Nick Pelios
Freediver, Creator
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Nick Pelios
Freediver, Creator
In his book "Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves", author James Nestor researched the history of freediving, its modern state, as well as how that's connected to our own existence. In a recent podcast, he spoke about the Ama divers that he met in Japan and their perception of competitive diving.
In the past, about 400-500 years ago, the largest fishing fleet in the world was this group of Japanese women called Ama, and they just spent their lives, from the time they were teenagers until they were very old, harvesting urchins and abalone and fish, all those good things on the seafloor. All of the pearl divers from the past, those were all freedivers, sponge divers in Greece, all freedivers, the Vikings were pretty good freedivers… A year and a half ago I went to Japan and actually found some of these Ama divers who actually do this for a living. One of them was 82 years old and she'd been diving every day since she was 16, and she was just like the biggest badass you've ever seen.
So it was great to see that they were keeping the tradition alive, at least for now, and see these people that are just so intimately connected to the ocean. It was really interesting to see their approach compared to competitive freedivers. The Ama were able to do phenomenal things but they didn't have this weird drive, they just seemed more at one with the ocean. You know, the Ama in all of their recorded history, and there's quite a lot of it, there's no record of them ever competing, and there’s no record of them ever having an accident, ever blacking out or dying from doing this. I met half a dozen Ama who had been literally diving since they were teenagers, every day, and they were in their 70s and 80s. So, this stuff can be practiced in a sane manner, and they just think competitive diving is the stupidest thing of all! It would be like competitive yoga or something, like seeing how far your back can bend before you break it! Their respect for the ocean and their place in the ocean really added a different element and a different layer to freediving. It was that sort of freediving, this respectful, meditative freediving that I really glommed on to and try to explore in the book.