One Breath

  Copyright © 2016 by Adam Skolnick

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Crown Archetype and colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9780553447484

  eBook ISBN 9780553447491

  Cover design by Elena Giavaldi

  Cover photograph by Martin Strmiska/Alamy

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: Dean’s Blue Hole, Long Island, Bahamas November 17, 2013

  Chapter 2: Water Child

  Chapter 3: What Is Freediving?

  Chapter 4: Punk-Ass Vegans

  Chapter 5: Caribbean Cup 2014, Roatan, Honduras

  Chapter 6: Revolution

  Chapter 7: Caribbean Cup 2014, Roatan, Honduras

  Chapter 8: Brooklyn Rising

  Chapter 9: Caribbean Cup 2014, Roatan, Honduras

  Chapter 10: Dive Yourself Free

  Chapter 11: Deja Blue

  Chapter 12: Dive Bum Chronicles

  Chapter 13: Sardinia, Italy: 2014 Aida Team World Championship

  Chapter 14: Kerry Hollowell Investigates

  Chapter 15: One-Hundred-Meter Man

  Chapter 16: Bloody Water

  Chapter 17: Nick’s Last Days

  Chapter 18: Nick Mevoli’s Last Dive

  Chapter 19: Vertical Blue 2014, Long Island, Bahamas

  Epilogue

  Photo Insert

  Acknowledgments

  For his family, and his many tribes

  The warm Atlantic sloshed in Nicholas Mevoli’s ears as he floated into the competition zone at Dean’s Blue Hole. He looked calm, but appearances can be deceiving. When Vertical Blue kicked off he had ambitions for a bronze medal and two more American records. Yet after a year of intense preparation and winning an overall gold in another competition only weeks earlier, plus silver at the world championship a month before that, he’d proceeded to flub every single dive that week. This was the Wimbledon of freediving. Aside from worlds, it was the only competition that mattered to him, and most others in the sport, and Nick was out of juice. Every muscle in his body hurt. Even his lungs hurt, but he wasn’t about to give up. It was game day, and he was preparing to descend to 72 meters, or 240 feet, and back on a single breath.

  “Six minutes!” announced Sam Trubridge, a theater director from Auckland, New Zealand, and the older brother of William Trubridge, the greatest freediver of them all. Standing on the platform, Sam loomed over Nick, who lay on his back, clipped to the competition line. His eyes stayed mostly closed, but when he opened them they flashed with focus and determination.

  The competition zone was delineated by a set of white PVC pipes that formed a 6-meter square within the dark blue of the hole. Inside were a photographer, a videographer, and three judges, including lead judge Grant Graves, one of the longest-tenured professionals in the sport. Also within the zone were five safety divers clad in long bi-fins, led by Nick’s friend, Ren Chapman, a former college baseball star from Wilmington, North Carolina. It was the safety divers’ job to meet the athletes once they reached a depth of 30 meters while ascending from their dive. That’s where pressure underwater shifts, and where lactic acid buildup and hypoxia (lack of oxygen) can begin to cause problems.

  Clinging to the floating boundaries were a handful of fans and several of Nick’s rivals. Folks like Mike Board, forty-four, the UK record holder and a former Royal Marine. Half-Chinese, half-English, six feet tall and all muscle, Mike patrolled the infamous Baghdad Airport Road as a private military contractor during the Iraq War, and earned good money dodging suicide attacks and ferrying high-dollar clients to the safety of the Green Zone. Afterward, he used his earnings to build a flourishing freedive center in Indonesia’s Gili Islands, which enabled him to train year round. In terms of global standing within the sport, Mike and Nick were among the elite national record holders, and both hoped to be contending for world records soon. Also in the water was Junko Kitahama, another national record holder from Japan. She watched him carefully. Their conversation on the beach had thrown her and she was worried.

  “Five minutes!”

  So were his friends and family. They were aware that Nick was hurting, and they also knew that when others took breaks, he doubled down on training. While many kept a less ambitious competition schedule, Nick Mevoli took every opportunity to dive. That’s what made him the best American freediver in less than two years of competition. But mulling past victories wasn’t going to help him now. Frustrated, he clenched his eyes tight to silence his brainspeak, to switch off and calm down. He took a cleansing breath and leaned back, submerging his face, stimulating the nerves around his eyes, and sparking the mammalian dive reflex, a physiological response that, if developed, helped an average man become Aquaman, capable of freediving to unheard of depths for minutes at a time, without feeling any anxiety or the slightest urge to breathe.

  “Four minutes!”

  He inhaled long and slow and exhaled twice as slow, twice as calm. Each time purging his system of negativity and carbon dioxide, the buildup of which spurs that urge to breathe and can turn a relaxed, peaceful adventure into excruciating toil. If a stray bolt of fear bloomed in his mind, he’d slow his breath down even more. That was the only way to lower his heart rate, and keep his demons at bay.

  “Three minutes!”

  He knew them well, his demons. They’d trailed him his entire life. They fueled him. His broken home, his feelings of inadequacy, his frustration with a society attuned to greed and waste, were what drove him into the water in the first place. They also blessed him with uncommon generosity. On land, Nick wasn’t the fierce competitor he was on the line, and beneath all of that anxiety, pain and loss, brainchatter and seawater sloshing in his ears, he knew something else, too: he had one more dive left in him, and he was going to tear that Velcro tag from the bottom plate, come up clean, and claim his record.

  “Two minutes!”

  He visualized the dive. Something his friend, William Trubridge, a fifteen-time world record holder and owner of Vertical Blue, taught him when they’d roomed together during the Caribbean Cup in Honduras the previous May, where Nick made the dive of his life and became the first American to swim to 100 meters on a single breath. He used a monofin that day. On Sunday, November 17, he would dive without fins, which ratcheted up the difficulty several degrees. Will stood on the beach, barefoot as usual, watching Nick breathe up. Typically he stayed away from the hole when he wasn’t diving, but he didn’t miss Nick’s dives. Nobody in the history of the sport had gotten to 100 meters so fast, and Will knew he was witnessing someone special, someone capable of breaking world records one day and going deeper than any human had before.

  “One minute!”

  As the clock ticked below thirty seconds, Nick’s breathing pattern changed and he began sipping the air, attempting to fill his lungs to the limit—from the depth of his diaphragm to those little-used air pockets between and behind the shoulder blades—and in so doing, pack as much oxygen into his system as possible. He would need it. If all went according to plan, he wouldn’t breathe again for nearly three minutes.

  —

  DEAN’S BLUE HOLE bloomed onto the freediving scene in 2005 when Will began living and training there. At the time he was not yet a champion, but an aspirant frustrated by the lack of accessibility to deep water and good conditions on a consistent basis
. He found both on Long Island, Bahamas, and within a few short years, he became one of the best, if not the best freediver on earth. Freedivers soon flocked to train alongside him, and those that were instructors brought students. That’s how Nick found it in 2012, when he was about to come out of nowhere to break his first American record.

  Eighty-one miles long but less than four miles across at its widest point, Long Island is splayed like a twisted egg noodle between the frothing blue Atlantic Ocean and the placid, turquoise Caribbean Sea. Etched from limestone by wind, surf, and rain, its stubby hills and plains are blanketed in thick, tropical scrub rustling with wild boar and feral cats, stitched with mangroves, and blessed with a series of exquisite, virgin beaches.

  On his maiden voyage in 1492, Christopher Columbus navigated the northern tip of Long Island (he named it Fernandina), anchoring on the Caribbean side of what became known as Cape Santa Maria. A single strip of asphalt leads from there toward the southern terminus, and after about an hour’s drive, in the town of Dean’s, a gravel and dirt road branches east over low-lying hills and around a bend to Will’s beloved blue hole, where the wind is almost always muffled and the current ever gentle, even in stormy weather.

  That’s because it’s sheltered by a concave semicircle of thick limestone bluffs that rise over fifty feet high. Its insides, grooved with giant primordial brush strokes, are drilled with shallow caves and punctuated by phallic stalactites that dangle over a sea so dark blue it has no business being just three steps from a silky white sand beach. Where Will stood, watching, as the clock wound down on Nicholas Mevoli. Sam ticked off the seconds: “10, 9, 8…” When he got to zero, Nick submerged, face first with his arms extended. He looked like a human arrow shooting into the darkness.

  Dean’s Blue Hole is an underwater cavern flipped vertically, shaped like a carafe. As Nick swam, he passed a rugged reef, which sprouted from sloping white sand that led to a ring of sheer limestone 10 meters below the surface. He’d reached the rim of the hole where sand spilled over the edge in a series of mesmerizing sandfalls that look exactly like a photo negative of a waterfall. Within five powerful breaststrokes those cliff walls receded beneath a sloped ceiling where small schools of giant tarpon or silver barracuda often hunkered in the shadows. After another few strokes and another 10-meter drop there was a second set of cliffs, and the walls receded again. Soon the hole was darker than midnight, and about twice as wide as the entire cove appears from the surface. The rim of the hole has a 35-meter diameter. Below 20 meters, the diameter is estimated at more than 150 meters. Nick had stopped swimming by then. His arms at his side, his chin tucked, he became as streamlined as possible. It was time to freefall. The part of a dive that feels like floating through outer space. He closed his eyes and surrendered to the soft, slow sink into dreamtime.

  —

  AT 202 METERS, Dean’s Blue Hole is the deepest of its kind in the world. Only one diver, Jim King, has ever been to the bottom and made it back alive. King pulled it off in 1994 by breathing a safe mixture of gases from his open-circuit scuba system. He found a pyramid of sand, built up from the sandfalls, and a tidal current suggesting that through one of the limestone caves was a passage to the Atlantic, which helped explain why the hole wasn’t completely filled with that sand that never stops falling. Of those inclined to wear tanks, only an experienced tech diver willing to breath helium can make it back from such depths, because beyond 60 meters, air is lethal. But tech divers aren’t the only ones who can trump recreational scuba divers. Experienced freedivers like Nick reach depths most scuba divers will never know, and they do it on one breath.

  Despite its surreal beauty, many locals don’t go near Dean’s Blue Hole, and if they do, they certainly don’t swim to the center. The island’s original inhabitants, the Lucayan people, told a myth of the Lusca, a Loch Ness–type creature that lives below, and will rise up and take down anyone who dares tempt him. Today, locals often swear that unpredictable whirlpool currents arise like vertical riptides and can take a diver down without warning.

  The fearful point to lives lost as proof. Three tourists from Nassau died there in 2009. That tragedy unfolded when one of them lost her footing. She’d been strolling the shallows and didn’t realize how close the shore was to the lip of the hole. She couldn’t swim, so her daughter dove in to rescue her, and soon both were panicked and dragging each other down. Instead of running or calling for help, the third woman dove in, too. All three died that day.

  Then in 2012, Theron Mailles, a nineteen-year-old local and gifted lobster diver, lost his life on Bahamian Mother’s Day, while his whole family was at the beach celebrating. The prevailing belief is that he was strapped with too much weight, blacked out at or near the surface after repeated dives, and nobody saw him slip below. By the time they realized he was gone, he was already spiraling to the bottom. His bones lie there still.

  When Nicholas Mevoli arrived on the beach on the morning of November 17, he slipped into his wetsuit not far from a plaque bearing the names of the three women lost in 2009, and he wasn’t in great spirits. He’d been on the island since October, living in a rented house, and training with New Zealand’s Jonathan Sunnex, aka Johnny Deep. When they arrived, Johnny and Nick were equals. Johnny was also an up-and-comer and an elite diver, yet while he and Mike Board had progressed steadily, Nick had not.

  Just two days before, his attempt to reach 95 meters in a different freedive discipline called Free Immersion had gone awry when he had to be assisted to the surface, blood dripping from his mouth. Furious, he screamed and cursed, certain he had blown his left eardrum, an injury similar to one that ended his competition after just one dive the year before. As he sulked on the beach afterward, he understood where he went wrong.

  “I wasn’t relaxed on the way down and I lost air,” he said, “and kept going instead of turning around. I just wanted to get there. Fucking stupidity.”

  Though Nick was still green enough to be prone to such rookie mistakes, he was accomplished. He’d won medals and had his one American record, but his preseason goal had been to break all the American depth records, and he hadn’t achieved it yet. Vertical Blue was the final competition of the year—his last chance—and disqualification would be a gut punch. Lucrative sponsorships in freediving are rare, and Nick, like most divers, was self-funded. A prop man in New York film and television production, he’d spent $34,000, his life’s savings, traveling and competing in 2013 alone. Right or wrong, if he didn’t manage at least one other record at Vertical Blue before diving back into months of wage labor, he would consider his entire year a failure.

  He was certain the competition doctor, Barbara Jeschke of Germany, would disqualify him when she examined him later that day, but she told him that his ear was sound, and he never complained about his lungs. If she had placed her stethoscope on his back and listened to him breathe, she might have heard the rattling of edema, thanks to yet another lung squeeze—what happens when capillaries hemorrhage blood and plasma into the alveoli (the lung’s air sacs), often causing damage to the tissue. Nick had several lung squeezes over the previous two years, and like most freedivers he treated them like a nuisance that hindered training. Few took them seriously and nobody considered them fatal. After all, the alveoli aren’t one big sac, but resemble a bunch of grapes, each berry capable of oxygenating blood through its own membrane. The prevailing thought was that even if a few berries were bruised, the rest should function just fine. Which is probably why Nick never told her he’d been spitting blood all afternoon.

  She cleared him.

  The following evening he attended a potluck dinner at Greenwich Lodge, a fly-fishing compound twenty minutes from Dean’s Blue Hole near Deadman’s Cay, where Ren and his safety team stayed. Such meals are a staple of the sport’s competitions and several of the athletes spanning sixteen countries were there, frying fish they’d speared themselves, making rice and salad, playing guitar, and chilling out in a spacious lobby lounge that spilled onto
a wrap-around deck overlooking the mangroves and the Caribbean Sea beyond. Nick sipped a cold Kalik—a Bahamian lager—with dinner, and his light brown eyes sparkled with calm and good humor. He looked confident, ready, content. His eyes were lying.

  Nick and Johnny shared a rental car as well as a house on Long Island, and as they loaded their gear on the morning of November 17, Johnny offered a piece of advice. “If the dive doesn’t feel right at any point,” he said, “stop the dive.” There is only so much one can hide from a roommate, and the fact that Nick was hurting was not lost on Johnny, who doubled as a sought-after instructor. In a sport with a slim margin for error, Nick’s was nonexistent. When Nick saw Junko on the beach at the check-in station moments later, he gave her a long, warm hug and said something that would stick with her.

  “I hope I see you again,” he said, unsure.

  “What are you talking about?” she asked, startled.

  “I thought…um…aren’t you leaving today?” he stammered.

  “Yes, but I dive right after you. I’ll see you on the beach later.” Distracted, he turned and strolled toward the sea.

  —

  “THIRTY METERS, thirty-five meters, forty meters.” Sam’s voice rang out as a swirling wind whipped the sixteen national flags strung above the hole. Spectators stood on the beach or clung to the floating boundaries as they listened, rooted, and hoped. Junko was on the platform behind Sam, literally on deck, tracking her friend’s progress.

  Cheers of “Come on, Nick,” and “Let’s go, Nick,” rang out as Sam squinted at his sonar feed and announced each new depth with authority.

  “Fifty-five meters, sixty meters!” All was progressing smoothly until Nick hesitated at 68 meters. “Looks like he’s turning around,” Sam announced as the audience groaned. Several seconds passed, an eternity in freediving, as Sam waited for Nick to ascend. He didn’t budge, and when he did start moving, he wasn’t heading for the surface. “Wait, he’s still…yes he’s descending again.”