Deep: Freediving
I mostly read this book on the strength of the author’s book “Breath”. In this book, he talks about the “sport” of Freediving, which was something I was aware of, but never really delved into, and when I first heard of the sport, it sounded absolutely insane.
Take your natural human body, now train it to hold your breath for over 3 minutes, now dive down deep. like not bottom of the pool deep where its max 10 to 12 feet, but we’re talking 100, 200, 300 feet deep. With no external oxygen. Just one breath.
and people do it. And they compete to see who can go deepest. And predictably, bad things happen, people die, get injured, suffer horrendous injuries. But its just absolutely bonkers that people can go even that deep, on one breath.
This book illuminates quite a bit of the physics/biology of what happens when you go that deep. Everything compresses with pressure, and the pressures even at 10 feet is obvious to anyone who’s had to recover a kids toy from the bottom of a family pool, now imagine pressure that’s 10x to 20x higher than that! Beyond the obvious issues that’ll happen to your sinuses and head cavities, there’s also the cute fact that your lungs become the size of your fist!
Anyhow, this book was fascinating mostly because it delves on a subject that’s as far beyond my understanding as some of the other more extreme sports like base diving or wingsuit’ing.
There are also some good snippets of life at this extreme. You h ave folks who have to deliver supplies to the only underwater laboratory in the world, located in the florida keys, the folks who freedive to commune with cetaceans….and the ordeals the author undergoes to train himself to become a better than average freediver.
The book is quite interesting and you can always feel the sense and depth of the actual subject. We aren’t that far removed from our underwater cousins, the whales and dolphins, and when we strip ourselves of the gear, they actually become more accepting of us, and commune back with us.
There are stories of the almost fatal accidents of freediver accidents, and other such subjects. Overall the book suffers a bit from being all over the place, probably because the subject of freediving itself isn’t that deep, but all the ancilliary subjects are just as interesting, and I feel that the author gives them a bit of short shrift because otherwise the book will be unwieldly long.
I still quite whole heartedly recommend this book, especially to anyone who’s ever dove or just interested in the deeps.