Three minutes and twenty-one seconds.

I got home last night from Bimini. Sorry, no pictures. They were selling a CD with 1,200 pictures on it (every pic they took, without deleting the bad or blurred or redundant ones) and I cannot deal with that kind of nonsense.

It was a mixed experience. The previous week the ocean was "as flat as glass," so they told us, but we had strong wind and rough seas the whole time, which was seasickville for me in spite of taking the maximum dose of the strongest prescription med there is for it. We only had two really good dolphin encounters, and I was too seasick to get in the water for the first of them. So I had one good encounter, lasting over an hour.

We also had freediving class taught by William Trubridge, who presently holds the world record for constant-weight no fins freediving: 95 meters on one breath of air. Wearing only a swim suit, bathing cap, and water-filled goggles he went down 95 meters and came back up.

I made it down to 42 feet, which was disappointing for me, but I learned what I need to work on. My form was not good. And I had trouble equalizing my ears. And I was not able to overcome my I-want-air panic. The urge to breathe is triggered by elevated CO2, not by low O2 levels. As you descend, pressure increases, including CO2 partial pressure. This triggers a powerful urge to breathe. The freediver must learn to overcome this urge, and I was not able to do so.

So I was foiled by my own inability to incorporate what I knew about freediving, and also by stuffy sinuses, which slowed my descents.

I did better at static apnea: We took several minutes to completely relax next to a pool at the marina. Then we lay in the water and took slow, deep breaths. Hyperventilating is both dangerous and counterproductive. Then a very deep breath and put our face in the water and held our breath while a buddy timed us. On my third and last attempt I held my breath for 3 minutes and 21 seconds. The longest I've ever done before was one minute and 5 seconds, sitting in my easy chair at home. Putting your face in the water triggers the mammalian diving reflex and greatly extends your ability to hold your breath. Being totally relaxed conserves oxygen, of course, and makes static apnea much easier than active apnea.

Next month I go to Little Cayman for scuba diving. Maybe I'll skip the first dive of the morning one day and try some freediving. If I could get to 50 feet and stay down for one minute while swimming I'd be really happy.

 

I didn't believe I could go more than a minute and a half, and I said so. I've held my breath for 1:05 sitting in my easy chair, as relaxed as I could be. But the mammalian diving reflex is real. Doing it the way we did, you'd hold your breath at least two minutes and probably 3 or 4 if you've never trained for it. I think the shortest time of anyone in our group was 2:30, and that was only because he got bored. That guy was staying down for over a minute and a half while swimming, which is a LOT harder. I never even lasted 45 seconds while swimming.

 

Active apnea is a lot harder than static. 25 meters would be really pushing it for me, and there's no way I could do 50. Maybe if I learned to overcome that air panic I talked about.

I'm not sure exhaling is a good idea, since you're giving up oxygen. But if you can do 50 meters you're doing something right.

Do you wear weights to maintain neutral buoyancy? I can stay down longer when I am correctly weighted, because without weights I use up a lot of oxygen exerting effort to stay down, whereas weighted I can relax, and expend only the energy needed to move forward. (I've seldom tried active apnea in a pool, and never recently. I'm always in the ocean, cruising along looking at the corals and the fishes, or swimming with the dolphins.)

 

Yes, they stressed the need for a buddy. I'll probably pay for a DM to accompany me as a buddy on the day I try freediving, even though I won't be going very deep or staying down very long. My goal is just 8 feet deeper and about 20 seconds longer than the 42 feet and 40 seconds of my best dive from this trip.

I'm not trying to set any records. Just improve my snorkeling skills.

 

I float. Even in fresh water I float pretty high. Of course, in the ocean I'm usually wearing a 3-mil wet suit, and then I float like a cork. I was wearing two lbs of weight on this trip and I probably should have been wearing six. In Belize I was wearing four lbs of weight with just a dive skin, and that was perfect for the shallow freediving we were doing there.

Of course the trade-off is that with more weight it's easier to go down but harder to get back up, and when I was trying for depth and time, I was scared to wear more weight and potentially have a hard time getting back to the surface in a pinch. But in retrospect, I needed at least 4 lbs with the wet suit. The experienced divers were wearing a lot more weight. Of course William was not wearing any weight at all, but he has no visible fat on his body at all. I have 20 lbs of excess fat.

I have to exhale completely before I get close to neutral buoyancy.