Reality Czech - The Martin Stepanek Odyssey
Posted By Paul Kotik on 1 October 2001
Fat Guy Meets the Terminator
My wife refused to get out of the car, and I heard the clunk of the power door locks as I cautiously stepped away from the vehicle, through the gap in the chicken wire and into the warrens of the infamous Wilton Manors trailer park. I made a mental note that the movie version of this should have my character getting flashbacks to combat foot patrols in that long-ago war a world away. The overgrown tropical flora, the shanties, and the smells - it was definitely Third World. In Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Who knew ?
I'd come there to pick up the next freedive champion of the world.
I had met Martin Stepanek a few weeks earlier, and watched him set a new static apnea world record (8:06) under the tutelage of veteran waterman Doug Peterson. Doug, Martin and I were connected through the Performance Freediving alumni network, and I'd volunteered to help prepare Martin for an assault on Pierre Frolla's free immersion world record of 80 meters /262 feet. Doug and Martin had planned a rigorous open water training schedule off the South Florida coast, 4 days on, one day off. Doug had a perfectly serviceable 23-foot Dusky launch and an aquatic career dating from the Year One. Martin had the will and the physiological assets, and I had the time.
Nobody had any money.
What was missing was the financial wherewithal. Sponsors had not exactly lined up to finance an obscure nobody's dream of world conquest. Jay Riffe had faith and offered some of his new fins, and Martin's world record for static apnea brought Mormaii onboard with custom wetsuits and apparel. The gear was a great help, but we still had no money
This was to be bare-knuckles freediving: raw, rough and pure. No frills. No freebies, no perks and no walking-around money.
"No air conditioning" Doug whispered to me that first August morning as we prepped the Toy Chest. Martin looked like he had welded his mouth to the marina water fountain. " The guy is living in a trailer - a part of a trailer - in Lauderdale's worst slum. It gets up to 120 degrees in there during the day, not much less at night. His part of the trailer is so small he has to fold his cot up to make enough room to get dressed ."
"No clothes, no money" Martin replied when I threw out the idea of going for sushi after docking back at Pompano.
"I'm buying" I offered. Doug's eyes rolled up.
"I have no clothes." said Martin matter-of-factly " All I own is this T-shirt and this swimsuit. I cannot go to a restaurant like this".
"He's not kidding." Doug added.
And so I became fully appraised of the situation as of early August, 2001, with 6 weeks to go before the scheduled record attempt in Grand Cayman. The prospective world champion had no previous experience deep freediving, was living in a Viet Cong tiger cage, working 10-hour shifts as a commercial diver while training 4 hours a day, had almost no sponsorship, no budget and a support crew consisting of Doug Peterson and me. And no clothes. And no money.
"Oh yeah, fuel and time are a big problem, too" added Doug. " You know the mid-water and bottom currents around here. To get a straight drop line down to the depths Martin has to hit we've got to go 8 - 10 miles offshore into over 1,000 feet of water, and let the boat and rig drift in the Gulf Stream. We drift another 5 miles or so north with the current, so it's an even longer haul back. If there's any kind of seas running, you're looking at an hour each way."
At about a buck per mile, in the best case, for the Toy Chest's 250hp Johnson outboard.
"This is impossible !" I declared. "Get real ! No can do !"
Martin shrugged. " Depends on your point of view."
Doug laughed. " For Martin, this is normal. His whole life is a series of impossible obstacles. Think about it: it was only 12 years ago he and all the other Czechs were sitting under Soviet occupation and wondering if they'd ever see the light of day ! Since then he's made it to the States, learned English, qualified as a commercial diver and as a chef, and now blown all that off to go for world records in freediving !"
Doug was right. It was not hopeless, it was inspiring.
At home that night I asked my wife if Martin could come stay with us for the duration. I figured it would save him a few bucks on rent and provide him with an environment in which he could focus on rest and recovery rather than mere survival. She readily agreed.
So there we were, the next day, poor Gila locked in the car while I reconnoitered the trailer park for young Stepanek.
Following Martin's directions, I came upon a mound of plywood scraps, formica shards and assorted personal items attended to by a sweaty, toothless West Indian gentleman with a sledgehammer, lounging in the shade of a coconut palm.
"Hot day !" I called in greeting.
"Yep, it is surely that." he nodded, shouldering the sledgehammer and advancing on the pile of rubble. " Too damn hot fo' bustin' down this here damn trailer".
He rose, advanced and began pounding on the rubble, reducing it to smaller fractions.
I looked again at my map with increasing puzzlement, and again at the ongoing demolition project. Not good - according to the map, this was the location of Chateau Stepanek
"Here ! Here!"
I turned and saw a shirtless Martin calling from behind a ragged plywood fence, leaning around what seemed to be a rusty shipping container.
I looked back at the increasingly agitated activities of the one-man demolition crew, at the map in my hand, and again at Martin.
"No, no !" he called. "That is my neighbor's trailer. I live over here !"
I walked over to Martin's hooch.
"Nice digs". I pointed back at the man with the sledgehammer, now cursing as he attacked a section of composition board. " What's with your neighbor ? What happened to his trailer ?"
The Terminator shrugged. "Did not pay the rent. Landlord evicting him."
What could I say ? "There goes the neighborhood."
Facing Facts
With Martin Stepanek settled at long last into lodging acceptable under the Geneva Conventions, his open water training began in earnest.
Martin's free immersion record attempt was scheduled for mid-September on Grand Cayman, so Doug Peterson did the math and worked out an incremental training schedule that would get Martin down to his record depth before leaving for the event. Pretty straightforward : if you dive X meters deeper every day for Y days, you become a World Champion.
I was, I confess, a bit skeptical. Two middle -aged beachboys and a Euro trailer-park guy with zero competitive freediving experience are going to cobble together some hardware from Home Depot , splash around in the Gulf Stream for a few weeks, and come up with a world freediving record ?
Doug was pleased by my quick grasp of the situation. He laid out the good news for me as the Toy Chest ploughed through the Atlantic swells. He reminded me that Martin's world record breath-hold time of 8 minutes 6 seconds suggested extraordinary potential and cited Martin's commercial diving experience as a foundation for comfort at depth.
"Wanna hear the real kicker? A few weeks ago, I made up a simple, cheap, thin, 60m drop line for us to play with. Martin had never done free immersion in his life before the other weekend except for 'grabbing the rope' and pulling a few times. We went out Friday and with the wind and current and the small weight I had he went to the bottom. 55 meters on his first try! Saturday he also did 55m but didn't feel as good. Sunday, we had no wind and the line was absolutely straight down. He went to the bottom where I had added a boat anchor for more weight. The gauge read 61.7m so he probably did 62-63m. He was totally clean, not anywhere near his limit. I met him at 20 meters and he was perfect and happy as a clam! Hell, the current record is only 80 meters! This was only the third time in his life he ever did free immersion and only the second time ever with no fins on the 'cheat' with.."
Summer in South Florida waters means stupefying heat and humidity, invisible clouds of stinging sea lice, and thunderstorms. Team Stepanek launched each morning from the Hidden Harbor Marina in Pompano. We motored through the Intracoastal to the Hillsboro Inlet, where Doug scanned the horizon, reviewed his Internet radar data and chose a zone somewhere in the range of 10 miles offshore. The Toy Chest is a fast boat, and on good days we kept up nearly 30 knots on the way out, but often the seas were running high enough to keep us down to a bone-rattling 10 knots. Masssive thunderheads were usually in abundance in every direction, but Doug, a master yachtsman and a longtime familiar of this stretch of ocean, expertly threaded between the squalls and got us to the designated coordinates.
Martin would spend the ride out doing his stretching and breathing up forward.
Once in the zone, and with Doug satisfied that the configuration of wind, current, squalls and shipping traffic would yield up 50 minutes of undisturbed water time, we deployed the floats and drop line. The line was 100 meters long and weighted with 80 pounds of lead, a detail I appreciated in full only after the first day's session, when I noted the absence of a winch.
"No budget for that", Doug explained. "By the way, I've got a dicey back and Martin needs to save his energy. Lower that on down, would you ? Oh, and we'll need you to pull it up later, too."
Each of us should do what he does best. I had found my place.
The session plan was simple. Martin and a safety diver in the water, the other guy on the boat. We had at least 1,000 feet of water below the keel, so we usually got the clean vertical drop line which was our reason for going that far offshore. With both divers in the water, the boat man cast the dive rig loose and motored away to an orbit downwind of the divers.
The divers, Martin and his safety (Doug and I alternated days in this role), completed a series of negative pressure warm-up drops followed by Martin's warm-up free-immersion to somewhere in the 50-meter range. He then would roll onto his back, do a 7- minute ventilation, and dive the target depth specified by the plan.
Our first day out, Doug drew water duty while I stayed with the boat. The seas were up, and the run out to the Stream was smack into them at 12 knots . We deployed the rig, dropped the divers and on Doug's signal I cast the rig loose and pulled the Toy Chest away downwind.
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