DIVE HAPPY

Ever wondered what it's like to try free diving? Turns out learning how to hold your breath for a long time is just the start of it.

Journalist Kate Rew gives an interesting account of trying free diving for the first time, deep within the glamourous confines of the 30 metres deep submarine escape tank in Gosport, England. The tank training is part of a comprehensive free diving course run by a company called Deeper Blue, who also organise trips for free divers to Egypt.

Freediving is a peculiar sport and this is its first skill: being able to stay under the water for long periods on just one lungful of air. Many fish stop at 25 metres but champion freedivers go to more than 150m, a depth at which water pressure compresses lungs to the size of a fist and they fill with blood plasma.

It sounds hellish, but it allows you to explore underwater without the noise and bulk of scuba kit and so get far closer to the fish. I'm on a new weekend course just outside Portsmouth run by Deeper Blue. It is designed to teach the basics of the sport, and those who take to it can move on to the company's longer courses in Dahab, Egypt. Real devotees talk about the sport in almost spiritual terms. 'It gets cold and dark down there,' says Emma Farrell, the freediver running the course. 'It turns you in on yourself. It's a bit like an acid trip - whatever your normal mindset is, is intensified.'

You can read the full article in The Observer.

Funnily enough, I met Kate on a diving press trip in Borneo a couple of years ago - she's the one in the photo at Mataking.

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