Freediving Turned Me Into A Wussy
Posted By Paul Kotik on 19 September 2005
Charlie also taught me the useful technique of inverting the cellophane wrapper on my pack of Camel cigarettes to keep 'em dry at sea.
The years rolled by, as did my motorcycles, business ventures, girlfriends, rocking, rolling, soldiering, sailing, studying, drinking, smoking, skiing, fishing, building, bashing and ..... you understand. A typical American Life.
Scuba diving fell by the wayside. Too much like high school ! Books, lectures, tests, diplomas, and permits seemed to me altogether unsuited to the manly pursuit of the sporting life. Besides, by the late 1980's scuba had become so mainstream your Aunt Tillie was doing it, and the studliness index asymptotically approached zero.
The last really neat apnea diving session before marriage and children beached me was in the ruins of Caesarea, the Roman Empire's version of Las Vegas on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. The sea was rough and the visibility none too good, but there was all kinds of interesting and very old stuff to see. That was in 1977.
The 1980's and 1990's were pretty wild and crazy. The object of the game, as far as I could tell, was to work harder, play harder, and sleep less than anybody else. Life was good ! Kids were happy, business was booming, Bordeaux had an unprecedented series of Vintages of the Century and I discovered windsurfing.
Windsurfing.
The enthusiast quickly moves beyond his casual initiation, that seductive, come-hither glide on a glassy lake, or bay, in the gentlest breeze. The learning curve quickly steepens and takes one through smaller and smaller boards, higher and higher winds and then hair-raising swell and chop. Apnea diving became something I did when a giant Maui devil-wave knocked me upside the head and squashed me down on the reef for what's left of a lifetime. Or, when sweet reason governed the affairs of man, a wholesome way to pass the time waiting for the wind to come up.
The windsurfing lifestyle suited me pretty well, too, including as it did lots of high-energy junk food, coffee, and copious apres- sail libations.
Then, at some point during the Age of Lewinsky, my next-door neighbor brought over a rental video called The Big Blue. I'd never heard of it. I agreed to watch it to be polite.
Well, imagine my surprise. Turned out this breath-hold diving thing had really caught on since I'd last looked in on it oh, 20 years earlier. Fantastic !
Competitions, strange gizmos like this sled thing - I had to know more.
Gizmos having permeated every aspect of life in the meanwhile, I went to the World Wide Web and gassed up my favorite search engine.
This led me to Divetech, a business on Grand Cayman whose website painted a credible picture of a rational, normalized approach to teaching what I was led to understand was now called "freediving". Freediving. I liked the sound of that.
Windsurfing, far from being free, had become a financial black hole.
I took the IANTD Master Free Diver course at Divetech in August, 2000. I arrived with a bit of an attitude (".. you hold your breath, you clear your ears, you go down, sideways and then up - where's the rocket science in that, eh?" ) but was quickly and properly adjusted by my instructors, Dan Hodgins and Tara Cunningham.
By the end of the first day I understood that whatever my abilities and experience were, to that day I'd been doing essentially everything wrong and was, in fact, lucky to have survived.
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