great white shark adventure - Midwest Scuba Diving Magazine

Champion Freedivers Speak Out
About Ocean Conservation
By Suzannah Evans
In Europe, the town of Náchod is about as
landlocked as you can get. Nestled in the Sudetes
mountain range in the Czech Republic,
near the Polish border, Náchod doesn’t seem
the likely hometown of a world champion
diver.
By the time he was a small child, however,
Martin Štěpánek had taken to the water. The
son of a competitive swimmer, Štěpánek saw
his first divers at the local pool when he was
seven years old. Impressed by their bulky
equipment, and the way they crawled along
the pool bottom, he knew he wanted to learn
to dive.
Now, at 30, Štěpánek has broken several
world records in freediving, an increasingly
popular sport around the world. Freediving,
or breath hold diving, is exactly what it
sounds like: divers go underwater without
the aid of any breathing equipment, relying
only on their lungs and wits to return them
to the surface. A variety of disciplines have
developed for competition, including diving
using a sled, diving with fins or a monofin,
and swimming for distance with and without
fins.
Štěpánek broke his first world record in 2001
in the discipline known as static apnea, holding
his breath for 8 minutes and 6 seconds.
Since then he’s excelled at diving hundreds
of feet with fins and carrying weight, a type
of competition known as constant ballast.
It was his desire to break the constant ballast
world record that took him to Dahar, Egypt
last summer. There, he would take on his
biggest challenge – and face his greatest
disappointment.
When he joined the scuba club in Náchod,
Štěpánek was the youngest of the boys. The
others grabbed the government-issued scuba
equipment before he could, and so Štěpánek
often found himself diving sans tank in the
pools, lakes, and quarries the club used for
practice. His favorite sport in the swim club
had been the 50-meter sprint, completed
underwater, and so he had a preternaturally
good breath-holding ability. Soon, this would
grow into the ability to equalize the pressure
in his ears without using his hands to close
his nose, key to diving great depths using the
breaststroke.
Keen with interest in nature, he studied
forestry engineering in school. “Probably if
I lived in a country with the ocean, I would
have studied oceanography,” Štěpánek
said. “Forest was the thing that we had at
the time.” He later got a degree in exercise
physiology in Prague. It wasn’t until he broke
the static apnea record that he pursued diving
as a professional career. Now located in Fort
Lauderdale, Štěpánek instructs free diving in
addition to training for competitions.
“I enjoy scuba diving as well, don’t get me
wrong,” Štěpánek said. “I find a lot more
freedom in freediving. To me, it’s the purest
way of connecting with the ocean because
you don’t wear any extra equipment that
separates you from the environment. Therefore
the experience you’re having out of it is
much more pure and more intense.”
That connection with the environment has led
Štěpánek to join the growing conservation
movement. In his travels around the world,
he has noticed a steady decline in marine life.
Even in his local Florida reef, he no longer
sees snapper and grouper.
“The locations that I’ve been diving ten years
ago and diving them now, they’re not the
same,” he said. “There’s so many less fish,
and the coral reef looks totally different. It’s
heartbreaking, literally.”
Štěpánek and Niki Roderick, his student and
diving partner, joined up with Oceana, the
world’s largest international oceans advocacy
group, as they were both gearing up for world
record attempts in Egypt. Štěpánek planned
to set a new constant ballast record, while
Roderick aimed to break the women’s variable
weight record by diving 403 feet while
being pulled feet first by a weighted sled.
From the start, however, their trip to the Red
Sea was plagued. Airport authorities hassled
the teammates over their diving equipment.
Roderick came down with the Egyptian flu,
and windy weather – unusual in the normally
calm Red Sea, which is why it’s a favorite
diving spot – prevented Štěpánek from training
for his world record attempt.
While Štěpánek has trained himself from his
youth to read his body, and to know its limits,
free diving has – not inaccurately – earned
a reputation as a dangerous sport. In 2002,
Audrey Mestre died during a world record attempt.
An investigation concluded that many
factors, including an unusually windy day,
led to her death. And, in early 2007, five-time
world champion Loic Leferme died when a
cable jammed on his ascent from a world-record
dive.
For amateur divers, perhaps the greatest
danger is shallow water blackout, a loss of
consciousness caused by a lack of oxygen
to the brain. Štěpánek says he doesn’t worry
about the dangers personally.
“If somebody is dumb enough to go out and
free dive by himself, hyperventilates and
stuff like that, yes, it can be dangerous and I
would call it the same as Russian roulette,”
Štěpánek said. “But if you go out there with
someone trained in the proper safety and
under supervision, it’s a pretty safe sport.”
Persistently choppy waters forced Štěpánek’s
team to move to a protected section of the
Red Sea known as the Blue Hole, an old underwater
cave that had lost its ceiling somewhere
along the way. At 300 feet, the Blue
Hole was not deep enough for Roderick’s
world record attempt, so it was scrapped;
Štěpánek had to alter his goal from a constant
ballast with fins record to constant ballast
without fins, a shorter distance to cover.
Incredibly, despite the change in plans and
the switch away from his favored discipline,
Štěpánek bested the world record, 269 feet,
by three feet. When he resurfaced, he was
exhilarated.
“I felt awesome, I felt great, because the
whole preparation and the challenges we
ran into, they were physically but also very
psychologically demanding,” he said. “I
felt crushed that I could not do what I came
there to do, and try to do this quick attempt
in something I wasn’t really prepared for.
And actually achieving that at the end and
squeezing every little last piece of oxygen
and energy out of me to complete the dive, it
just felt amazing.”
But the euphoria was not to last. Six weeks
MARTIN STEPANEK AND NIKI RODERICK
later, the International Association for the
Development of Freediving decided not to
recognize Štěpánek’s world record. A judges’
error in recording the event led to its invalidation.
Štěpánek is disappointed, but not defeated.
He still holds the world record in free immersion,
where the diver pulls himself along a
rope during the dive. Next year, he will dive
for the Czech Republic at the world championships,
and take another stab at the constant
ballast with fins record.
What he’d like more than anything is to get
more people in the water, learning the art of
freediving. The intimacy it provides divers
is one way to help preserve the oceans for
future generations – an environmentalist’s
bent that Štěpánek has had since he studied
forestry in the Czech Republic.
“Get people in the water and see what’s happening
– that’s what’s going to make them
think,” he said. “The reason [conservation is]
not happening in the past with our oceans is
that people don’t see it. The fish is far from
them. They only see it in a supermarket. So I
think this would help quite a bit, make people
realize, that it’s the time to do something.”
Snapshot: Suzannah Evans
Suzannah Evans is the editor for
Oceana. She prefers to stay on land.
20 MIDWEST SCUBA DIVING FALL 2007