Freediving Turned Me Into a Wussy
Posted By Paul Kotik on 26 November 2001
I once was so cool that my teenage childrens' friends used to stop by the house to hang out even when they knew my kids weren't home.
A lifetime of R&D ( Recreation & Downtime) , financed by neglect of career and fueled by trivial pursuits, had yielded a lifestyle and a persona that most middle-aged men ( and their benighted women) can only dream of.
Everything was in perfect balance.
The beer, which I brewed to my own specifications, was no sooner guzzled than burnt in a 10K trail run. Granola breakfasts enveloped, infiltrated and finally escorted the previous evening's midnight prime rib to the fate that awaits all repasts. Coffee ? Maui Organic, Ono Farms, please, $35 the pound by monthly air freight from the Valley Isle itself. Ono Farms apparently deals with pests by spraying the beans with the caffeine extracted from your de-caf blends. Cigar ? Yes, thank you, Cuban please. My guitars were Fender, and my volume, bass, treble, gain, and reverb at maximum. I lay down just before dawn and rose in the afternoon.
Life was a frat boy's game plan on grown-up paycheck.
Diving was always part of it. Let's not mince words. This is gonzo diving we're talking about, no instruction, no theory, none of those cute plastic insurance cards.
Childhood scuba spearfishing in the early '60's was the entry point to blue water. Certification consisted of forking over a good old American greenback to a very, very authentic Antillean gentleman who taught diving as a search-and-destroy mission. We searched for big critters and killed them.
I'd seen Sea Hunt, and asked him one day whether he'd ever had The Bends.
" Wha dot ?" he queried. I explained, that is, I recited Lloyd Bridge's lines from a recent episode, and Amador listened attentively. " So yo tink dos wha I got dose hurts in me joints all da time whot I dive all day ?" He was the water sports director, so to speak, at the Curacao resort where my family spent a month that winter.
Breath-hold diving was the happening thing when the under-the-counter scuba market dried up. I'd been doing it since toddler days, scaring the shoes off parents and guardians at beaches and pools.
The big breakthrough, equalizing the ears, came as a gift from a middle-aged retired stockbroker I met during a family vacation on the (then undeveloped) south shore of Puerto Rico. I think I was about 14 years old, and this Charlie took my Dad and I out to the edge of the reef. In retrospect, this guy was a pretty good freediver. He lived there, near the town of Guanica, and was really happy to have enthusiastic company on his boat, inept though Dad and I surely were.
Dad was content to snorkel around above the reef, but I was tuned in to Charlie's drops down the outside wall, into what seemed like a bottomless void. I tried to follow him, but was held back by the strange pressure and then pain in my ears and head.
Charlie noticed the blood in my mask and signalled us back into the boat. I guess I was lucky - it must have been a sinus that went before an eardrum popped.
Charlie revealed his method of pushing the mask skirt up to block the nostrils and performing what I later learned is the Valsalva technique. The cat was out of the bag. Having been let in on the trick, I was soon back in the water and getting some serious depth. How deep ? Couldn't say - I never used a depth gauge until late last year !
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