A friend of mine, Nicolas Mouchart, is currently doing a round the world sailing aboard his 42 foot steel ketch named Perd Pas Le Nord. He left from Belgium 3 years ago, he does not sails full time and divides the journey in legs of various duration. So far his biggest achievement was to go through the North West passage in 2013, Perd Pas le Nord was the only boot to successfully doing the passage that summer. After sailing down Canada and California he left the boat in San Diego. I decided to join for the next leg which was a 3 weeks trip around Baja to end up in La Paz. Nicolas and his girlfriend Florence are keen divers and freedivers so we planned the route with the best dive spots in mind.

But this year we were not lucky, with an strong El Nino and a shorter time frame of 2 weeks we couldn’t dive all the dream spots. Benito was beaten up by 4m swells and 35knts wind. We sailed down directly to Alijos Rocks in big seas and wind hoping it would calm down when on site. The bet paid off and when we reached Alijos the wind had dropped. But the residual swell made our 36h stay the worst anchorage we had ever experienced! The place is stunning,  some small rocks sticking out of the open ocean 300km offshore, crystal clear waters and tons of fish. We were expecting lots of sharks but probably because of the storm they stayed very deep and only a few Galapagos sharks paid us an elusive visit. Some sea lions seem to own the place, they were very peaceful and not bothered by us at all.
We left Alijos heading to Cabo San Lucas for a quick refuel and then headed to La Paz where the boat will spend a couple of months. When Nicolas and Florence left, William Winram an I stayed a bit longer in the area to dive Cabo Pulmo with the Pelagios Kakunja team to help them tagging sharks. Cabo Pulmo marine reserve is simply amazing. Not only it is full of life but it is extremely well managed by the local community. The diving is strictly regulated, limited and spread over the dive spots leaving them period of total “rest”. It is an example that all the marine reserve should follow: why create a marine reserve if hundred and hundred of divers are bothering the sea life and create an anthropic pressure that can sometimes be even worst than a well managed fishery…? A topic that should be raised more often.
We saw only 3 shy bull sharks and we eventually tagged one.
The best memory of that trip is for sure the giant school of jacks, we spent hours contemplating that tornado of life, one of my best freediving moment ever!

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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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