When I talk about risk I don’t mean the direct risks that might be the consequences of diving with wildlife like being bitten, bumped, kicked, crushed or whatever might happen. I mean risk of bringing the wrong message to the general public withy events that inevitably occurs during nature based activities.

That can happen easily when you realize that a large percentage of people participating to wildlife encounter tours go to « thick » a box: hammerhead shark: checked, orca: checked, humpback: checked…the list goes on and on….

The people don’t really care about the wildlife but care more about the experience and what they can tell about it afterwards. Having a « close call » is then the trigger to an uncontrollable ego trip. 

We ear a lot about the fact ecotourism helps to raise awareness and help conservation, it’s a way to look at it and most of the time it might be the case. But it only take a bad story to ruin a the all the effort that has been put into to support a cause. 

Since a few days we see in all mainstream media the story of a snorkeler who’s been swallowed and spat out by a whale.

Well how stupid must you be if you are a genuine wildlife and nature lover to disclose and brag about such an event!

Everyone who has been in bait balls or other feeding events have had close calls, bumps and stressful moments.

The key is to learn for yourself and if you are a story teller show the beauty of what you’ve witnessed but not making cheap thrill entertainment out of it. 

Although they claim the outcome because it shows that the whale didn’t wanted to harm him, I believe it’s totally out of line to use the story because it’ll get quickly out of hand in the media sphere.

This bring us into this over-mediatized world where news agencies will do anything to get clicks or likes and squeeze money out of stories. 

Everyday tories are being brought by people who have no idea how the media world is manipulating them and that eventually their stories are being used against them. 

That’s the reason I don’t have my pictures in media agency, it’s so easy to have pictures of humans and wildlife taken out of context: a picture of a freediver swimming peacefully along a large shark will be turned into a story saying « death defying diver escaped from being shredded in pieces by a mindless killing machine” 

It is our responsibility to fight against that by keeping full control on the content we produce. 

As a tour leader, organizer, it’s your duty to make sure things like that are not happening. 

As a customer you must check who is taking you out there, what is their true code of conduct, not what they write on the brochure. 

It’s of course too late for those inconsequent people, they did it, they’ve created a money making bullshit content. Let’s move on, let’s all learn from it to avoid more of it to happen and let’s question ourselves why we are going in the wilderness and why we want tell stories.

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Competitive freediving has some serious problems, that is not something new. In the past we had some competitors dying during training and even one during a competition, but every time the accidents were caused by misjudgment or stupid behavior of the victims themselves.

Lack of professionalism while practicing an activity which at that level requires a lot of it can be extremely dangerous.

But this time the accident concerns the person I consider as the only real professional in the sport, Guillaume Nery.

Guillaume took many many years to get where he is now. I met Guillaume when he was still a young teenager training with us the “old guys” in the late 90’s. In those days he was already showing respect, determination and patience. It took him many years despite amazing abilities and adaptation to get his first world record and after that he kept on being at the top of the sport and developing other important aspects of his life. His freediving career is unique, being at the top for almost 15 years has no equivalent in the modern freediving era. He carries the true values of the sport.

Today Guillaume suffered a serious blackout during a competitive dive not because of his ego, a misjudgment or a stupid mistake but because of the incompetence of people organizing the sport. These idiots set up the bottom plate 10m deeper than where it should have been. Fortunately the most professional if not the only professional freediver in the world is safe!

Since 2011 I’m  saying that competitive freediving is getting out of control. While taking the underwater pictures during the world championships that year I witnessed a really bad blackout by a competitor who was doing a dive at a depth where he shouldn’t have been. That day we were so so close to see the first death during a competition. An american journalist, James Nestor, was covering the event for Outside magazine and wrote an article describing

how he was seeing the sport with an external eye. As you can guess the article was very critical of the competitive freediving world and instead of trying to understand why they were portrayed in that way and evolve, a lot of freedivers criticized the paper and kept their head in the sand… Although It was a big warning, nothing drastic was done by the sport’s governing body and two years later the first fatality during a competition occurred.

I believe that today it is the day to say STOP and the day for the competitive freediving community to put pressure on the governing body to do something about that and I hope that someone will sue their representative who were on site and particularly the head judge.

In other words, fire the wankers.

Freediving is not dangerous at all, the problem is that there are some extremely dangerous people who are freediving or organizing it.

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