Teaching Your Sweetie To Freedive
Posted By Peter Scott on 20 August 2007
Editor's Note: This classic Peter Scott tutorial is a rerun, a timely reminder for our readers who may be tempted as the summer winds down to introduce significant others to the apnea thing. If, with this republication, we can save just one relationship, it will have been worth it.
It is never good to meddle in the love lives of one’s readers. They tend to take it personally. However, in this case, I hope you will thank me in the end.
I'’m no Dr. Ruth (keep your underwater sex fantasies to yourself), but I can give you some sound advice for a healthy relationship in and out of the water: do not attempt to teach your better half how to freedive unless you have a good plan.
Empathy is the mark of a good therapist, but more important are detachment and objectivity. Your particular disease is twisting your judgement. A haunting vision of What Could Be shimmers before you, beckoning with its promises of guilt-free weekends in the ocean and carte blanche from your lover to buy all the carbon and Heiwa and Cayman Island vacations you want, damn the mortgage! You dare to dream that one day your soul mate will say with passion brimming in his or her eyes, "“Honey, couldn'’t we go freediving instead of dinner with the Hamptons?”"
You have to start with a lesson. You should start planning weeks, even months ahead. Test your teaching with your friends and acquaintances first. Tell them it'’s all for love.
If you underestimated the challenge of teaching your sweetie and fail to prepare adequately for this most tricky of couplehood moments, your relationship will enter a Twilight Zone of warped interpersonal communication. Your clearest instructions and your most patient encouragement will be heard as deliberate criticism. It happens all the time on the ski slopes, in the car, on the mountain, in the forest - innocent couples struggling with the alien dynamic of teacher and student. Marriages unravel here. Summer loves disintegrate in a puff of wind.
For any other sport there is an easy solution: hire a qualified instructor to teach that first lesson. The relationship between an instructor and student is wonderfully simple: —if the student doesn’t like the instructor, he or she can select a new one with no hard feelings (on the other hand, try to make your husband or wife redundant).
Unfortunately for most of us, good freediving instruction is expensive and hard to find. And at this point, it might be overkill. If, after the first day in the water, your true love wants to know more, then you can start thinking about a trip for two to Apnea Academy or Performance Freediving. But first you have to tempt with a sweet taste of what the sport can offer. Sip the wine before you buy the vineyard.
Still, without a plan, you are destined to fail. Let us turn to the sport of windsurfing for edification. Windsurfing was born in the early 1960s and it wasn’t until the year 2000 that a pure beginner could learn to windsurf in a single day and have fun at the same time. A windsurfing beach used to be a good opportunity to watch marriages and relationships collapse. Typically, men would abandon their girlfriends to the struggle, while they sailed off for hours, returning finally when the wind died to ask, “"You sailin’' yet, honey?”" I’ve seen the carnage with my own eyes.
More recently, an evolution of equipment has yielded a wide board that is easy to stand on and a sail that is easier to handle. Instruction has been whittled down to the bare necessities and all the basic skills can be learned on land before going out on the water. Beaches everywhere are no longer the war zones they once were and windsurfing is ready for the masses. But it took the boardheads almost forty years to figure out how to make it so.
As freedivers, we cannot afford to wait that long. Thus, have I been forced to take matters into my own hands.
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