Roni Essex
Freediver, Spearo, Creator
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Roni Essex
Freediver, Spearo, Creator
Maui-born, freediver and spearo, Kimi Werner followed in her father’s footsteps and got hooked to the ocean. Distinguished by her exceptional ability to hold her breath for more than four minutes in order to hunt for food, she has managed to become a US National Spearfishing Champion as well as a highly sought-after speaker. During a TedX talk in Maui, Kimi spoke of the importance of being "relaxed" at sea, something which proved very helpful when she encountered a big white shark. Here's what happened.
"The best advice I was ever given about freediving, came from World Champion freediver Martin Stepanek, right before I took my personal best dive. He said to me “when you feel the need to speed up, slow down”. These words could not be more true. So many times, when something goes wrong, when fear kicks in, or when you’re underwater and you simply realize how far away you are from the air, it can be so natural to want to react by speeding up, kicking harder, swimming faster, and trying to get back to safety sooner. But it's actually those precise moments when you should slow down.
Moving faster underwater takes more energy, raises your heart rate and you can quickly burn through all of that oxygen you have saved up from that single breath of air you took at the surface. Slowing down conserves your oxygen, keeps your heart rate low, but most importantly it allows you to be calm enough to see things clearly so that you can make good decisions. This advice is what allows me to hold my breath for over four minutes and 45 seconds, without showing any signs of hypoxia or oxygen deprivation. It also allows me to swim to depths of 159 feet and return to the ocean surface, slowly and safely, but it’s helped me in some other situations too.
While on a research voyage, I was getting ready to do a free dive and I had my head out of the water, as I was fixing my mask. My friend Morgan started shaking me and warning me, and when I turned around I saw the biggest great white shark I had ever seen. Had I not become used to staying calm in the face of fear, I probably would have done exactly what I see people do in movies, scream “shark”, swim backward, and frantically splashed my way back to the boat. I’m really glad I didn't do that. The clarity I got from slowing down and staying calm was basically just enough to tell me that I can't out-swim a great white shark. And so instead I swam towards her, and when I did, she backed off.
Now, this started to make sense to me as a hunter, because when I spearfish I never swim directly at my prey. If I do, it will surely push them away from me. So instead, I pretend to hide, I pretend to be scared, I act like I'm shy, I turn away from them because that will pick their curiosity and bring them right in.
So knowing that a shark is a bigger fish, I try to apply the same theory, but use the opposite strategy. And anytime that she swam up towards me, I made sure to swim down directly towards her and we got into a rhythm of doing this, to the point where she slowed down - in fact, her tail almost stopped moving. And what had started as one of the scariest moments of my life, ended up being one of the most beautiful. This truly reconfirmed to me that so many times, when we are under pressure, the very things that we tell ourselves we’re supposed to do, are actually the opposite of what we should do".