Freedivers Quotes

Underwater I hear the water coming to my body, I hear the sunlight penetrating the water.

In a world of seven billion people, where every inch of land has been mapped, much of it developed, and too much of it destroyed, the sea remains the final unseen, untouched, and undiscovered wilderness, the planet’s last great frontier. There are no mobile phones down there, no e-mails, no tweeting, no twerking, no car keys to lose, no terrorist threats, no birthdays to forget, no penalties for late credit card payments, and no dog shit to step in before a job interview. All the stress, noise, and distractions of life are left at the surface. The ocean is the last truly quiet place on Earth.

We have the responsibility to care for the ocean as it cares for us

Human blood has a chemical composition startlingly similar to seawater. An infant will reflexively breaststroke when placed underwater and can comfortably hold his breath for about forty seconds, longer than many adults. We lose this ability only when we learn how to walk.

In a world of seven billion people, where every inch of land has been mapped, much of it developed, and too much of it destroyed, the sea remains the final unseen, untouched, and undiscovered wilderness, the planet’s last great frontier.

One of the hardest skills in freediving is to distinguish between instinct and fear.

What stops the lungs from expanding is the musculature around the ribs, chest, and back. Through stretching and breathing exercises, freedivers develop up to 75 percent more lung capacity than the average person.

At three hundred feet, we are profoundly changed. The pressure at these depths is nine times that of the surface. The organs collapse. The heart beats at a quarter of its normal rate, slower than the rate of a person in a coma. Senses disappear. The brain enters a dream state. At six hundred feet down, the ocean’s pressure—some eighteen times that of the surface—is too extreme for most human bodies to withstand. Few freedivers have ever attempted dives to this depth; fewer have survived. Where humans can’t go, other animals can. Sharks, which can dive below six hundred and fifty feet, and much deeper, rely on senses beyond the ones we know. Among them is magnetoreception, an attunement to the magnetic pulses of the Earth’s molten core. Research suggests that humans have this ability and likely used it to navigate across the oceans and trackless deserts for thousands of years. Eight hundred feet down appears to be the absolute limit of the human body.

felt a sudden recognition, an instant and ineffable sense of knowing that I was in the presence of something extraordinarily powerful and intelligent.

Master Switch of Life,

When a man comes to the ocean, he exploits it and strips it,” she says. When a woman puts her hands in the ocean, that balance is restored. Manusanke explains that the ocean can always provide for humans if they gather from it in their natural forms. A person should take what he or she can carry, but no more. Otherwise, she says, eventually, there will be nothing left.

It’s a little bit of rock that reminds us where we came from,” said Russell. If it is true, the iron-sulfur world theory suggests that life not only could have started in hydrothermal vents but that it had to have started there.

It refers to a variety of physiological reflexes in the brain, lungs, and heart, among other organs, that are triggered the second we put our faces in water. The deeper we dive, the more pronounced the reflexes become, eventually spurring a physical transformation that protects our organs from imploding under the immense underwater pressure and turns us into efficient deep-sea-diving animals. Freedivers can anticipate these switches and exploit them to dive deeper and longer.

At the ocean’s surface, the sun’s energy penetrates easily through the water. Deeper down, that energy fades until, at depths of around three thousand feet, there is no light. Longer-wavelength colors, like red and orange, are easiest for water molecules to absorb, and so they drop out first. The color red becomes invisible to the human eye at around fifty feet down; yellows disappear at around a hundred and fifty feet; greens at two hundred feet, and so on, ultimately leaving only stronger, shorter-wave colors like blue and purple. The

Scientists have discovered that every cell in the human body also contains an electrical charge. Tibetan Buddhist monks who practice the Bön tradition of Tum-mo meditation have learned to focus these cellular charges to warm their bodies during bitterly cold winters. Researchers in England have discovered that by controlling the output of cellular charges in our bodies, humans can not only create heat but treat many chronic diseases.

Scuba divers can make it to three hundred feet breathing mixed gases, but it takes years of training and is a logistical nightmare. The danger isn’t going down—although that certainly is dangerous—it’s coming back up. For a scuba diver, a one-hour plunge at two hundred feet breathing regular compressed air would require a ten-hour ascent to purge the deadly levels of nitrogen gas in the blood that accumulate on the way down. A three-hundred-foot ascent on compressed air would most likely kill you.

Sperm whale clicks—which are used for echolocation and communication, and max out at 236 decibels—can be heard several hundred miles away, and possibly around the globe. Sperm whales are the loudest animals on Earth. In air, a 236-decibel sound would be louder than two thousand pounds of TNT exploding two hundred feet away from you, and much louder than a space shuttle taking off from two hundred fifty feet away. In fact, 236 decibels is so loud that a sound of that intensity cannot exist in air. Above 194 decibels, sound waves turn into pressure waves.

But what the Tibetans have long known and what Western science is now discovering is that aging doesn’t have to be a one-way path of decline. The internal organs are malleable, and we can change them at nearly any time. Freedivers know this better than anyone. I’d learned it from them years ago, when I met several people who had increased their lung capacity by an astounding 30 to 40 percent.

A series of interlocking islands and bridges, with wide white-sand beaches on the green Gulf of Mexico and placid marinas on Tampa Bay, St. Petersburg was a place of stucco and sunshine, East Coast attitude and tropical rain, cheap gas and imported food.

I continue to train. The depths still beckon me. On that dive in 2016, when I turned 102 metres down, although my eyes were closed I could feel the pull of untold volumes of water yet below me. What am I still chasing, one might ask, in that submerged realm? Shakespeare spoke of the lure of ‘unpathed waters, undreamed shores’. If George Mallory, who perished somewhere near the summit of Everest in 1924, had been a freediver, he would have justified himself with the words ‘because it’s everywhere’. My first teacher, Umberto Pelizzari, dived to ‘look inside’. These concepts have all rung true for me, too. As did the insight of the elderly Bahamian lady who was asked why she thought I dived, and replied: ‘He wants to see what he is.’ I don’t have to go deep — sometimes I dive just to be, as Mervyn Peake says, ‘at one with every swarm of lime-green fish, with every coloured sponge’. Long after my final record or my final competition dive, I will continue to frequent that ‘world of wavering light’ where it all began, for me and for life as we know it. I dive to go home.

Proper breathing supports the nervous system, the digestive system, the muscles and energy levels, memory and concentration and the ability to get a restful, restorative sleep.

Herbert Nitsch, a multiple world record holder, reportedly has a lung capacity of 14 liters—more than double that of the average male. Neither Nitsch nor any of the other freedivers started out like this; they made their lungs larger by force of will. They taught themselves how to breathe in ways that dramatically changed the internal organs of their bodies.

That day, after barely resurfacing from a seventy-two meter warm up dive into the Blue Hole, Mevoli went into cardiac arrest and died. This time, he wasn’t able to bring himself back. When asked to comment on the accident, Natalia Molchanova, regarded by many as the greatest freehold breath diver in the world, said, “the biggest problem with freedivers . . . [is] now they go too deep too fast.” Less than two years later, off the coast of Spain, Molchanova took a quick recreational dive of her own. She deliberately ran though her usual set of breathing exercises, attached a light weight to her belt to help her descend, and swam downward, alone. It was supposed to be a head-clearing reset. But, Molchanova didn’t come back either. And that’s the problem that free diving shares with many other state-shifting techniques: return too soon, and you’ll always wonder if you could have gone deeper. Go too far, and you might not make it back.