Freediving in Thailand

Freediving in Ko Tao, Thailand – Sunday Times



No snorkel, no air tank, no tubes... freediving is diving without the annoying equipment and less classroom time
Guyan Mitra

Oh to be a mermaid, or merman in my case, and swim, unbounded, with the wilds of the ocean. This was my goal.

So with a chest-swelling intake of air and a graceful flick of my prosthetic fin, I swoop, head first, into an abyss of dark-blue ocean.

With only a pair of full lungs to sustain myself, I drop five, then 10... 15... 20 metres to the sea bed. I grab a fistful of sand before twisting up and gliding through a school of neon-coloured parrotfish, which naturally recognise me as a fellow fish.

Finally, I burst through the surface for a well-earned breath of crisp ocean air. Well, that’s how it’s supposed to be done. My personal experience of freediving involved less graceful flicking and more flailing and flapping, but I was just a beginner, after all.

Cruising around the depths of the ocean without any form of breathing aid may sound like the bold realm of fearless adrenaline nuts. But in reality, freediving is open to everyone with a pair of lungs and a rough idea how to swim.

In the diving mecca of Ko Tao, a rocky isle of chalky-white beaches, surrounded by a rainbow of coral gardens in the middle of the Gulf of Thailand, divers flock to see the whale sharks that often pass through the local waters.

The vast majority do it weighed down with scuba gear, but a pioneering few are choosing to freedive instead of using the clunky and awkward scuba clobber. And now I was one of them.

“The most important element of freediving is being in a calm mental state,” claims Monica Ganame, the Argentinian co-owner of Apnea Total freediving school. Probably the closest being to a mermaid that you’ll ever encounter, Monica has been swimming with the whales and dolphins off Argentina’s Atlantic coast since her teenage days.

In her brief moments above sea level, she practises yoga and meditation. Beyond the holistic techniques helping to work the respiratory organs needed to freedive, the disciplines promote a calm personal state. The logic goes that a relaxed freediver has a slower heart rate, therefore uses less oxygen and is able to dive for longer periods.

In the spirit of seeking my “inner calm”, I enrolled in morning yoga classes on Ko Tao’s appropriately serene Sai Ree beach. As a total novice to anything remotely holistic, my thoughts towards yoga had always been that it was simply the stretching I would do before going for a run.

One miserable attempt at “downward dog” proved how wrong I was. An hour later, I hobbled off the yoga platform, puffing, panting and bent out of shape like a broken Lego man — more humbled than calm, I’d say.

Limbered up, to a degree, I limped off to learn how to freedive. The dive school is full of hard-bodied male instructors, who all boast a cringingly handsome resemblance to Jean-Marc Barr, satisfying the fantasy of the many female pupils clearly here in search of re-enacting Luc Besson’s cult classic The Big Blue.

The crux of the class centres on a breathing technique, which involves a four-minute “breathe up” before each dive. This entails inhaling and exhaling deeply 12 times, while pushing out the belly and expanding the chest. The purpose is to fill the body with plenty of oxygen while maximising expansion of the lungs.

At full-breath capacity, I’m informed, your pushed-out belly is supposed to give the impression of having an enormous gut. A session of pranayama — a nasal yogic-breathing technique, which exercises the respiratory muscles — ended with most of the class unattractively blowing snot all over themselves. A natural occurrence, I was told as I reached for the tissues — we now all had stronger sinuses and diaphragms, apparently.

Once in the sea, it took a few nervy attempts before I was 12 metres deep, swimming among the sea fans on the ocean floor. Quite frequently there would be a little voice of panic in my head.

According to my instructor, there’s a nerve in the human brain that triggers warning alarms, or voices in my case, once underwater. “If you ignore it, eventually it will go away. In reality, your body has enough oxygen to stay underwater for plenty of time.”

While much of the early classes are spent bobbing up and down around the surface, practising the breathing techniques, the more experienced divers dart around the coral gardens of the sea bed like jovial seals for up to four or five minutes at a time. Their confidence is annoyingly enviable to the beginner, but some of them are only a couple of weeks ahead of us.

Back on dry land, I’m introduced to the school’s co-owner, Eusebio Saenz de Santamaria. In 2005 he was ranked third in the world, has dived to depths of more than 80 metres and can hold his breath underwater for more than seven minutes.

“At depths of more than 30 metres, the human body reacts just like other mammals, such as whales and dolphins,” he explains. “What happens is known as the mammalian diving reflex. The heart rate drops, some organs shrink to a fraction of their size and the human body adapts to the underwater pressure while producing and conserving as much oxygen as possible.”

I’m relieved to hear this doesn’t come into effect for the depths I’ll be going to. I’ll leave the mammalian diving reflex for my next visit.

“When I go freediving, I do it for therapy,” chimes in Monica. “Being like a fish helps me stay calm, which is why I like to do it with yoga and meditation.” There’s certainly a left-field, hippie association with freediving that fits in well with the surrounds of Buddhist Thailand. Perhaps the monks should try freediving for medi­tative purposes? “They really should,” says Monica, without sarcasm.

By the end of the two-day course, I was comfortable at 20 metres, a depth that had sounded inconceivable 48 hours earlier. Plus, I was able to dive Ko Tao’s newest underwater site. A boat had recently sunk — without casualty, thankfully — creating a modern wreck around which a kaleidoscope of tropical sea life was investigating.

Using my new-found skills, I was able to probe and glide in and around the wreck, just like my fellow fish. Not quite a merman, but getting there... definitely getting there.

- Guyan Mitra travelled as a guest of Thai Airways

Travel details: there aren’t any direct flights from the UK or Ireland to Ko Samui, but Thai Airways (0870 606 0911, www.thaiair.com) has connections via Bangkok, from £620. Ferries from Ko Samui to Ko Tao take 1Çhr and cost about £50 return.

Apnea Total (00 66 87 81 32 321, apnea-total.com) runs two-day free­diving courses from £99pp.

Imaginative Traveller (0845 077 8802, imaginative-traveller.com) can tailor-make seven nights in Thailand from £800pp, with two nights in Bangkok and five nights on Ko Tao (both B&B), including flights from Bangkok to Ko Samui, and the ferry crossing. It can help by booking international flights and freedive courses, too.

Or try Dive Worldwide (0845 130 6980, www.diveworldwide.com) or Worldwide Dive and Sail (020 8099 2230, worldwidediveandsail.com).

For further information, go to tourismthailand.co.uk