The girl on the balcony in Koper is not one of them. Their exploits inspired the 1988 film The Big Blue, and with it, a Fourteen years later, his French rival Jacques Mayol made it to 100 meters using the same technique. And beyond that, doctor? One will be crushed.īut then in 1962, an Italian spear-fisherman named Enzo Maiorca, having overcome his own great fear of the sea, freedived to 51 meters using a weighted sled to speed his descent and an air balloon to help him resurface. More than 40 years later, a French Navy physiologist warned that a depth of 50 meters was the absolute limit to which a human could descend. On the seabed, 76 meters down, he located the anchor, secured it, and pulled himself up.įor decades, what Statti did seemed miraculous, perhaps even apocryphal. He tied a float to one end of a rope, and a stone to the other end, which he clutched in his arms as he dived. Diving for sponges had already cost the Greek his eardrums by the time an Italian navy ship lost its anchor near Crete in 1913. Who was first to go considerably deeper, no one can say for sure, but Haggi Statti is a reasonable guess. Ancient trash piles of shells found as far apart as the Far East and the Baltic Sea suggest our ancestors dived the ocean shallows for pearls and shellfish thousands of years ago. The average human might last 60 seconds.īut offer food or bounty or glory and we can go against our instincts. A sloth can manage up to 40 minutes underwater without coming up for air. We are land animals, and unless we are taught to swim while young, open water evokes primordial fears. Only a few dozen have freedived 100 meters under the ocean. Nearly 6,000 people have climbed Mount Everest. With a few flicks of her tail, the mermaid disappears. Then, gently, she rolls onto her stomach and duck dives, following the guide rope down. Eight little breaths, packing her lungs to their limits. The diver takes one long breath before noisily sipping air, like a fish reeled onto the sand. She has prepared for this not just for nine months but for all her life.įrom a platform floating nearby, a safety officer in a pink, wide-brimmed hat begins the countdown. Dived so deep, so often, she was too tired to even put the key in the lock of her apartment at the day’s end. Held her breath for so long, so many times - underwater, while walking, lying on her bed - that she imagined when her mouth finally opened again, she’d inhale the whole sky. The diver has trained for nine months for this moment. Where, if her oxygen runs too low on the ascent, she will black out and rely on the white-vested safety divers to pull her to the surface, call her name, and blow on her eyelids to stimulate breathing and keep her from drifting off further, toward death. Where her heart rate will slow to 30 beats a minute, and her arteries will constrict to stop blood supply to her legs and arms. In a place where the water’s weight will wrap her in a strong hug and shrink her lungs to the size of tennis balls. That same breath must also bring her back up out of the blackness, toward the spears of sunlight bursting through the turquoise water.įor 210 seconds, she will be suspended in the liminal zone between this life and the next. This is intentional: Thinking burns oxygen and the air in her lungs must take her down nearly 400 feet into Dean’s Blue Hole, where it is so dark that if her light fails she may as well be blindfolded. The diver’s face is blank, and so is her mind. Only a few people - all men - have dived deeper into the ocean than she has on just one breath. She is 39 years old and the best female freediver in the world. She wears a thin wetsuit, a tiny headlamp, and a carbon-fiber fin that resembles a mermaid’s tail on her feet. A diver floats on her back above a marine cavern with a travel pillow supporting her head.
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