It Is More Than Sport, Say Breath-Hold Divers; It Is Absolute Communion With the Sea

They are elite adventurers who easily, naturally expand their lungs, minds and visions far beyond our miserable limits. By so doing, say at least some within the discipline, they are reaching back to a time when man may have evolved from sea mammals. Call them Homo delphinus . Man as dolphin.

But for the time being, call them free divers, or, most classicly, breath-hold divers; men and a few women who prefer the purity of diving oceans alone and without air tanks so as to be better accepted by the big blue.

“I’m more comfortable down there than I am up here,” says John Ernst, 45, of Redondo Beach. Up here, he is a captain with the Los Angeles Fire Department. Down there, he is a 12-time national free-diving champion and a two-time runner-up in world meets. “I feel so much at home (in the ocean) that there have been a couple of times when I almost forgot to come up.”

A feeling of absolute assimilation with the element is common among breath-hold divers.

“Without (breathing) equipment, you are a fish,” says Gary Thompson, 45, a former commercial diver, owner of a paper recycling business in Pasadena and a Pacific Coast free-diving champion. “No bubbles, no squeaks in the suit, you’re part of the environment. It is not a coincidence that most scuba divers have never seen a white sea bass.”

The Master of the Art

Then there is Jacques Mayol, the master, the seignior whose life purpose is breath-hold diving. He is 61 and of Marseilles, Miami, Crete, the Grand Bahamas, Los Angeles and wherever there is a sea to revisit and audiences to grant.

“Water, the ocean . . . it is our most natural environment,” Mayol states. “We are born naked from the miniature ocean of the mother’s womb . . . and breath-hold diving is a continuance of that.

“It’s also a cult, a way of thinking, for when you start breath-hold diving, you enter yourself and begin a marriage with the sea. You become a diving mammal.”

Mayol was in Los Angeles recently to attend trade and public openings of “The Big Blue,” a movie about world breath-hold diving competition, where the hero is a young man with a body and spirit better adapted to the sea. The actor is Jean-Marc Barr. His screen name and character--of course--is that of young Jacques Mayol.

In the movie--directed by Luc Besson, a Frenchman inspired by his own lust for breath-hold diving in the Mediterranean off Greece and Morocco--one character says of the screen Mayol: “Do not think of Jacques as a human being . . . he is from another world.”

Mayol clearly is that. Better than ancient Greeks and Romans who dived for sponges and shells, he can remain submerged for five minutes. At depth, his heart rate drops from 60 beats per minute to 26.

Before many fatalities brought an end to European contests where free-divers clung to weighted, falling sleds and were judged solely on depth attained, Mayol won consistently at 250 feet.

Five years ago, in a medical experiment off Elba, he dived on the powers of lungs and yogic discipline deeper than any man: 347 feet.

In Europe, breath-hold divers make up 98% of the diving population and their champions are rich--sponsored heroes hailed as highly as any bullfighter or winner of the Tour de France.

Thousands of U.S. Devotees

In the United States, they are a clique unknown beyond their sport. There are maybe only 3,000 breath-hold divers nationwide with concentrations in Florida and Southern California. But there are observers who believe that--as Americans come to value a less adulterated society in other areas--more divers may abandon their scuba equipment and turn to breath-hold. And with divers of every stripe reportedly flocking to see “The Big Blue,” some are predicting the movie may do for breath-hold diving what “The Endless Summer” did 22 years ago for surfing.

“There’s no doubting they (free divers) are the athletes of diving . . . purists alongside the guys with the bubble machines,” says Bill Bryant, president of the Greater Los Angeles Council of Divers. “It’s so satisfying. The euphoria at doing this successfully is indescribable.

“Go to a meeting with these guys and you’ll hear 10 minutes of meeting and 50 minutes of fish stories.”

You will also discern the clear categories of breath-hold diving.

There are the gladiators--such as John Ernst, his brother Bill, also a Los Angeles Fire Department captain, and Terry Maas, a Ventura dentist, who thrive on the competition.

Local, regional, national and world free-diving contests now are phrased around spear fishing. A two-day tournament commonly involves two six-hour sessions for each diver. Divers will be hunting under water, holding their breath, for at least eight hours of those 12 hours.

Nationally there’s a circuit--from Carmel to Miami, from Hawaii to Missouri, from Watch Hill, R.I., to Seattle. Internationally, the tournaments touch places untarnished by tourism--Paracas, Peru; Cadaques, Spain; Iquique, Chile; and Moorea, Tahiti.

Shattering a Record

Maas, 43, a 30-year diver, has won four national titles and with John Ernst recently broke fresh water “going for the big fish in blue waters . . . sometimes 100 miles offshore.”

That’s how, with a homemade spear gun, he took a 400-pound blue fin tuna, a world record for any form of fishing. But the kill is far from the entire thing.

“It’s holding your breath and just floating and hovering 50 feet below the surface and seeing a school of tuna, maybe hundreds, swimming by,” he says. “If you were wearing a tank, they wouldn’t come anywhere near you. Without a tank, you’re doing something that few people have even conceived, let alone done.”

For Thompson--president of the Fathomiers club with membership restricted to 25 breath-hold divers--the pastime represents Zen, an inner peace, a spiritual oneness with the ocean.

He dives alone, at night, in storms or fair weather. Thompson estimates he has spent several thousand hours under water “and that’s a career, that’s an obsession . . . but that’s where I want to be.

“My home is the ocean. I go to the same areas every week to learn the fish trails, to know the reefs, to understand the population . . . to the point where after a period of 20 years I’ve learned about 20 miles of our coastline from (Leo) Carrillo (State Beach) to Malibu.”

To better feel this world, Thompson tries to avoid entanglements at the surface, personal frictions and business confrontations that could reduce his underwater acuity. He says being a Christian helps. Then, when beneath the sea, he rolls with its surges and goes with their pull.

“If you’re in a surging area and you relax, you don’t hit anything,” he says. “The ocean has a way of moving you around the rocks and over the reefs. Whales and dolphin do the same thing.”

Old Friends

From this state of being “aquatic”--a free diver’s adjective for melting into the sea--Thompson can recognize one old sheepshead by its markings and scars. He has greeted the same moray eel year after year and knows its cave. Thompson is accepted as an elder of an exclusive metier where “the only newcomers are when guys like me take someone under their wing and accept them as candidates for the sea.

“But it takes a long time.”

It actually takes most breath-hold divers two or three years to find a warmth and a home in the ocean. Most begin in their teens, learning to free dive as part of the mental training for scuba (self-contained breathing apparatus) diving.

Then they develop an opposition to bottled air and mechanical breathing, the false security that develops from modern equipment, and the general noise and bulkiness of it all. That’s when a diver will return to breath-hold diving, to just a mask and flippers and a purity of self-contest understood by bow hunters, solo sailors and sailplane pilots.

John Ernst started diving when he was 11. Brother Bill, 40, has been his competition partner for 18 years.

Locky Brown, 54, a Beverly Hills insurance salesman, made his first dive a quarter-century ago. Maas, 43, began diving in 1958 when Lloyd Bridges and the television series “Sea Hunt” were the largest things in his 13-year-old life.

All are remarkably fit and conscious of balanced diets; they enjoy athletic crossovers into running and iron-man contests and know a contentment that Brown describes as “a therapeutic experience, an escape . . . the feeling when you get to a depth level of 60 feet and that marine mammal reflex takes over.”

Taking of Fish

It is somewhat unfortunate, they agree, that their contests are phrased around the taking of fish, because that brings condemnation of free diving from those who recognize no other aspect of the pastime.

“I don’t enjoy killing fish. I don’t need it,” John Ernst says. “The lure is the hunting . . . trying to outsmart the fish.”

Ernst has been bounced by killer whales, had a seal place its head on his foot and he sees fish as “guys or people . . . because they really have an attitude and a demeanor of their own, a particular set of actions and reactions.

“They are not just fish at all.”

Ernst is better than any other American at this sport. His diving biography, its individual and team championships since 1962, covers three single-spaced pages. The only career soft spot has been his failure (“by one small fish,” says Ernst) to win the world championship currently held by Renzo Mazzarri of Italy.

Now, like some graying gunfighter, he is waiting “for a really good young diver to come along and push me some more.” Meanwhile, he says, there is his quiet ambition to push the legendary Jacques Mayol some more.

“If I had a backer right now who wanted to have a diver from the United States do what Jacques did, and maybe go deeper, I’d be gone tomorrow,” he says. “I don’t know if I could beat him. I know I could come close.”

Mayol, however, is not concerned.

He knows man can go much deeper. Possibly to 400 feet. He is certain that one day a breath-hold diver will be trained from birth and be capable of remaining underwater for much longer times. Maybe 12 minutes.

‘Our Genetic Heritage’

Yet such training, he says, will be nothing more than a re-education aimed at stirring the “dormant attributes that are part of our genetic heritage.”

That heritage, he suggests, includes homo sapiens ‘ common root “to all creatures . . . such as the dolphin” and not solely to apes and earlier primates.

Although there is no scientific proof, he acknowledges, there are strong indicators in the “prenatal life of all mammals where, in the fetal state, they go through all the (development) stages of all the species that ever were.”

A fetus, he says, carries evolutionary vestiges of tails, gills and fins that become arms and legs. During gestation, the human mammal exists in an amniotic fluid environment and “the first reflex of any mammal is to swim.

“I’ve seen it with my own eyes, a 3-week-old child in Moscow as amphibious as you could believe . . . diving 2 or 3 feet to suck on a milk bottle like any mammal and then swimming up to the surface.”

Doctors in the Soviet have been experimenting with underwater birthing for 20 years. It is believed that matching water temperatures with 101-degree womb temperatures produces a softer birth with reduced shock to the new infant.

Proponents also have claimed that children born by this technique lack a fear of water, are more confident and less aggressive than babies born by conventional means.

Water Birthing

Mayol sees water birthing as further proof of his theory that we are closer to dolphins and whales than we think. He urges a continuance of research for “better understanding of man as a terrestrial with amphibious capabilities . . . and better understanding of our cousins, the great mammals of the sea.”

He is involved in such research. It entails communications between man and dolphin and the physiology of free-diving where bodily systems slow and oxygen usage is reduced--as is the case when seals dive for depth and distance.

Mayol also continues to free-dive for the absolute spiritual thrill of it all.

He dons fins but shuns a mask. He will use a nose clip but prefers not to wear a wet suit.

“We are born naked,” he says. “To go to the great mother of the sea, you must go naked.”