Deep Breath

In the air pocket of a gloomy sea-cave, a New York teenager breaks the surface in a panic. His shock of curly hair is pressed flat to the nape of his neck, and he gulps a lungful of air before spitting an adrenaline-fuelled monologue.

“Holy SHIT! I seriously though I would DIE in there, man!”

He pushes his snorkel mask up past eyes wide as dinner plates.

“I was following your fins in and you just DISAPPEARED into the DARK. I thought I was going to DIE, dude, oh my God. That was AWESOME!”

This cossetted young Manhattanite has just swum the length of a 75-foot underwater cave in total darkness on one lungful of air. One breath. He’s feeling pretty pumped.

This is free-diving. The fins he followed into the black hole were mine. This was my favourite part of my job, every day, for three summers in the Caribbean.

Of course, not ever day involved a 75-foot kick through a cave. Domestic, common-or-garden freediving was a lot more mundane. Twice a day we would slip into fins and mask to check our anchors.

Most anchorages in the Virgin Islands were shallow, sandy affairs. We dove into 15 feet of womb-warmth sapphire blue to grab the anchor and tug it a bit to check its grip on the sea bed.

Taking one student, we’d swim out ahead of the boat to a point above the anchor cain.

With masks on you’d lie face down in the water and take some slow, calming breaths. Your heart rate slows. With three deep lungfuls, you bend at the waist and your upper body begins to sink. As your head drops to a line vertically beneath your hips, and your torso begins to slide directly downwards, your legs fall in line and you become a sinking column, kicking gently to continue the momentum towards the bottom.

As the pressure builds, you hold your nose and blow gently to equalise your ears en route down to the anchor, and perform your check on its grip.

It was always nice to sit in silence on the white sand for a while, holding the anchor and looking up towards the boat floating silently above, and then glide back up casually, or pull yourself towards the boat via the chain.

But the cave dives were a different category.

They were an inevitable consequence of the competitive drive between certain members of our staff who pushed each other to go deeper and longer every week.

I was never brave enough to follow colleagues to the depths of 70 or 90 feet, where they would taunt bewildered scuba divers before racing back to the surface. Often, the elation of reaching a new ‘low’ on a dive would be tempered by looking up and seeing the surface shimmering an unreachable distance above, starting a mind-over-lungs race to the surface. There was no option but to swallow the rising fear, accept the aching desire in your lungs to breathe in, and just stay calm. Tales of shallow-water blackout limited my diving to 55 feet, roughly the height of four red London buses stacked on top of one another. The round trip, then, was 110 feet, eight buses’ depth on one breath. The others would do 150-foot, 180-foot round trips.

The 75-foot cave shouldn’t have been that daunting in comparison, so.

Its location was passed on to us by a colleague. It was a horizontal hole through Torrens Point on the island of Saba, a craggy Dutch-owned island in the Caribbean whose volcanic peak is, officially, the highest point in the Netherlands. To get to the entrance, you had to duck down under a rock into the ‘porch’, the cave which contained the air pocket, and room for perhaps three snorkellers.

Put your head in the water and stare into the dark and you could see, in the distance, an uneven-edged circle of blue. That was the exit. Between the porch and the exit was a 75-foot tube of spiky rock and smooth coral, and a few vertical coral pillars halfway through the cave. The swim-through brought you out on the far side of the headland, out of sight of our boats.

The return was the thing.

Staring back into the hole whence you had just come, triumphant, there was no blue guiding light to bring you home. The far end, the first entry hole, is in a dark cave, so there is no tropical light pouring in.  Just inky, watery blackness. It was a black hole.

Calming yourself is harder, the heart does not slow as readily, which means you’ll be slightly more panicked on the way through, burning more oxygen more quickly. Your lungs will begin to burn sooner than they did as you kicked happily towards the blue light. The fear sets in sooner.

After three breaths you enter the cave in a dive of faith, knowing, hoping that the exit will become apparent at some stage. It’s not until a little over half way through that there’s anything to see in the gloom. By halfway through it’s easy to panic and think of turning back. That would be a bad idea.

In I went, this time with a nervous teenager instructed to follow my fins as close as he could. Stay. On. My. Fins. I kicked on methodically, into the gloom, past the coral columns and saw a greyish blue glow begin to appear. Behind me, the once-confident kid had seen my fins vanish as if into oil. His kicking was faster, less efficient, more urgent: oxygen-burning floundering. He was slow.

I cleared the edge of the cave and emerged in the porch. I took a breath and put my face in the water to see where he was. He, my charge, the kid whose parents I would have to call if he was stuck on the roof of an underwater cave,  should have been two seconds behind me. Four passed. Five. Six. Seven….and there he was.

Deep Breath, stay calm. You did it.

If you like the sound of this, you might check out this article from the Guardian on free-diving in Turkey. Or you could just buy fins and a mask. And go find a cave.