Freediving

There is a certain point when I'm fairly sure I forgot I was living in a tropical paradise. The morning runs on the beach had petered out, and I was getting home from work past sunset daily. Even the weekends were slogging along.

It takes a certain amount of determination after a long week of work to get out of bed and explore. It's not a lack of desire, but a lack of determination. Too many hours had already been wasted aimlessly "exploring," but never exploring the right areas or finding the small moments of flavor and interest -- their was a blandness, probably more due my perspective then my surroundings.

For the dive column I arranged a meeting with Sarah and Richard from We Freedive. They took me to a small beach that I hadn't been to before, a little off the beaten track.

We drive through the hotel parking lot near Nai Harn Beach and then it opens back up into a public road. A thin, snaking road making its way up through long warm-brown grass. Suddenly, it doesn't feel like Thailand, it feels more like you are looking out onto the Mediterranean ocean from the Tuscany countryside.

Down the hill and you are on the little beach, which has a coral reef full of life just a stone throw away.

Now on the weekends, I go by myself (breaking the first rule of freediving) and I play. I wouldn't say I train, but I take a breath and spend sometime underwater exploring. Here is a link to the published dive story (that ended up going nation wide): http://www.phuketgazette.net/archives/phuketsports/2012/article12221.html

(A couple inaccuracies have been brought to my attention post-publication: It's AIDA not AIDEA; it's called  "static apnea" not "breath hold," which is what the comp. blog said; lastly "No Limit" and "Variable Weight" are not part of competitive freediving!) (Yikes that was a lot.)

The following is the full length story. To fit on page, it's necessary to hack these stories apart. A newspapers page, well at least our pages, are more about presentation than content. So we make sacrifices, but while I was slashing 200+ words from the 700 word original I realized that in the editing process, when you are forced to make it fit, the ego of the writer can be dropped from the story. The squirrelly little phrases that drew the reader away from the story and towards your "cleverness" or your "keen wit" are the first to go in a good edit. They simply aren't as important as the essence of the story.

FREEDIVING. It’s different than scuba diving. There is a quietness underwater. Not a silence, but a quietness. There is the sound of shifting sand and parrot fish chewing on coral. These are the sounds of life that don’t exist for scuba divers, as they bubble away on their regulators. It was one of the beauties of diving on a single breath.

Freediving is about calmness, not necessarily lung capacity. You slow your heart rate down, you stay streamlined and you take one breath, and never let it go – no blowing bubbles all the way up. You hold it in, because despite the rising carbon-dioxide levels setting off alarms in your head, the air in your lungs still has plenty of oxygen to keep you running, to keep you from blacking out.

“People, especially scuba divers, think that freediving is really risky, but it’s not. The stuff that is really risky is the breathing – and since we don’t do that, we don’t have those problems. There is one basic rule: always free dive with a buddy,” says Richard Wonka from We Freedive.

“It would be hard work to get yourself in a position that you could black out, and if you have a buddy not even that would be a big problem,” he adds.

Richard runs We Freedive, an AIDEA certifying freediving school, along with Sarah Whitcher.

He was a member of the German national team at the freediving world championships in 2008. Before that he had trained in Dahab, Egypt – famous for its freediving location, the Blue Hole. While in Dahab, Richard met Sarah who had moved to there to work as a freedive instructor. Together they opened We Freedive, which recently relocated to Phuket.

Freediving is a multifaceted discipline, like almost every other sport. It is composed of eight different fields: no limit, variable weight, constant weight, constant weight without fins, free immersion, dynamic with fins, dynamic without fins and static apnea.

On one of the lesser-known beaches of Phuket just north of Nai Harn, Sarah talks me and my freedive buddy, who’s just as green as I am about the sport, through some light stretches, some“belly breathing” and then with nothing put fins, snorkel and a mask we kick out into the water.

The equipment, or the lack of it, is another draw for the sport. I’ve been scuba diving for years and I have grown used to the awkward five minutes of clunking around a dive boat in my BCD and flippers, like some over-zealous off-balance turtle, but there is none of that. The sport is beautiful in its simplicity. It’s what Richard calls “Snorkeling 2.0”.

“People learn to freedive during our three-day course – and that’s when they surprise themselves,” Sarah says.

At the end of the certifying course, most people, though maybe not as fluid as seals underwater, are at least very comfortable and can make a two or three-minute dive covering about 50 meters.

“The numbers aren’t that important. The courses aren’t so much about covering a certain distance or staying underwater for a certain time, but are about learning how to dive well, about being relaxed and streamlined underwater,” Sarah says.

“Once you learn those things, the times and numbers just happen. They are a byproduct of good diving,” she adds.

Laying face down on the surface of the water, I calmly breathe, trying to slow my heart rate. The slower the heart rate, the less oxygen you burn, the longer you can stay underwater and explore.

A deep breath in and I duck dive and follow the rope that Sarah set up. Halfway down, equalizing constantly, I suddenly realize that I am looking at the bottom, which is a no-no.

“It takes twice as long to get there if you’re watching,” says Richard. Not only does it just seem to take forever to get to the bottom – even just 10 meters – but your head position when you are looking at the bottom is less streamlined. I correct my head position and suddenly I am at the bottom.

Floating just above the reef, there is a moment of meditative calmness. I watch a pair of butterfly fish flutter past, totally unfazed by my silent presence.

Calmly I put one hand on the rope and slowly start to let myself rise. Calmly down, calmly up – easy does it seems to be the name of the game.

“Once you’ve understood. Once you’ve done your freedives and been underwater for an extended amount of time, and you came up fine – that experience will never leave you. You won’t get nervous underwater with only a breath,” says Richard.