Drifting on the surface, I am suspended over the clear blue water of Little Bahama Bank. I breathe through my snorkel, staring straight down transfixed by the light patterns dancing on the white sand ridge 80 feet (24 meters) below. The Gulf Stream carries me, along with my trusted dive buddy, above sea turtles, sleeping nurse sharks, and patches of coral that appear as oases along the vast rippled saltation seafloor.
Having taken in enough air, I descend, tucking behind my camera to stay as streamlined as possible, and swim straight down. During the descent my lungs compress until I become negatively buoyant, allowing me to sink effortlessly. This freefall is a total surrender rewarded with the feeling of flight.
Nearing the bottom, I pike into a slow-motion layout flip, first to face up and see my buddy at the surface and then continuing around to observe the benthic life. A colony of brown garden eels retreat back into the sand, disappearing all at once. The weight of the water at this depth is somehow comforting.
A cacophony of sounds come from a nearby reef: the cavitation of snapping shrimps, the low grumble of a grouper, and the scraping sounds of parrotfish removing algae from corals. Vivid sounds fill my ears as I witness underwater interspecies communication.
A cleaner shrimp claps its claws to let fish know it’s open for business. I wonder, “If I hover weightless and inverted over the cleaning station would the cleaner shrimp and wrasses accept me into the reef community?” Half playing, I invert and try, but then I hear a high-pitched squeaking in my ears.
I push some air into my Eustachian tubes to balance the pressure. My ears feel fine, but the squeaking persists. The squeaks become whistles and clicks that grow louder, drowning out the sounds of the reef. Feeling the telltale pings of dolphin echolocation scanning my body, I imagine the dolphins are reading my bones and listening to my heartbeat.
On the edge of visibility a pod of Atlantic spotted dolphins comes into view, and their vocalizations feel pointed directly at me. A small dolphin calf races toward me, and then an adult catches up to overtake and redirect the calf back into the pod.
I frame the pod in my camera viewfinder, capture the moment, and then begin my ascent shrouded in dolphins. My buddy, who observes the whole dive from the surface, descends to meet me at about 15 feet (4.6 m). We make eye contact and ascend together. At the surface we exchange the OK sign while taking recovery breaths.
My earliest memory of freediving is doing vertical loop-de-loops as a child. After I learned how to properly equalize my ears, I enjoyed moving through water with some degree of disregard for the rules of gravity. Eventually I learned that freediving is a great way to approach and closely observe marine life underwater.
A freediver can move streamlined and quiet without bubbles. Certain wildlife situations can be disturbed by the sound of scuba exhaust bubbles, and the noise of bubbles gurgling past our ears prevents us from experiencing the incredible and sometimes subtle layers of sound underwater.
When attempting to observe fleeting marine encounters such as baitballs, freedivers have a fluid egress and ingress from a boat. One can slide in and out of a boat like a seal and quickly reposition for another drop.
When I am assigned to film marine mammals, there are certain kinds of shots I find to be best accomplished as a freediver. While swimming with my camera and holding my breath, I feel like the dolphins and whales seem to understand my limitations. I imagine they see how slow I am, and they understand that I can only go to a certain depth. They trust that relative to them I am almost feeble and nonthreatening. They assess my form and go about their business, letting me see their world.
While I may appear gawky next to a dolphin, I am considerably more streamlined as freediver than I am when using my scuba gear. As a freediver I have been able to weave through gorgonians and sea fans with my camera to capture the perspective of Caribbean reef sharks hunting within this dense topography.
Some years ago I traveled to Long Island, Bahamas, to film a commercial featuring William Trubridge freediving in Dean’s Blue Hole, which is 663 feet (202 m) deep. At that time Trubridge was the only human to swim deeper than 328 feet (100 m) without any gear — no fins, just one breath and a beautifully refined, supremely efficient swimming stroke.
Through my lens I saw him take five pulls and kicks and then freefall down into the darkness. I realized that all my years swimming with cameras had conditioned me to hold my breath well but nothing like what I witnessed while watching Trubridge swim. I later asked him for some guidance on how to improve my freediving abilities.
The first step is to find training partners. Rule number one in freediving is to never dive alone, even for training. Trubridge suggested I contact Ricardo and Claire Paris, PhD, who were also based in South Florida. Claire holds world records across several disciplines, and Ricardo was president of USA Freediving (Team USA) at the time. Luckily, they allowed me to join them and train on a regular basis between jobs.
Training with athletes entails working on technique and conditioning the body to improve performance and capacity in measurable ways. Conditioning for freediving involves developing tolerance to high levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in your system and working to improve your technique, mobility, and strength, with the goal of moving more efficiently through water.
After making gains in CO2 tolerance, I began to learn more about recognizing hypoxia and improving my mammalian dive reflex (MDR). Cool water on the face can trigger the MDR, but the more profound MDR response comes when the CO2 levels in your body rise and blood shifts from the extremities toward the vital organs.
Experienced freedivers embrace this feeling and recognize when it occurs. During a long swim you might feel fatigue or a lactic acid buildup when instead it is an MDR-induced blood shift. Experienced instructors and mentors can help guide you through these unfamiliar sensations.
Over time each area of improvement leads to substantial gains in overall freediving ability. From my time cave diving and swimming with large cameras while on scuba, my technique was bent knees and fins away from the bottom, which is a tendency I work to correct when training for dynamic apnea with bifins (DYNB).
We seem to talk to ourselves during the drills. My mantra might be, “Straighten your legs, kick from the hip, and point your toes.” Another day it might be, “I feel the blood shift, my legs are good, relax the neck, and let the blood from my torso be available to my brain.”
One day at the pool my training partners said that, based on how far I was swimming during our interval workouts, I could consider trying for U.S. Freediving Federation (USFF) Masters freediving records. In June 2024
I swam 554 feet (169 m) DYNB and 390 feet (119 m) DNF and set U.S. records for men over 50 years old. These efforts qualified me to represent the U.S.
at the 2025 CMAS (Confédération Mondiale Des Activités Subaquatiques) World Indoor Freediving Championship in Athens, Greece.
At the world championships event, there was great coordination between coaches, judges, safeties, and medical staff to provide a safe environment for athletes to push themselves to their limits. If someone is going to go right to the edge of their capabilities, this is the time to go for it.
Despite a long career of more than 40 years swimming with my cameras, I was still learning better ways to swim, breathe, and train. I could swim deeper and hold my breath longer in my 50s than I did in my 20s.
While it’s great to discover that I can still become a better freediver late in life, the most crucial thing I have learned is the importance for all freedivers to take a freediving course to stay current on all safety protocols. Core fundamentals include having a reliable rescue-trained buddy who adheres to the unwavering rule of “one up, one down” and understands methods of rescuing a freediver, how to protect their airway, the “blow, tap, talk” procedure, and in-water resuscitation, if needed.
If you are using cameras, how are you trimming the buoyancy? When diving deep with a camera, I want it slightly buoyant so I can ditch it if needed.
The international community has led to the creation of agencies and federations for training and competitions, which generate a great deal of knowledge that continues to be refined and disseminated.
For beginners and experienced divers alike, I highly recommend taking a freediving certification course to gain access to the latest thinking on safety protocols and techniques. There is always more to learn about how to breathe and prepare physically and mentally to have amazing freediving experiences.
© Alert Diver – Q1 2026