Interested? Never freedive alone. Know your limits. Learn with a qualified instructor—you’ll learn about safety and will quickly make an incredible amount of progress. In the Leeward Antilles we highly recommend Carlos Coste in Bonaire and Walid Boudhiaf in Curaçao.
Don’t worry, Donna. We want to improve our technique and increase our breath holding capacity to be comfortable at 30m, but don’t intend to go much deeper than that.
Three videos that have impressed me
Below is Walid, our instructor, going for his personal record of 112m. That’s meters. In feet, it’s 367. Things to note:
- While watching it, remember to relax! Holding your breath is optional for you.
- Walid initiates the freefall at around 30m.
- The ascent is the most demanding part, and it starts after you’ve held your breath for quite a long time already.
- On the way up there’s a bunch of safety divers waiting for Walid in apnea as if it was a walk in the park… at 30m!
- Safety divers cannot be scuba divers—because they are subject to decompression sickness, they can’t bring the freediver to the surface fast enough in case of a blackout.
The world record in that discipline is 130m. The deepest freedive in the no-limits category, where you go down with the aid of a weighted sled and come up pulled by an inflatable device, is 214m.