A Mermaid Sidebar
Posted By Paul Kotik on 3 October 2005
I've followed Sam Kirby's and Saltfree's project with great interest, and not just because it's all girls all the time. As I've said before, I think a lot about the tiny footprint our sport has made on this vast planet, and what extraordinary results we've achieved even with the tiny platoon of divers we've managed to attract in various and random ways. But who knows what talents lay out there in the vast seas of humanity, untapped, and still oblivious to our little world of blue lips and deep dips ? Sam and Saltfree are, in my view, doing a revolutionary thing. They are executing the first systematic effort to explore the human shoals for new, heretofore unknown deposits of freediving potential.
The outcome of the Salt Free Mermaid project is still undecided, and it must be understood by anyone who decides to read beyond the end of this sentence that the siren song that follows is in no way a hint, clue, indicator, adumbrage, prediction, or wink-and-nod in respect of that decision.
Can you spot the Surfer among the Mermaids ?
Kirsty, whose monologue follows, is but one of the mermaids on the short list of potential victors. It is her voice that is sounded here because she offered it up, and because of all the candidate mermaids, Kirsty is the only one who had no diving background at all. She's a surfer. Full disclosure: your Editor has a prejudice in favor of surfers, as he believes they are a close phylogenetic cousin of his own genus, the windsurfer. That aside, the observations of someone entirely new to the concept of intentionally submersing one's body in water would seem to offer the greatest potential for an innocent, unbiased reflection of ourselves - how we look to the rest of the world.
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