By 2007, Nick had abandoned making it as a professional actor. He didn’t have it in him to endure casting calls, which felt more like cattle calls. Twenty versions of him, all waiting their turn to sound way too enthusiastic about Kraft mac ’n’ cheese, or whatever comely cougar he was to bed on One Life to Live. He’d still stage the odd play with Akia, but as much as he loved the city, he craved a life infused with much more passion and adventure. That thirst for change, the desire for a new way of living, grew louder with each day. Meanwhile, all around him the ground was literally shifting. Williamsburg was in the midst of metamorphosis.
Real estate money had flooded the riverside. There would be new piers and sea walls. Crumbling factories and warehouses were repurposed and retrofitted into loft complexes. He especially hated the tasteless new build condos, which seemed to be spreading like bacteria. The waterfront, where Nick once roamed free, was fenced off.
In came the dot-commers and lawyers, editors, artists, architects, and young families. The influx, 90 percent of it white, transformed the look and feel of Williamsburg. They came along with an explosion of new bars and restaurants and, gasp, doormen, and rents skyrocketed as high as $4,000 a month. Old heads could moan and groan all they wanted. Bedford Avenue was suddenly the hottest street in the city, and the new Williamsburg even had a soundtrack. Bands like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Animal Collective, Interpol, Fischerspooner, and of course, TV on the Radio, were all from Williamsburg, and they helped their neighborhood become a national phenomenon. Tourists flocked to the bar downstairs, which was now called The Levee.
When Nick’s friends came through, they’d ask him for restaurant and nightlife recommendations. If Morgan was around, he’d laugh and take over. “Nick didn’t know where to go,” Morgan said. “He never went out!” Most of the time, Nick would sit in his avocado armchair, stay up late, and watch the world go by through his windows or from his rooftop, smoke cigarettes and spliffs, and listen to a fuzzy feed of NPR or the Yankees game. Or he’d listen to jazz records, write and draw in his journal, and try to figure out what to do next. One night his phone vibrated with a text from his sister at 1 a.m.
Are you awake? Can you talk?
By then Jen was a high-powered wedding planner at the Ritz-Carlton in Orlando. Her husband, Joe, was a pharmaceutical salesman and made good money too. They dressed dapper, voted Republican, and had a nice house in the suburbs. In other words, Jen had become Nick’s polar opposite, but they were close, and when Nick answered his phone, Jen was sobbing.
She’d been diagnosed with cervical cancer. The treatment would begin with a conization surgery to excise a piece of her cervix, so the bone could be biopsied. Then, depending on how many cancer cells they found, the second step was likely a hysterectomy. Joe had been oscillating from being a positive force of eternal loving support to crumbling from the sheer terror that the love of his life was dying. Even if she survived, they’d never have children.
Not that she’d ever wanted them. She and Joe loved their life. They went out, they traveled, they had plenty of cash at all times, but now she found herself mourning children she’d never wanted. Joe tried to comfort her, but his words were hollow and there were too damn many of them. She continued to do business and tried to muscle through it. Not long before the diagnosis, however, Ritz-Carlton had begun to require their wedding and event planners to be certified sommeliers. Her exam was a week away, and had been booked before all hell broke loose in her cervix. Now that conization procedure was coming up too, so why the hell was she still studying?
That night, at one in the morning, nothing made sense to her. What was the point of any of it? Joe certainly couldn’t figure it out. Her mother, Belinda, was busy projecting worst-case scenarios, and her dad was, well, Larry. He had his own problems. Specifically, his business was in a tailspin. He’d begun leveraging credit, taking out third and fourth mortgages on the house and the store’s property in the hopes of saving George’s Market. Which is how she ended up bawling into her flashcards, terrified and feeling more alone than ever until she called Nick. “He had this incredible gift,” she said. “He wouldn’t fill the space with words. He’d let me spill my guts and then he’d comfort me.”
“Jen, I love you. You got this,” he said. He did not advocate throwing in the towel on the sommelier exam. He didn’t advocate any approach at all. He let Jen dictate terms, and asked what she needed from him. And what she needed was to study the damn flash cards. She went through all one hundred of them, dictating the questions and answers to Nick, who wrote them down, then asked them at random.
What kind of grapes are grown in Bordeaux?
(cabernet sauvignon, merlot and sauvignon blanc)
What is maceration?
(the period of time the grape juice spends in contact with the skins and the seeds)
A kilderkin of beer has how many gallons?
(18)
In the Burgundy region of France, Pouilly-Fuissé has 100 percent of what grapes?
(chardonnay)
He quizzed her until the sun came up, while they joked and laughed about obscure wine trivia, about Larry, the new Williamsburg, and the tragicomedy that is life on earth. When they hung up she was at peace.
A week later their youngest sister, Katie, a high school senior, performed in a marching band competition near Gainesville, Florida. Nick came down for it and Belinda asked Jen to drive up so they could all be together, and to take her mind off things. She’d just had the conization biopsy and the surgeon had determined the cancer was too invasive for caution. She was told a hysterectomy was the only safe course of action. Jen was cranky, in pain, and too uncomfortable to sit on the hard bleachers with her parents, so she and Joe drifted to the concession stand. They were standing in line when Nick turned up.
“I ran to him, and he came towards me, and gave me the biggest hug of my life,” Jen said. “He just held me for like ten minutes, and told me I was going to be okay. The love and the support and whatever I needed that I couldn’t quite get from Joe at that time, he gave to me in that moment. And then we were watching Katie, and I was just standing there, and he put his arms around me from behind, and laid his head on my shoulder, and held me. There were no words. No words. But through his actions and his hug alone, it spoke a thousand words. He gave me that love and assurance. It was the most healing hug I’ve ever experienced in my life. It was this unconditional, amazing thing that helped me get through everything I had to get through. He was my rock.”
What Jen had to go through was a slalom course of prognoses and second opinions, prayer circles, healing sessions, and perhaps, a medical miracle. She never did have her hysterectomy and was soon cancer free. Within two years, Jen and Joe welcomed a baby daughter named Elizabeth into the world, and Nick became an uncle.
Around that time, Nick started attending services at a Catholic church two blocks from his apartment called Our Lady of Consolation. Lit by wrought-iron chandeliers crowned with candle-shaped lightbulbs, the room was filled with the melodic groan of a pipe organ, and perhaps twenty regulars seated among the thirty-odd rows of pews. Nick, the only young man in the nearly empty historic church, dressed for mass in an ill-fitting suit and thrift-store tie, and prayed with great intensity. A nineteen-year-old, platinum blonde, Polish American girl couldn’t help but notice him. He noticed her, too, and often tried to get her attention with a nod and a smile when he stepped to the altar for the sacrament. She ignored him every time. Her life was falling apart and the last thing she needed was a new friend.
For a while church became Nick’s antidote to a life that felt increasingly shallow and directionless. He’d begun working on Gossip Girl in 2009, another hit, but one he didn’t enjoy. Glamour and glitz still weren’t for him, and neither was the gathering hipster storm that engulfed Williamsburg. Nick’s apartment was his cave. His refuge.
He’d made several trips to the Czech Republic in his twenties, and his love of old Europe permeated his apartment. He stocked his fridge with vodka, kielbasa, and slivovitz, and fed the birds with stale bread on his fire escape. The apartment itself fit the bill. The ceiling tiles were warped, the floors splintering. The stove wouldn’t ignite without a jiggle on the gas line. There were six different locks on the front door, each with its own key. One weekend when Sol and Aaron were visiting, they woke up on Sunday morning only to see Nick walk out the door in his oversized blue suit with a bible under his arm. In the context of the Williamsburg zeitgeist, Nick was still a rebel. This time, that meant going old world. He stopped dating. His moral ground was shifting. He was becoming an anarchist monk.
And none of it helped. Work didn’t make him happy. Church didn’t fill the void completely. Lobster season was still on his radar, and he’d hang with the Bonzo crew every year, but it wasn’t enough. He needed a mission. Then late one night in the fall of 2011, four years after Jen’s cancer scare, he stumbled upon a Yahoo group called New York Area Freedivers. It was a forum for local spearfishermen and recreational freedivers, and to his delight he learned that they periodically went diving in an abandoned quarry in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Dutch Springs is a private half-mile-wide lake nestled along a green ribbon of low-lying hills, ancient oak trees, and historic wooden homes. Once a working quarry, in 1972 it was filled with water and became a mecca for scuba divers who came to explore a sunken chopper and Cessna, a school bus, an army truck, and other vintage manmade wrecks. New York Area Freedivers hit Dutch as well, and Nick asked if he could join them.
The next weekend he caught a ride from an attractive, athletic Long Island schoolteacher named Kelly Russell. She pulled up to his corner and honked her horn. Nick waved and hustled her way. He was tall and lean, and now had shoulder-length hair. He was dressed in rolled up jeans and flip-flops and had an apple in his mouth. “He was beautiful,” Kelly said.
Among the eight divers who would regularly join the group at Dutch was Meir Taub, an IT consultant in his late thirties who had been diving with the group since 2004. His interest in freediving was sparked by a friendly challenge to swim the length of a 25-yard pool underwater at a Vermont ski resort. He’d barely made 10 yards and couldn’t hold his breath for more than 30 seconds. When he got home he searched the web and found out about a guy named Martin Stepanek who held the world record in Static Apnea at the time at 8:06. Meir decided to take a course from Stepanek and his partner, Kirk Krack, in Florida. The whole experience was full of physiology, technique, and adventure and Meir was hooked.
By the time Nick showed up at Dutch Springs, Meir was one of the longest-tenured divers in the group, and he took it upon himself to watch newcomers and gauge their sense of safety. Nick knew nothing of their golden rule: one up, one down (when a diver always has a buddy watching him on the surface). He’d come along to dive at his own pace.
The group warmed up and started diving on a line attached to a buoy that went to a small depression in the lake—its deepest point, 32 meters below. Nick was bored waiting his turn, so he rocketed down to the muddy bottom and lay there looking up at the shimmering silver surface illuminated by the Indian summer sun, blowing bubble rings at Kelly, who was about to dive the line. He swam and popped up behind her and made her laugh, distracting her from her breathe up. She loved it, but it wasn’t exactly protocol. Meir watched from the corner of his eye, none too pleased.
Soon they ditched the line and began exploring the lake together, but instead of diving safely and waiting for one another on the surface, Nick called out “Follow me! Follow me!” It was impossible for Kelly to resist, and not just because Nick was cute, but because she saw something in him she hadn’t seen in any of the other divers. She saw a palpable joy. “The others were very technical, but he was very natural,” Kelly said. “It was almost like he merged with the water. It was pure poetry. He was very, very fluid. It was just so intuitive with him. It was second nature. The others were working, and he wasn’t working at all.”
Together they dove the chopper and the plane, soared over an old army truck, and lingered in the big yellow school bus, where Nick walked down the aisle pretending to be the driver and wagging his finger at imaginary kids. When the day was done, the divers gathered at nearby Wegman’s, a natural food store with a café and deli where they would refuel and talk diving. Nick’s antics had annoyed Meir, who saw them as reckless.
“So Nick, how long have you been diving?” he asked.
“My whole life, I guess,” he said.
“Have you ever taken a freediving class?” Meir asked. Nick glanced at Kelly.
“No. No class. I’ve just always been able to do it. It’s easy for me.”
“Right. Well, you need some training.” Nick couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Nick hadn’t been too impressed by Meir’s dives, and it ticked him off that this guy, who couldn’t hold a candle to him underwater, had the nerve to suggest training. “I put my life in your hands and you put your life in my hands when we do this,” Meir continued. “You have to understand the seriousness of that and you need to get trained so you know how to react appropriately in the event of an emergency.”
Meir suggested a course taught by a teacher in Fort Lauderdale named Ted Harty, an American record holder in Dynamic, a pool discipline. Nick researched the class online. He liked that Ted had a record and some impressive depth numbers, too. Then he read that students of his Level II class could dive to 100 feet and hold their breath for three minutes by the time they were through. Nick laughed. He could already do those things. Hell, he’d gotten his breath hold to over four minutes without any instruction at all.
He stared out into the Brooklyn night from his armchair. The window leading to his fire escape was cracked, and a chill in the air announced coming change. It was already late October. Leaves were turning gold and red. Dutch Springs would soon be closed until April. The dive season was almost over, and he’d only just begun. If he took the class he could at least go deep again. Spearfishing and lobster diving were fun, but he’d enjoyed the feeling of diving for diving’s sake, and Meir didn’t seem like such a bad guy. He was a little conservative, but he wasn’t saying don’t come back, he was saying take this course and let’s keep diving together. Nick considered his schedule. He’d be in Florida for the holidays. Why not fit in a class?
Born in Atlanta, Ted Harty was running a successful scuba shop on Marathon Key when he took his first freediving class in 2008. It ruined him for tanks. He’d always been competitive and the idea of measurable performances in freediving appealed to him. In his first class he held his breath for 2:45 and hit 75 feet, but, like Nick, he wanted more. After taking the course he also noticed for the first time how loud scuba divers were. He could hear their bubbles churning from around the corner, while he would glide down and hang with the fish before the bubbles scared them all away. When Kirk Krack offered Performance Freediving’s first-ever instructor program, Ted enrolled, and became one of PFI’s first certified instructors.
Ted could see Nick’s obvious talent right away, but he also noticed inefficiencies in his technique. He wasn’t as relaxed as he could be on his pull-downs, and if he relaxed his stomach and worked his kick cycles a bit better, he could conserve oxygen on his deep dives. Unfortunately, weather marred the course, so while they did the necessary pool work, and Nick managed to reach 30 meters (100 feet) on their only day of open-water training, the other two open-water days were canceled. Still, after being bored by it in Dutch Springs, Nick had become gripped by the challenge of line diving, and what he had learned in the classroom blew his mind. He never knew how dangerous he’d been. He was such a natural, he’d never calculated his surface and bottom times, and frequently dove alone. He hadn’t known about the mammalian dive reflex or how increased depth meant rising partial pressure of oxygen in the blood, or that it was possible to dive to 100 meters on one breath. That number stuck in his mind, from then on.
Also embedded within the course were references to freediving competitions, specifically Deja Blue, organized by Kirk and scheduled for the following April in the Cayman Islands. Nick was intrigued. Before the comp there would be weeks of training and ample opportunity to push his personal best in all six freediving disciplines. Nick hadn’t competed since he’d left the BMX world, and he was hungry for it. He told Ted he was interested in coming to Deja Blue, and if possible, he’d love to get some tips so he could train while back in Brooklyn. Ted offered to coach him, for a fee.
After the course Nick flew to Orlando to spend Christmas at Jen’s house, where her newborn Alexandra, Nick’s goddaughter, had lured their whole family south from Tallahassee. Inspired by his course, he cued up YouTube videos of freedivers while he rolled his famous gnocchi in the kitchen. His three sisters and stepfather, Fred, crowded around his laptop to watch. Belinda took a passing glance, poured herself a glass of wine, and retreated to the family room sofa. The videos were ethereal and thrilling, but Jen, Fred, and Belinda were concerned.
“Are you sure this is safe for your lungs?” Fred asked. “How well do you understand the physiology? What are the risks?”
“There’s nothing to worry about,” Nick said. “They taught us the physiology and it’s a lot less risky than driving your car to work. Statistically speaking.”
“You know he’s gonna do what he wants to do,” Belinda said, “and if he wants to kill himself and drive his mother crazy, let him do it!” Jen watched as her mother poured herself another glass. She was a nervous drinker and Jen could tell Nick’s new obsession frightened her. Later that night she took her brother aside.
“So this freediving thing, it’s something you really love to do?
“Yes,” he said. Jen smiled.
“Just…please be safe,” she said. Nick nodded. “Promise?” He nodded again. “Okay, because you know we love you.”
“I do,” he said. As they stood staring at one another in the hallway, a hungry Alexandra began wailing for her mother. Jen rolled her eyes.
“Good, I’m gonna go breast-feed now.” She hugged him tight and walked off.
Nick stayed in the dimly lit hall and watched from around the corner, as his family joked in the living room. While Jen picked up her ravenous baby and headed for privacy, he lingered, enjoying the scene. Belinda caught him staring and smiled. She’d never fully comprehend him, and was weary of trying to protect or influence him, but she loved him with every cell in her body. Nick knew that, and he cared deeply for his family, too, but he also understood that from then on he’d have to shelter them from the truth. If he was going to succeed as a competitive freediver, he was going to have to push himself and take risks they wouldn’t like or understand.
Nick returned home after Christmas and trained every possible moment—if nothing else to get that Blake Lively out of his mind as quickly as possible. He quit smoking cold turkey, and dropped his weed habit too. Alcohol was also verboten. Ted prescribed a series of diaphragm and lung stretches, which were to be done each morning. At night he performed a regimen of dry apnea walks, where after a two-minute breathe up, Nick would sit and hold his breath until the contractions rattled his ribs, which usually occurred in the second or third minute. That was his cue to stand and walk as far as he could on one breath, holding a gashed tennis ball in his hand, which he’d drop when he reached his limit. Then he’d walk back to the chair, breathe up for two more minutes, hold his breath again, pick up the tennis ball, and walk it even farther on. His apartment wasn’t big enough for apnea walks, so he did them on the street. When that got too easy, he began doing apnea lunges.
“Everything about freediving is tolerating extremes,” Ted told him during one of their early Skype sessions. “You have to tolerate low levels of oxygen, you have to tolerate high levels of CO2, and you have to tolerate high levels of lactic acid.” The lunges set fire to Nick’s quads, filling them with the cramping burn of lactic acid. All of it was painful.
There were pool workouts too. He began training two blocks away at the Metropolitan Pool, a historic brick bathhouse recently converted into one of Brooklyn’s fine public gym facilities. A classic natatorium built in the Art Deco style, it had tarnished bronze tiles that climbed toward a peaked glass roof. The pool’s grout could have used a scrub, but it was Nick’s kind of place. He would share the dressing room with old Polish men and Hasidic Jews, serious Speedo swimmers, and the elderly looking to maintain range of motion in their silvering years. He’d begin by practicing Static Apnea on the side of the pool, then dive to the bottom and lie flat below the swimmers who puttered and glided back and forth on the surface. Then he’d do one or two laps at a time on one breath. All of it worried the lifeguards, who were on alert whenever Nick turned up.
One night while he was doing an apnea walk, he came across a group of drunken students who watched him stroll, tennis ball in hand, while his diaphragm and chest heaved. He was walking over 90 meters at a time by then and was trying to get to 100 meters. “That dude is really creepy,” one of them said, loud enough for Nick to hear. Nick smiled and made the last 10 meters before hook breathing, seated on the sidewalk. He shared that story with Ted in an email, and also mentioned an interest in going for his first depth record. He’d looked it up and the American record in Constant Weight was 90 meters, held by Robert King. Nick hadn’t even passed 30 meters, but something told him that 91 was within reach.
Ted appreciated Nick’s confidence, but he also knew that breath hold alone doesn’t get a man deep. Equalizing becomes increasingly tricky the deeper one dives, and Nick had a lot to prove before Ted would take a statement like that seriously. First things first, Ted told him. Come back down to Fort Lauderdale, and finish your Level II training. Two weeks later, Nick landed in Florida.
Ted has an open-door policy for PFI alumni to join his students on open-water dives, and when Nick posted to the New York Area Freedivers forum that he was headed back to Fort Lauderdale, Meir decided to come along. They weren’t yet close, but Nick, ever frugal, wanted to share a hotel room. Meir agreed, but there was a catch; Nick would be arriving late at night and Meir, a light sleeper, insisted that he enter quietly so Meir could be rested for the dives.
When Meir woke up that morning, he found Nick sleeping in the entryway. There were two beds in the room, but he’d been so concerned about disturbing Meir that he opted to sleep on the floor, fully clothed. Meir felt like an asshole. Nick laughed it off. “I like sleeping on the floor,” he said with a yawn when he woke to a puzzled Meir peering down at him. Later that day, after a pool session, Nick was trying to figure out the Fort Lauderdale bus schedules so he could hit church the following morning.
“Nonsense,” Meir said. He hadn’t pegged Nick as religious, but growing up Orthodox Jewish imbued him with respect for those who believed. “I’d be happy to drive you to church.” Two days later, he did just that, and waited outside for Nick until the service was over.
Ted owned a thirty-five-foot boat, which he used to motor his students out to blue water from the Fort Lauderdale marina. Once clear of the shallows, Ted set a float in the drink and dropped a line from there with a weighted bottom plate, which he adjusted to their target depths. By the end of day three, Nick had no trouble tapping the plate at 40 meters. When he returned to Brooklyn he wrote about his experience on the East Coast Divers forum. His post was riddled with typos and misspellings, yet brimmed with excitement and wonder.
Hands down one of the BEST EXPERIENCES OF MY LIFE. As I drifted down in sink faze Ted’s words echoed, “If you have the proper head position you should be able to see the surface.” I tucked a bit more and the surface world revealed to me upside down was rippling with wind cresting waves rocking my buddies in its pitch and roll near the floats and here dives Ted to meet me at depth with a GoPro in one hand and his ever watchful eyes on me. And as the first time passing my previous bench mark of 30meters I could feel the weight of water really start to press in on my rib cage, again Ted’s words came to mind, “like a Pilsbury dough boy, soft.” Refering to the stomach and diaphgm, I relaxed and allowed it to be pressed in by the pressure, grouper calling up another mouth fill to equalize…From day one in his class I knew the way I would dive would never be the same and since then it has evolved in such a positive way that I couldn’t be happier with the results. I have taken Ted on as my private coach training for the last three weeks and I have seen my performances increase significantly in that time. Goals that I set day dreaming at work turn into reality when I get in the pool or ocean…
Around that same time, Nick shared his desire to chase King’s record with Meir and Kelly. Kelly was a believer, but Meir was more skeptical. He’d seen Nick dive to 40 meters, but Meir was in IT. He was more pragmatist than dreamer, and the data said that Nick would have to accumulate a lot more experience as a competitive freediver before he could snatch a record like that. It was February 2012, and the first time Nick had ever dived along a line was the previous October. Nobody, no matter their talent, could get to 90 meters that fast.
One night Kelly and Meir were gossiping about Nick’s quest online. Kelly understood Meir’s point, but her intuition told her that Nick was special. If anybody could get there, he could. She suggested a wager. Lunch at Wegman’s. The next day, Meir called Nick and confessed that he had a betting interest in his record attempt. “Look man, I don’t think you’ll get there this fast,” he said, “but I’d hate myself if I didn’t do my best to help you try. From now on, I’m your training partner. Whatever you need, and whenever you need it, I’m your guy.”
By then Nick had bought a monofin and melted the foot pockets for a snug fit. He’d built his own neck weight, and he bought a custom freediving wetsuit made to measure too, but the Metropolitan Pool wouldn’t let him practice Static any longer and they insisted he only swim one length at the most on a single breath. Meir, who lived in Flatbush, knew of a pool at a Hebrew Educational Society Rec Center much deeper in Brooklyn at the end of the L train line in Canarsie. That’s where Nick trained.
Most days he’d catch an early train from the Bedford station and nestle between snoozing passengers heading home from Manhattan after their graveyard shifts. After a few stops, the L climbed out of the underground and onto elevated rails above Broadway Junction. From there it was all rooftop views of antiquated stone and brick relics, iron bridges, onion-domed Orthodox churches, and stained-glass subway stop windows. This was old Brooklyn, the way it had always been, and Nick liked watching it rumble by.
The pool was only four lanes wide but Meir and Nick were soon on a first-name basis with the lifeguards, who always let them have a lane of their own. Meir would lean on a kickboard, and safety from above as Nick did a series of breath-hold lap swims. He’d do 25 yards at a pop, then 50 and 75, with a two-minute break in between, and those were warm-ups. After that he would relax completely and try to hit 100 yards and eventually 125, on a single breath.
In between pool workouts he amped up the dry apnea work. He’d do his stretches and run through what freedivers call training tables: a series of breath holds designed to build tolerance for hypoxia and high levels of CO2. He was still doing the apnea walks and lunges, too, and he’d climb the stairs in his building while holding his breath, or go for a jog, and alternate between breathing normally and holding his breath for thirty-second intervals. Sometimes he’d push himself to a “brownout.” He wasn’t ashamed. Many a pair of underpants had been soiled on the road to freediving fame. He augmented it all with a strict alkaline diet.
Ted scheduled the work, and Nick reported back via email or Skype. Each week he would ask for more drills, hoping to increase his workload. Ted told him to relax and take his time. “I’m a competitive freediver, and I would never train that hard,” Ted told him, but Nick wouldn’t listen. He always wanted more.
At the end of March, Meir, Nick, and Ted reunited at Dean’s Blue Hole to train before heading to the Caymans. Nick showed up on the island with two bags full of dive gear, seventeen Clif Bars he’d smuggled from Craft Services at work, one shirt, and a single pair of shorts. While some found the darkness of the hole foreboding, Nick took to it without hesitation. It felt good to get out of the pool and dive deep again. It felt natural.
Between dives, Ted told him it’s an athlete’s breath hold and ability to equalize that dictate how deep he can go. Robert King’s American record in Constant Weight at 90 meters would require a three-minute active breath hold, which meant that Nick would have to work up to close to a six-minute Static to have a legitimate shot. But six-minute Static breath holds aren’t rare at the elite level, and by the time Nick landed in Long Island, he was almost there. What nobody knew—not Ted, Meir, or Nick—was whether he’d be able to equalize to such a depth. To do that he’d have to master the three-stage mouthfill, aka the Frenzel-Fattah technique, which was once taught only to experienced and elite freedivers. By 2012, it was shared far and wide by the majority of instructors to new students without hesitation. Although the prevalence of lung squeezes had started to rise at competitions as a result, sidelining competitors for a day or two, few athletes, if any, considered them life-and-death dangerous.
Ted started Nick off slowly and did his best to temper his perspective. “I’m not saying you can’t break the record, but it is a totally unreasonable expectation,” he said as they sat on the edge of the platform, staring into inky blue, watching wisps of white sand fall over the edge of the bluffs below.
“Nice pep talk. You’re supposed to be coaching me,” Nick said.
“I’m just saying it’s unreasonable,” Ted said as he lowered the plate to 50 meters. Over the next four days, Ted kept dropping the plate with every dive, and Nick kept tapping it, always pushing Ted to drop it farther than he wanted. When Ted wanted to drop the plate five meters, Nick pushed for ten. When Ted thought two or three would do, Nick asked for at least five. By the end of the trip word had started to filter to other divers around the hole that there was a new American kid in the mix who was no joke. Among those in the area were Ashley and Ren Chapman. Ashley was training for her upcoming attempt on the women’s Constant No Fins world record, and though they wouldn’t officially meet until the Cayman Islands, they noticed Nick.
Nick loved everything about Long Island. Its rustic simplicity, its wooden churches, its bathtub-warm turquoise waters, and the offshore reefs teeming with lobster. After training he’d dive for lobster, just like he did on Marathon Key. This was the life he was meant to be living, he thought. He was in his element, but he’d started to sour on Ted, confessing to Meir at their last dinner on the island that he suspected Ted might be intentionally hamstringing him. “Think about it,” Nick said, while sipping a Kalik. “He’s a competitor. He doesn’t want me to get the record because he wants it for himself.”
Ted claims he was always supportive, though he’d become alarmed by Nick’s approach. “Nick was excited. He crushed it, and I supported him,” Ted said. “I wanted him to do well, but the more time I spent with him the more I realized that he just doesn’t listen.” Ted was trying to slow Nick down, because he knew that if he didn’t have his mechanics together he might get a lung squeeze, which would limit what he could do in the Caymans. Meir squeezed in Dean’s Blue Hole, and had to stop diving because of it, so Ted’s wasn’t a remote concern. That’s why he asked Nick to repeat dives at 50, 55, and 60 meters, before he dropped the plate farther. As Kirk had always emphasized, Ted felt Nick should own each depth before making the next jump. Nick was impatient because he was a natural, and every dive only emphasized that point. He could hear his uncle’s words echo in his brain. He was born for this shit, and all he wanted was to go deeper.
Nick hit 70 meters on their last day in the hole, yet Ted still didn’t believe Nick would get the record. As depths increase, each new meter is exponentially more difficult than the last, and 21 meters was a hell of a gap to jump in just a few weeks.