Freediving Reloaded: Getting My Feet Wet
Posted By Paul Kotik on 23 May 2005
All righty. I’ve screened the director’s cut of The Big Blue ( seemed strangely familiar…) and read back issues, so to speak, of Deeper Blue. I found an old copy of the American weekly Sports Illustrated detailing the dark side, the existential risks inherent in freediving, gazed longingly at the photos in Jacques Mayol’s fantastic coffee table book, read Pipin’s, and seen an IMAX spectacular titled Ocean Men. A friend of mine showed me the hilarious and instructive DVD memorializing his participation in a freediving course given by a Canadian guy with the unlikely name of Kirk Krack.
My mind was made up: I want to be a freediver, too. But can I ? Seems like it ought to be possible. The people in the Krack clinic video were not all supermen, some seemed like regular people, happy couch potatoes like me. Still, there is this lingering suspicion (fear ? ) that they all know something I don’t. Could it really be as easy as they made it seem in the viddies ?
I know from my internet research that I’m supposed to get proper training and have a buddy before I try anything, even in a shallow pool, because otherwise I might die. To be perfectly candid, that seemed a little overblown. Probably they say that to sell diving lessons and books and stuff. I mean, where’s the rocket science ? If I feel like I can’t hold my breath much longer, I just rocket up topside and take a nice deep breath, for Heaven’s sake. I’m a graduate of one of America’s finest universities – in fact, two of them, if you don’t mind – and I think I know which way is up.
At night, my sleep was troubled by strange dreams. In one, I’m actually in the water, freediving ! It feels great. Comfortable, fluid, joyous. . . free. Just as I imagined it would be. I’m in perfectly clear water, an idealized ocean by an island whose shores drop steeply into an abyss so deep it is black. I’m with a woman, who I seem to know well, and two men whose way of speaking is very strange. Only in a dream – it sounds like English, and I feel like I ought to understand it, but mostly cannot. I have the sense that I am there to help the woman teach these men about freediving. Then, all of a sudden, I am in an office somewhere else entirely, reading an e-mail telling me that one of these guys has drowned, freediving, on the other side of the world. I awake shaking, in a cold sweat.
Just a dream.
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