Deepest you've ever been?

[bg7003]

Over the summer I do a lot of free diving with my spear gun. I've been down about 40 feet on a single breath. Whats the avg. depth you guys/girls get to?

[NetDoc]

I need to get out and do this more myself. I have been to 60 ft once, but I wasn't comfortable.

[Superlyte27]

60' is my painful max. I have new fins now, and I've never tried being weighted. I could probably do more, but that's what scuba is for. Hehe.

[DevonDiver]

My first great freediving experience was during a holiday to the Maldives in 2000. I had spent a morning snorkelling and shallow breath-hold diving on the house reef, whilst taking photos. After a couple of hours in the water, I did a dive where I just didn't need to breathe. I went down and down and felt pretty euphoric. I was slowly descending on the sloping reef looking for a moray that I had seen from the surface. Having taken some snaps, I glanced at my depth gauge and realised that I had descending to 70ft. I felt perfectly fine... but was worried about my ability to reach the surface because I had never been that deep before. I calmly ascended back up the sloping reef and surfaced. At no point had I felt the urge to breathe. That, in itself, worried me a little.

That remains my deepest breath-hold dive, although I am sure I could have gone much deeper on that occasion if I had wanted to. It was only 'prudence' that made me come back up when I did.

Since then I've done lots of dives down to 60ft...often for photos or, when working, to free up anchors or check conditions prior to a scuba dive etc. I keep that limit because I am never sure what my tolerance/capacity is to go deeper.

[dumpsterDiver]

Freeing up an anchor can involve use of the large muscles in the back. chest, arms etc. which consumes oxygen very fast. Freeing a stuck anchor can be very dangerous, even at a shallow depth like 60 feet.

[NetDoc]

Freeing up an anchor can involve use of the large muscles in the back. chest, arms etc. which consumes oxygen very fast. Freeing a stuck anchor can be very dangerous, even at a shallow depth like 60 feet.

But if you're smart, you are pulling yourself down by the anchor chain.

[Capt.Ed]

40 feet is my max but it's also the depth I hunt at (between 30 and 40 ft) so I spend a little time down there looking for fish. I'm sure I can go deeper but haven't tried in deeper water yet...this weekend though I should be hitting 66 feet. I'm taking a course with FII in Marathon this weekend and 66 feet is the class goal.

[smellzlikefish]

I've been to ~70 and feel pretty certain I could go significantly deeper in the right conditions. I've also had days (bad viz, blue water, too much coffee, etc.) where I could only hit ~30.

[Hank49]

75 feet. Like saying I can bench press 170 lbs.
I'd like to try the Performance Free Dive course. But I'm also 55. Don't know if I want to go deeper. Most fish I shoot, I can get at 60 feet or less.

[TraceMalin]

Freediving is a mostly psychological endeavor, but technique plays an important role in energy conservation. The environment in which you train and dive will also play an important role. For example, since Dutch Springs is my "office" just 15 minutes away from my girlfriend's place, most of my freediving training is done at the maximum depths available 95 feet on the sunken car and 105 feet in the hole. When I was working in the Caribbean, my freediving was between 100 and 200 feet. With gauge error, my deepest depth was + or - 6 feet or so from 200 feet.

Conversely, Hank Garvin once asked me to make a 40 foot freedive off the Garloo off Gardiners Island, NY to check out some numbers. The current was swift and we had a good bit of scope out on the anchor. I opted to make a solo scuba dive instead due to the amount of work that it would require to move dynamically down the anchor line using a pull technique and the risk of entanglement.

Those deep dives were made more difficult because I wasn't able to do enough warm up dives. I'd normally dive as divers were getting briefed on the site and then return to slip into my SCUBA gear to guide the dive.

For those of you interested in increasing your ability, a freediving course is worth its weight in gold. Most of my students enter day one of training with the ability to dive 30 - 60 feet and hold their breaths 1 - 2 minutes. By day two of the course, they are doing 80 - 100 foot dives (most students attain 100) and doing breath holds greater than 3 minutes. Some students reach 4 or 5 minutes.

A good course will focus on relaxation techniques, efficiency and energy conservation, surface dives, equalization techniques, and rescue. Large classes with world champions tend to limit the number of dives a student can make with proper coaching. A freediving class should be personal and heavily water-intensive allowing the student to make 50 to 100 or more dives in class.

Generally, you'll need to time to let the mammalian diving reflex kick into gear. This can be speeded up by facial immersion without a mask prior to diving. You'll need time to get used to retaining CO2 so your breath holds are comfortable. You can do this out of the water before a dive if you have no opportunity to do so underwater. And, you'll probably need a few practice dives to get into the groove so you just glide into the dive. I prefer one leg surface dives to two leg dives for the energy conservation. Equalize early and often. This goes for the mask as well.

Whether to use a snorkel or not or whether to leave it in the mouth of not during ascent is a matter of both preference and debate over perceived safety and risk factors.

Breathe-ups, even "proper" ones, are all a form of hyperventilation to some degree so limit your bottom time. In my experience, black outs happen when you feel your best and push your time spent on the bottom or increase your activity level during long breath holds.

Personally, I think you gain a psychological edge when you ditch the depth gauge. You no longer care about competing with others or yourself. You just immerse yourself in the sensual caress of the water as it passes your suit and body, enjoy the pressure changes, and become one with the underwater world. Greater depth is a natural by-product of physical and psychological comfort and adaptation.

Age is irrelevant. There are many great stories of older freedivers attaining incredible depths for sport or work. My favorite is a story told by Brett Gilliam. He was spearfishing with some old freedivers and he couldn't find the sea mount they were diving over. He told one of them that he was diving to 50 feet and couldn't find it. They told him the top of it was at 130 feet (or something deep like that). Jacques Mayol was 56 years of age when he dove to his greatest depth of 346.5 feet in 1983.