A Mermaid’s Tale

On England’s South coast, near Gosport in Hampshire, there is a rather ugly 10-storey tower block.  On the tenth floor there is a circular swimming pool that is 7 metres in diameter.  Fewer than a dozen swimmers are in the water.  They stop and look downwards through their goggles as one of their number swims to the surface.  As he swims upwards the water is filled with whale-song.

It’s December 2005.  The tower block is in HMS Dolphin, a British Navy establishment.  The “swimming pool” is the Submarine Escape Training Tank (SETT).  The bottom of the SETT is at ground level, 30 metres (100 feet) below the water surface on the tenth floor.  The SETT was built as a training facility for submariners, to teach them to escape safely to the surface from a submarine disabled underwater.  The swimmers are people learning to freedive and those who are teaching them.  The whale-song is the sound of air escaping from a freediver’s ears and sinuses as he ascends from pressures of almost 4 atmospheres at the bottom of the SETT to one atmosphere at the surface.

One Breath

Freediving, sometimes called breath-hold diving or apnea, is the art of swimming underwater while holding your breath.  One Breath: A Reflection on Freediving is Emma Farrell’s story about learning to freedive, competing internationally, and teaching.

At its simplest, freediving is simply drawing a breath, holding it, and descending below the surface of water.  It is the art of the pearl-fisher, the spearfisherman, or the holiday maker who dips below the surface while snorkelling.

Emma’s story begins on New Year’s Eve 2000 in the Canary Islands.

“…We met an Englishman in a bar who, shouting over the music, told us he was a freediver.  I pulled him outside into the rain, my eyes shining, and grilled him until I had a list of contacts in the UK.”

I always smile when I read that.  Emma is at least six feet tall, and I have some sympathy for the English freediver.  I’m grateful to him too, that he coughed up the contacts.

One Breath records Emma’s journey from that moment in Tenerife to becoming one of the most respected freedivers in an international community.  It is beautifully written, drawing on Emma’s experience as a film writer and director.  It is also brutally honest, charting struggles and difficulties that had to be overcome along the way.

“When you surface from a good dive you want more, and the happy memories warm you like the sun.  Surface from a bad dive and it stays with you, a cold wind to chill your confidence.  This dive would now haunt me like a shadow, casting shade on my soul, until I had the strength to go back down into the darkness and banish it.”

COMPETITIVE FREEDIVING

There is a competitive side to freediving too.  The disciplines include:

Static apnea – timed holding a single breath, with face underwater.

Dynamic apnea – swimming horizontally underwater holding a single breath.  There are speed and distance variants.

Depth disciplines – the depth to which a diver descends.  There are numerous versions of this discipline, from diving unassisted with constant weight to the “no limits” competition.

Freediving disciplines are described on the deeperblue website.  Current records are listed on Wikipedia.

One Breath describes competition in several disciplines.  Emma treats competitions as learning experiences.  She claims no international or national records, but she has the respect of people who have broken freediving records.  Her mastery of breathing techniques has enabled her to coach competitors in different sports towards gold medals in Olympic Games.

Understanding water

This book presents water as an environment that does not yield to force and determination.  Spending more than a few moments underwater, or descending to depths of more than a few feet, requires an understanding of the essence of water and our own physiology.  The book is an introduction to the breadth of that understanding.  It explores how our bodies can adapt to an underwater environment.  While the process of evolution optimises humans for life on land, we have a physical legacy from our aquatic past.

Teaching

We’ve reached Chapter 10 and Emma is teaching.

It’s as if Emma was destined to teach freediving.  At the age of 12 she was taught to breathe by a Buddhist Monk.  She is a qualified yoga instructor.  She has written and directed short films, so she understands how to present her lessons to best effect.  This can all be learned or inferred from her résumé.  The bit that’s missing from the résumé is Emma’s love of the comic and absurd.  Her infectious humour acts as a reset button when a student faces a personal impasse.  She takes her teaching very seriously.  Herself less so.

“Teaching brings me so much joy.  My own struggles can be turned into learning experiences for others and the memory of my own fears can be used to melt those of my students.”

We are back in the SETT and I’m lying on my back with my left hand resting just below my sternum, feeling my heartbeat.  The fingers of my right hand are splayed across my belly with my thumb resting in my navel.  After breathing continuously for over 50 years, I am learning how to breathe.  It’s the first of many “Ah-ha” moments on the course.  I’ve used what I learnt on that day every day since.  On a couple of occasions when allergic reactions have pushed me to the brink of anaphylactic shock, I’ve been able to hold back the panic by telling myself:
“It’s okay.  You’ve got this.  You know how to breathe.”

Overall impressions

One Breath is a beautiful book.  With just a couple of exceptions, the hundred-and-something photos were taken by Frédéric Buyle.  (The images here have been scanned from my copy of the book, and are not representative of the quality of Fred’s work.)  Fred is an underwater photographer from Belgium.  He freedives to take his photographs.  He uses minimal equipment and natural light.  Fred has held four freediving world records, and he is one of only a handful of people who have dived unaided to a depth of 100m on a single breath.

The endorsements for One Breath are impressive.

The Foreword is written by Tim Ecott.  Tim was a staff correspondent for the BBC World Service when he wrote Neutral Buoyancy: Adventures in a Liquid World.  Neutral Buoyancy was published in 2001.

On the back-cover, Tanya Streeter describes One Breath as “Written as elegantly as Emma herself is in the water…”.  On 17 August 2002, petite Tanya Streeter claimed the overall No Limits freediving record with a dive to a depth of 160m, the deepest ever freedive at the time.  Her record has been broken several times by male freedivers, but remains the record for a female.  Tanya Streeter retired from professional freediving in 2008.

One Breath is published by Pynto, ISBN 0 9542315 2 X.  Copies are available (signed by Emma) from GO freediving.

The last word

If you are still here, would you buy Emma, or me, a coffee?

Somewhere along the way Emma and I discovered that we share a birthday.  (We were born under a water sign, of course.)  Recently we’ve given each other donations to the same cause as birthday presents.

There is a sisterhood of mermaids, and one of them needs some help.  Mermaid Reese has been battling Leukaemia for more than five years.  She’s now in her early teens.  Reese lives in the US where there is no state-sponsored healthcare.
Linden is a professional Mermaid, Auntie Mermaid to Reese.  Linden champions fundraising to provide medical care for Reese, and to support Reese’s parents who provide full-time care.