The Last Attempt
Posted By Chris Engelbrecht on 16 March 2007
Poor Audrey.
I finished reading Carlos Serra's The Last Attempt, closed the book and began looking through old E-mails. On October 13th, 2002 at 2:55am GMT, I'd received a message from someone apparently a resident of the Dominican Republic. He'd seen something horrible on a local TV station and had written about it to one of the many lists I then subscribed to. Lists which were, at the time, mainline communication channels for the freediving community. This message just happened to be the first one I got the news from. Others followed quickly, echoing the horrible developments.
There had been a freediving accident at Bayahibe the day before. During an attempt to break the absolute world record in the no-limits discipline, celebrated freediver Audrey Mestre, wife of another freediving icon, Francisco 'Pipin' Ferreras, had lost her life.
Everyone in the global apnea community was in shock. Everyone immediately went looking for answers to a million questions. The email lists were absolute chaos. At first, nobody could tell anything specific about what had gone wrong. Everything was speculation. The best sources were Spanish-language media, but these weren't accesible to much of the largely English-speaking world of freediving. After a number of days news finally started to trickle out from the event organizers, the now-defunct IAFD (International Association of FreeDivers). One voice in particular stood in the line of fire, that of the IAFD President, Venezuelan-born Carlos Serra. He stood shoulder to shoulder with a grieving Pipin and asked for time to figure out what had gone wrong.
It was too late. Rage had taken over in much of the apnea nation. Serra's public statements, and some peculiar ones by Pipin, seemed vague and inadequate at best. Voices in the community decried them as lies and cover-up. The public controversy became gruesome.
Time passed. New information became public from time to time, picked up by a shrinking audience of the interested. The matter of the empty pony bottle on Audrey's sled came up. The sled video recording appeared in a couple of documentaries. IAFD, its credibility exhausted, closed down for good. Rumors of Hollywood producer James Cameron's interest in optioning the story were floated.
Pipin published a book about his wife's death. And now, Carlos Serra has published his own.
As I read, I was full of grief. I never met Audrey Mestre personally, but when she died it was like I'd lost a close family member. A fellow freediver had been taken from this planet, and I suffered.
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