Reality Czech - The Martin Stepanek Odyssey
Posted By Paul Kotik on 1 October 2001
September 12, 2001 - Life must go on. The day after. Focus on the here-and-now. By 9:00 AM the Performance Freediving team and crew were aboard the Divetech boat Ten Ata, cruising around the northwest tip of Grand Cayman and making for the planned dive site at the edge of the North Wall.
Kirk tinkered with the sled apparatus throughout the boat ride, verbalizing his thoughts and actions for the attentive team as he examined the winch, steel cable, drop line, releases, locks, latches and other paraphernalia.
Instructor and Team Canada member Calista Johnson was at the helm and would be providing deep scuba support at the dive site. As we approached the mooring on the edge of the wall, Cali and Kirk noted the southeast wind and quickly calculated how much line to pay out to the mooring buoy after hooking up. It worked out perfectly. The light breeze held Ten Ata taut on the line, 500 feet beyond the edge of the Wall. The depth, for all practical purposes, was infinite. There was no discernible current at the surface or, we noted after dropping the sled's base plate, at depth.
Mandy's first sled dive was only to 30 meters (100 feet), just a little baby step to test the apparatus and re-acquaint her with no-limits diving. Mandy simply does not have the means to train no-limits at home in Vancouver, but nonetheless here she was, with one previous sled experience under her belt, a credible threat to the womens' world record.
Martin's free immersion target dive did not work out very well. He surfaced early, having aborted at a shallow 60 meters/ 197 feet. Back on the boat, he took us all by surprise when he announced he had turned around because he could not equalize one of his ears. Mandy chimed in with a complaint that hers had felt sticky as well.
This was bad news, for these two divers are notable for their no-hands style of freediving. Martin's ears had always equalized without his conscious intervention - the concept of pinching one's nose shut by hand was unknown to him when he'd attended the PFD clinic a year earlier. Something was very wrong. Mandy, though she generally did have to consciously equalize, generally did so without pinching her nose. Now she reported having to keep her hand involved all the way down to the bottom of her dive.
"Maybe you both got dehydrated on the plane and got your Eustachian tubes all sticky." Kirk suggested, "Probably be back to normal by tomorrow."
Martin was less sanguine.
"This is really no good if I have to pinch my nose", he grumbled. " I don't see how you people do it. I don't think I would enjoy freediving if I had to pinch my nose to equalize. What a bother !"
Kirk, always the trainer, always the leader, had coaxed them both back to the optimistic side of the boat by the time we docked. Tomorrow, he reminded us, would be another day.
September 13, 2001 - Everybody watched TV news until late the night before. The Cayman cable - TV monopoly arbitrarily and randomly switches the only news channel between various foreign feeds. CNN mysteriously morphs to the BBC, and then to a Caymanian government public service spot promoting .......what ? One sees, and hears, but does not understand.
An early morning rendezvous at Divetech, then back aboard Ten Ata and across North Sound to the edge of the Wall. Deploying the sled is a considerable athletic achievement in its own right, as manipulating the 100- kilo base weight and cabling carries certain very physical penalties for error. Everything was soon in place, thanks to the experience and precision teamwork of Kirk and the Divetech crew. It was a beautiful, sunny Caribbean day. The deep safety diver, Team Canada member Tara Cunningham, shrugged into her twin 80's and descended to the base weight at 100 meters. Conditions were perfect for deep freediving.
No. The mysterious, unwelcome demon made another appearance, and both contenders' ears were boxed. Wedged. Mandy couldn't equalize on her first warm-up dive and sidelined hereself for the day. Martin aborted after trying to muscle his way down past the pain, and thought he had ruptured an eardrum. No bubbles when we did a pressure test with some distilled water in the ear, but his day was over, too.
September 14 , 2001 - Kirk made appointments for Martin and Mandy with Cayman's wonderful Dr. Glatz, the eminent ENT specialist in the aquatic and aviation communities and a great supporter of Grand Cayman freediving . To everyone's relief, both divers checked out with nothing fundamentally awry, " Just a great deal of gunk in there", pronounced the good Doctor. " Probably y'all got dehydrated on your way down here, flying and then diving all afternoon." The prescription was for water, water and then more water, plus a little pill for poor Mandy. Never mind. The rest of the day went for personal and project overhead, rest and, inevitably, more television news.
News reaching us by telephone from the outside world was not so good, either. The aftermath of the 9/11 attacks had reached out and touched our project. We knew that all flights in and out of Grand Cayman had been cancelled until further notice, and it was now becoming clear that the cancellation wave was rippling throughout the world aviation system and into the indefinite future. The AIDA judges scheduled to observe and certify the record dives would not be able to fly into Grand Cayman. No judges, no records. No good.
Victory at Sea
That afternoon Kirk, Martin, Mandy and I sat for a while in an internet cafe on Seven Mile Beach, sipping decaf and catching up on e-mail and news.
Dirty old man that I am, my roving eye was caught by a group of winsome twenty-somethings frappolating around the next table. One of the girls was trying to talk the others into taking a freediving lesson at Divetech ! As social opportunities go, this seemed like shooting fish in a barrel, so I nudged Martin, who instantly caught on and alerted Kirk by way of a kick to his ankle. Mandy, noticing the sudden reconfiguration of her three gentleman companions into a slathering wolfpack, turned to see what it was our targeting radar had locked on to. And so it was, our little tableau, just as the nearby freediving enthusiast assured her friends that " ....the world record was set by an American girl, Mehgan. Right here. It was on TV. People keep trying to break her record, but nobody can do it, not even guys !" On and on she went, Mehgan this and Mehgan that, a nonsensical patois of exaggerated depths, wrong locations, incorrect dates and mangled terminology. Kirk, Mandy and Martin are, of course, freedivers who exceed Mehgan Heany-Grier's old record by way of warming up before breakfast. They were getting roiled. "Let's go" I suggested, and so we did. In the car, Kirk saw the light: "Media. Publicity. Sponsorhip. Media, publicity, sponsorship......."
"Yes, those things we don't have" Martin grumbled. "Add money to list!"
September 15, 2001 - Up early, back on the boat, out to the Wall. The sled deployment went smoothly, the safety tech diver dropped on schedule, and the freedivers hit their target depths with no problems. A textbook session. The Performance Freediving Team was back in the Zone.
Stopped at the Cobalt Coast resort on the way home to discharge a favor to our Divetech hosts. As the sun set over the Caribbean, Kirk and Martin delivered a coaching session on static apnea to an assembly of World Cup competitors from the Canadian, Dutch and Caymanian teams.
Ibiza was at this point less than a month away, and Kirk's revelation was that at this late stage competitors should have stopped doing the traditional static apnea tables and begun training the event itself.
"There's not much you can do in a few weeks to improve your carbon dioxide or hypoxic tolerance", Kirk pointed out. " Block out a 45-minute window, do a couple of warm-ups and then go for it, just like it will be in Ibiza". An hour or so later a bunch of pretty happy competitors were sitting in the hot tub, with a couple of new personal bests to celebrate. It worked.
Kirk spent the evening working on solutions to the judging problem, which still threatened to derail the record attempts. E-mails and phone calls arced over the wires to AIDA headquarters in Switzerland and from there out across the planet to the Board members. It was terribly frustrating, having overcome poverty and disease, only to face this final snafu. No AIDA judges, no AIDA records.
Flights out of Grand Cayman had resumed, and my wife insisted, reasonably, that I fly back to Miami the next day in the afternoon. There was, after all, a war on.
September 24, 2001 - Miami International Airport. I waited behind the plexiglass panes at International Arrivals, and had no trouble spotting the Performance Freediving Team as they came through passport control. The airport was a ghost town, the air transport system still reeling from the September 11 attacks.
Kirk and Mandy had a couple of hours before their connections to Vancouver, so we went up to the 8th floor lounge of the airport hotel and persuaded the bartender to let us run some video through the bar TV. We were the only customers, so the staff, Cubans, joined us as soon as they realized the subject was freediving.
And there we sat, nibbling finger food in an empty airport, the dogs of war loose outside, and watched a video replay of a positive alteration in our world. The barman and his colleagues whooped and whistled, Kirk fiddled with the camcorder, and we saw that on September 23, 2001, in the waters off Grand Cayman, the Performance Freediving Team once again had changed our concept of human aquatic capability.
The AIDA board, after trans-continental phone consultations, had responded to wartime contingencies by authorizing two Cayman residents to judge the record attempts: Dr. Robert Glatz, veteran diver and aviation physician, and Nienke Reigenhardt, a World Cup competitor on the Dutch women's freediving team .
Mandy-Rae rode the sled down to 139 meters, taking with her three styrofoam coffee cups which were squeezed down to thimble size by the pressure. She became the deepest woman in the world.
And Martin Stepanek completed this phase of his journey. An improbable dream that began behind the Iron Curtain in the waning days of the Cold War became reality after winding through monofin competitions in Prague, 18-hour shifts in a Key West restaurant kitchen, self-taught mastery of English, a commercial diving school in New Jersey, empty pockets and a rat-infested trailer park in Fort Lauderdale. Martin's 90-meter free immersion dive had shattered the previous record by a stunning 10 meters and established him as a contender for the top spot in world competitive freediving.
"What next ?" I asked after we saw Kirk and Mandy off and merged into the Miami traffic.
"All the records in all the disciplines!", deadpanned the Terminator.
"No," I laughed. " I mean today !"
"Sushi" was Martin's reply. "Lots and lots of sushi".
"Back to reality !" I agreed. " Tokyo Bowl, all-you-can-eat, $12.95 ?"
"It is good to have pants ", said the World Champion. "You can go anywhere."
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