stars are out. “Is this the right way?” I ask our driver.
He’s a local named Bobby; that isn’t his real name, but that’s what he wants me to call him. Bobby is shaking his head and flashing me a reassuring smile. It’s the same smile he used ten minutes ago when he took a wrong turn into someone’s front yard, the same one he gave me twenty minutes before that when he brought the van to a dead stop in the middle of a two-lane freeway, stepped out into oncoming traffic, and ran across the street to ask a barefoot man on a bike for directions.
“Bobby? Is this the right way?” I repeat.
That smile.
Then Bobby suddenly pulls into a driveway. Through the headlights, it looks like we’ve just entered a junkyard. Guy Gazzo, the seventy-four-year-old freediver from Réunion, mumbles something in French in the seat behind me. Gazzo is sitting beside Diderot Mauuary, an acoustic scientist from northern France. Trailing us in an identical white van is Fabrice Schnöller and an American film crew.
We’ve all just spent twelve hours driving through steep mountain roads, jungles thick with elephants, and dusty towns filled with men in baggy slacks selling boiled peanuts and green bananas. Now we’re two hours late and we’re all getting irritated.
“Bobby?”
He pulls out of the driveway and takes a left. This road is narrower and bumpier. Bushes scrape the doors. The eyes of unknown animals glow from copses of coconut palms. A dog barks. Bats the size of rats flutter and swoop inches from the windshield.
Minutes later, we come to a stop in a barren sandlot. To the right is a creepy-looking, three-story pink-concrete building. A single, bare light bulb shines over a white plastic table on the patio, giving the scene an Edward Hopper feel. Bobby exhales, pulls the key from the ignition, and smiles. We’ve arrived at our destination, he says: the Pigeon Island View Guesthouse.
I’m in room 6, up three flights of stairs, near the back of the building. In one corner of my room, beside a lime-green wall, is a bed so short that my legs will dangle off the end at midcalf. Overhead, a ceiling fan swings precariously from two wires, its blades whipping clumsily around like a helicopter about to crash. A pink net covering the bed is supposed to keep flies and mosquitoes out but has done little to stop the fleas, which hop like popcorn on the sheet and pillowcase. I’ll be sleeping here for the next ten days.
I’VE JOINED THE DAREWIN TEAM in Trincomalee, a Podunk town along the northeast coast of Sri Lanka, to swim with sperm whales, the world’s deepest-diving animals.
Sperm whales can go down as far as ten thousand feet, but studying them at such depths is impossible: few submarines or ROVs could make it, and they wouldn’t see anything if they did. No sunlight gets down there, and the artificial lights of a sub would scare off the whales.
As with sharks and dolphins, the best way—the only way—to film and study sperm whales is at the surface.
Hunting down whales and forcing your presence on them never works—they get spooked and dive; they swim away; or they attack. The whales must choose to come to you, and they’ll choose a freediver more often than a boat, a scuba diver, or a robot.
What attracts the whales to Sri Lanka is Trincomalee Canyon, an eight-thousand-foot-deep chasm that stretches twenty-five miles across the Indian Ocean, from the northern tip of the country into the Trincomalee harbor. Sperm whales come here to feed on deep-water squids, socialize, and mate during their annual migrations from March through August. They’ve done it for as long as anyone can remember, and probably for millions of years before that.
Unlike other deep-water chasms and sperm whale hotspots, Trincomalee Canyon is close to shore, so it’s easy to run trips out to the whales by day and return to land at night. This will save our team from hiring a live-aboard research vessel, which can cost thousands of dollars a day. But the big attraction is that there are no permits to obtain, no authorities to evade, nothing to stop us from freediving with the whales. Because there’s nobody here.
During the Sri Lankan civil war, which lasted from 1983 to 2009, separatists led by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil fought the Sri Lankan army for control of the northeast coast. Trincomalee was a war zone. Few tourists came here; what little infrastructure existed was quickly destroyed, and the area took a direct hit during the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. The unintended benefit for sea life was a coastline that went years without any significant human presence. Cruise ships have never motored through here, and there is no whale-watching industry to speak of. In many ways, the waters of Trincomalee look about the same as they did thousands of years ago.
Today, it’s one of the world’s best places to see and study sperm whales.
COMING HERE WAS MY IDEA. After visiting Prinsloo in Cape Town, I connected her with Schnöller and proposed that we all go out to Trincomalee on a freediving sperm whale–research expedition. A few months later, tickets were purchased and travel arrangements made. Somehow, at nine thirty, after days of air travel from five different points of the globe, we are all sitting together on the patio of the Pigeon Island View Guesthouse. On one side of a patio table is the DareWin crew: Schnöller, Gazzo, and Mauuary. On the other is Prinsloo’s team. She’s brought her new boyfriend, a six-foot-two aquatic he-man from Los Angeles named Peter Marshall. Marshall broke two world records in swimming at the 2008 Olympic trials. Beside him is Ghislain. He tells me that after we met in Cape Town, he went to Botswana to swim with crocodiles. The trip ended after the first day when a team member had an arm eaten off.
Also in the group are three members of an American film crew who have come to shoot footage for a planned documentary on Schnöller’s work with dolphin and whale clicking communication.
Thirty years ago—to the week—another American film crew came to Trincomalee and captured the first footage of sperm whales in their natural habitat. The resulting film, Whales Weep Not, narrated by Jason Robards, became an international sensation and helped spark the Save the Whales movement.
Our crew hopes to have a similar impact by capturing the first 3-D footage of sperm whales and human-and-whale freediving interactions. DareWin scientists will use the click data collected from various hydrophones on the cameras to help decipher what they believe is a sperm whale click language.
But for any of this to work, we’ll need to find some whales.
DURING MY DIVE IN STANLEY’S sub to 2,500 feet, I felt more remote from the world I knew than I ever had before. And the gelatinous, awkward, eyeless, and brainless creatures at the bottom of the Cayman Trench seemed farther from humanity than anything I could have imagined.
I presumed that this sense of remoteness would only intensify as I investigated deeper realms. Sperm whales, which feed almost two miles below the surface, would seem to buttress that view.
These creatures look nothing like us. They weigh up to 125,000 pounds and lack the limbs and hair of land-dwelling mammals. Their insides are as unlike ours as their outsides are. The sperm whale has four stomachs, a single nostril on top of its head, and a three-hundred-gallon reservoir of oil that gives its enormous nose its distinctive shape. They can hold their breath for up to ninety minutes at a time. Yet, in two related and crucial ways—language and culture—sperm whales more closely approximate human culture and intellect than any other creature on the planet.
“It’s sort of stra
nge. Really, the closest analogy we have for it would be ourselves,” said Hal Whitehead, a Canadian biologist who has researched sperm whales for thirty years. Whitehead was referring to elaborately developed sperm whale groupings, which he called “multicultural societies.” Within these societies, whales communicate in dialects and share behaviors distinct from other whales who live nearby.
Each sperm whale society is made up of tight-knit family units of “nursery schools” that contain from ten to thirty mature females and their male and female offspring. Calves are raised not just by their mothers but by an entire matriarchal group of relatives, which includes aunts and grandmothers. Females stay in these families their whole lives, while males, called bulls, are taught at an early age to become more independent. By their teens, bulls join groups, or gangs, of other bulls and wander the ocean looking for food—and sometimes for trouble. Bulls will eventually strike out on their own to live bachelor lives in the Arctic and Antarctic Oceans, visiting the equator—“for summer vacation,” said Whitehead—every spring to mate and socialize for six months before returning to their solitary winter homes.
Sperm whale clicks, which are used for echolocation and communication, can be heard several hundred miles away, and possibly around the globe. Sperm whales are the loudest animals on Earth.
At their maximum level of 236 decibels, these clicks are louder than two thousand pounds of TNT exploding two hundred feet away from you, and much louder than the space shuttle taking off from two hundred and fifty feet away. They’re so loud that they cannot be heard in air, only in water, which is dense enough to propagate such powerful noises.
The noise level in air maxes out at 194 decibels. Any louder, and sound becomes distorted to the point that it turns from a sound wave into a pressure wave. The threshold of noise in water is 240 decibels; any louder, and the noise will almost literally boil the liquid into vapor in a process called cavitation. Sperm whale clicks could not only blow out human eardrums from hundreds of feet away, but, some scientists estimate, vibrate a human body to death.