This week I became a freediver.
When I was a kid, we had a pool. All summer long, I was the
first one in and the last one out. I didn’t hang out by the pool to get a tan.
I spent my time in the water because it was the best place that I could imagine
being. I did not like surface swimming. I thought it was the most boring thing
a person could do, so I spent my days underwater. I would do laps on the bottom
of the pool, fetch objects and simply hang out in the deep end to see how long
I could hold my breath. One of my favorite things to do was let out all of my
air so that I would sink to the bottom where I would sit and enjoy the silence,
looking to the surface, knowing that in a moment I would have to go back up.
I forgot about the pool. I moved to Vancouver and focused on other things;
acting, university, relationship. One day I was watching the news and I saw Mandy-Rae Cruickshank freediving in Horseshoe Bay, just outside of the city. I watched
her take a single breath and swim down to some unbelievable depth and come back
up on her own power. It was dark, where she had gone. Unlike the pool I
grew up in, where I was surrounded by blue vinyl walls and was never more than
eight feet from the surface, the ocean was dark and kinda scary. And so I
thought, maybe I could hold my breath
and try that, but it’s too dark and cold and unknown for me to even try. It
didn’t look like fun. I forgot about freediving.
Then last year one of the most amazing things in my life
occurred. For my birthday, Morgaine
gave me scuba diving lessons. She knew I loved the water but had been ignoring
it for years. We started our scuba lessons in the pool, and I felt happy and
comfortable and simply thrilled to be underwater and be breathing. By the time we got to the ocean, I felt completely safe
and excited to be going down into the mysterious darkness. And there we saw the
most wonderful things; sea cucumbers, feather stars, giant lingcod, crabs, a
mud shark… Those first few dives in the ocean changed me in ways I can never
explain. And I was no longer afraid of the dark mystery of the ocean.
Because of all of the time I spent in the pool, I’ve always
been able to hold my breath quite easily. I could go two minutes without any
effort, which never really seemed like a particularly useful skill. Then one
day Morgaine brought up freediving. She saw that my absolute comfort in the
water, my excitement over what lay below and my ability to hold my breath all
pointed to this incredible sport. My attachment to the water suddenly seemed to
have direction. And so I signed up for a four day clinic with Performance Freediving.
This week I spent four days learning the necessary skills to
enable me to hold my breath and swim down to depth. We started our ocean dives
by pulling ourselves down a rope and pulling back up. In this way we could ease
ourselves into the exceptionally clear ocean and grow accustomed to the new
sensations of pressure on our bodies and lungs. There is a kind of stillness
down there that I have never experienced before. Even with all of the physical
and mental struggle of getting the technique right, I felt completely safe and
at ease. If I could have stayed down longer or gone down deeper I would have,
but one breath can only be held for so long. By the end of the four days, I was
able to swim down to 25 meters (82 feet) on a single lungful of air. The
pressure at that depth squeezed my chest and left me with lungs so small that I
would be unable to get enough air to equalize my ears if I went any deeper. I
know that with practice I will go deeper, where it’s darker and quieter. And
when I get there I will look up it won’t be like the pool; I will no longer be
able to see the surface, but I will not be scared because I will know it is
there when I need to take another breath.
Thanks to Kirk, Tom, Mandy-Rae, and everyone else at Performance Freediving.
And a huge thank you to Morgaine for your incredible love, support
and encouragement. Thank you doesn't even begin to cover it.
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