Kelly passed away on 11 September 2008.

Marineland in Napier looks the way you think a childhood memory or a postcard from the 1970s should look. It is sea blues, washed out from the summer sun; Pohutukawa trees in bloom.

It smells of fishy wharves and sea salt and wet togs; of ice cream. People are friendly here. “i know we’re a bit fishy smelling here at Marineland, but we’re friendly. Ask us anything and if we know the answer we’ll tell you, and if we don’t we’ll make it up,” says Amanda Milne, keeper and retail manager, smiling and waving at the crowd from the stage behind the dolphin pool. We in the grandstand wave back and smile. The last dolphin in captivity in the country grins, or we like to think it does.

“Did you know?” quizzes a sign on the side of the pool, “that dolphins have no sense of smell?” no, i didn’t. i also didn’t know that in human years, Kelly, the last dolphin in captivity in new Zealand, is 160 years old. i suspect them of having made this up.

The dolphin grins, as we think dolphins do.

in the old days, the keepers wore red shorts, red shirts and bright white socks, up to the knees. They look, in the photographs, as they had been imported from a Butlin’s holiday camp. a Miss New Zealand worked at Marineland. She added a bit of glamour.

The Queen came, with the duke. Derek Nimmo came, so did Rolf Harris and Belinda Todd.

Nobody would come here now for a photo op. in the files at the museum at Napier is a photo. “Zara the dolphin zooms down the side of Napier’s Marineland pool yesterday towing [in a little boat] four-year-old Michelle Robson, daughter of dolphin trainer, Mr Bruce Robson.” The date is March 30, 1966.

The dolphins used to wear funny paper party hats. “We wouldn’t do that now,” says Gary Macdonald, Marineland’s manager. He started here in 1972. He was on the boat the day the last two dolphins, Shona and Kelly, were caught, on December 13, 1974. Did he think now it was demeaning to put silly hats on animals? “No, they looked cute. They didn’t know they looked silly.” While we are having this conversation, a man has come to paint the Christmas decorations on Marineland’s front windows: a seal and a dolphin, cavorting, and “they’ve put hats on them! Oh my God!” says Macdonald.

He is a thoughtful man, a kind man, who is a pragmatist. He has heard everything that has been said about Marineland before.

He wept “of course I did” when Shona, the second-to-last Marineland dolphin, died on April 7, 2006. He always thought Kelly would die first. He had drawn up a plan, made arrangements to have the last dolphin euthanized, if it came to that, if she pined so badly her life wasn’t worth living. He says, “Some people think the songs of the humpback whales contain the history of time, [something] like Homer’s Iliad.” He doesn’t know; this could be true but probably isn’t. He thinks dolphins do have an empathy with humans, or some humans. Or it could be that this is an extension of the empathy humans have for dolphins. “Which is amazing after all the things we’ve done to them.” He doesn’t think, surely, that they have some sort of collective memory of the things humans have done? Of course not, he says, and laughs at such silliness.

He has heard it all before.

He keeps an old clipping from a science journal pinned to his office wall. The headline: Hedgehog’s Brain More Complex Than Dolphin’s. An excerpt: “It is not true that they [dolphins] are by nature especially friendly to humans.” That is one of Macdonald’s little tricks. Marineland, like memory, plays tricks. People who were last here as children say, “What happened to the killer whale?” There never was a killer whale. They say, “What happened to the stingray?” There never was a stingray. There was a drainhole cover with a pipe that looked, if you squinted in the right way, with the summer sun in your eyes, a bit like a stingray. People get quite aggressive about these memories being challenged. They want to believe what they thought they remembered about Marineland. This is what I will remember about Marineland. Makea the Californian sea lion came out and did a behavior which was praying to the big sea lion in the sky for sun. And the sun came out.

REGAN BECKETT, the senior keeper, came here at the age of 15 as a volunteer and is still here 23 years later.

“I’m not really a water person,” he says. His mum was one of the ticket office ladies; his dad had a cattery. Most of the staff began as volunteers. Macdonald gets letters all the time: “I want to come and work at Marineland because I love animals.” He is never snooty about this because, when you think about it, that is a very good qualification for wanting to work with animals.

When you work with animals you must not call what they do “tricks.” They are behaviors.

“What we ask the animals to do are natural behaviors,” says Beckett. He has a whistle called a bridge which works like a high frequency dog whistle. When the trainers want Kelly to do the behaviour ” which is lying on her back and swimming ” they are encouraging her, with a reward of a fish, to do a behavior which, in the wild, is designed to dislodge parasites. She will also, sometimes, do an unnatural behavior which is mimicking another species of dolphin, the spinner.

Bottlenose dolphins are supposed to be easier to train; common dolphins like Kelly have been regarded as difficult. The bottlenoses, says Macdonald, are like Flipper and “they’re bigger, stronger, more agile and probably quicker on the uptake.” He was told the common couldn’t be trained. “They’re supposed to be flighty and fragile animals and, to be honest, the early years probably reflected that.” There was no manual on how to train a dolphin when Macdonald started. He could, no doubt, write one now, but there would be little demand. But here is how you train a common dolphin to do a spinner dolphin behavior. “The spinning is a trained behavior for Kelly. The spinners do it naturally and very high. Common dolphins need to be taught how to do it. Once they do, they seem to enjoy it, though. How do you train it? The dolphin sits in front of you (in the water, of course) and you use their pectoral flippers to gently turn them around. Reward (fish) and repeat and after a while the dolphin will do a spin on its own.

Then you put it to a signal and, using your hand as a target (for the dolphin to touch), you get it to spin while lifting itself. It takes a while, but this is what I mean by starting simple and developing from there.” Dolphins can be trained to do entirely unnatural behaviors, like leaping out of the water on to a stage. Kelly doesn’t do this.

Macdonald doesn’t like to see dolphins doing it: it is like watching a fish out of water.

On our first day in sunny Napier, at Marineland where the murals behind the stage show memories of summer childhoods, washed out sea blues and Pohutukawa trees in bloom, the Rush Munro’s ice cream shop is closed, due, says a sign, to the terrible weather. The wind gusts in icy blasts and at Marineland the show goes on. After Shona died Marineland put an ad in the local paper: “The Show Goes On! Come and cheer dolphin Kelly along as she goes solo!” You suspect that ad describes a chirpiness nobody was feeling.

Is it a sad thing, to go and watch the show go on, twice a day, when the show features the last dolphin in captivity? When this story about the last dolphin appears, Kelly will have lived here for 37 years and two days. The pool is 30 metres long, 15 metres wide, 4.5 metres deep. “No, it’s probably not big enough,” Macdonald says, “but interestingly enough, by United States standards it is and under the Marine Mammal Protection Act it’s perfectly adequate.” An Olympic swimming pool is 50 metres long, 25 metres wide, a minimum depth of two metres.

THE DAY Kelly was caught, Macdonald remembers as a nice day. It went smoothly. Kelly was caught mid-morning, Shona in that late morning, early afternoon. They were caught, he seems to recall, close to shore, around the port area. “So long ago.” Such a long time ago, when the idea of catching dolphins for entertainment purposes was regarded as a drawcard for a city.

On that day, there was no time for trauma, Macdonald says, not during the catching. “It was full-on, so much action” but later, “just seeing the animals in the small pool and basically knowing that just a couple of days ago they were out in the ocean. You know. It was my job. At that stage it was part of what we did. And, I guess, when I say I felt these things, probably the more I reflect on them from a distance, the more impact I put on it.” Marineland opened on January 29, 1965. On August 30, 1970 it received its millionth visitor; by August 1977, two million had visited; by December 1980, three million.

For the last 15 or so years visitor numbers averaged 70,000 a year. Last year, the first full financial year from July to June, since Shona died — that number dropped to 50,000 visitors.

It costs the city $385,000 a year to keep Marineland running.

There is no money to upgrade it. The place looks tired. There is an abandoned ride on-seal “it used to go up and down, for a dollar” in a corner. There is a fibreglass dolphin, propped against a fence. You can queue, behind ropes, to have your picture taken with a little blue penguin. A towel is placed on your lap, the penguin on the towel, and snap. For $6 you get the picture in a paper frame. “Congratulations! Today you had your picture taken with Onion.” Onion The penguin was found by a farmer and his his dog. The dog’s name was Mushroom, hence, logically, Onion.After a surprising number of people (seven) have their photo taken with Onion, the penguin waddles into Macdonald’s office.Usually it poops on his floor; today it just wobbles about a bit, is picked up to be stroked, then it wanders outside again. The girls show me pictures on their computer of the mad things people ask to have done in their penguin pictures: A penguin sitting on a Shrek doll. A penguin sitting on a man’s head, atop his cowboy hat.

“Oh yes, we starve them,” says Jacque Wilton, the education officer, about the Marineland animals. She says she no longer reads the paper; she’s sick of what the letter-writers have to say. After the death of one of the last dolphins” and there have been about 75 dolphins here since the doors opened ” animal rights protesters arrived carrying a coffin and chained themselves to the doors.

They carried signs which read: Dolphin Murderers.

In the visitors’ book, a Sea Shepherd member has written: “Free the animals! Disgraceful.” What a good idea. There are other animals at Marineland, many of them have been rescued from certain death. They are the maimed or the handicapped or the orphaned. There are two fur seals with eye problems, birds with broken wings. Some have been bred in captivity; none, including Kelly, could be freed.

When Shona died Macdonald and his staff took turns coming in before daybreak and staying until it got dark to sit with Kelly. They sat at the pool’s edge and talked to her, played with her with balls and seaweed and the hose, just made sure the dolphin knew someone was there.

“We hope she’s not lonely,” says Beckett.

In 1969 somebody threw a fish stuffed with nails into the dolphin pool. A dolphin died. In 1996 young boys broke in, threw a blue penguin in with a leopard seal which ” because it was too well fed” ignored it. The boys then stoned the penguin until it drowned. They hit Kelly with a metal bar. She still has the scars.

There was a family conference. “If you ever want to know a bigger crock than that stuff, tell me about it,” Macdonald says. “You can imagine,” he says, “what the staff felt. You can imagine why most of us like working with animals ” they’re not people.” People write letters to Marineland about Bobbi, the sulphurcrested cockatoo. How cruel, they write, to keep the bird locked up in a cage. These letters make the staff laugh. “That bird,” says Macdonald, “has been everywhere. She’s been to Wellington, to Palmerston North, in the car. The damn thing is never in its cage, mostly because it makes such a racket that it’s easier to let it out.” “That bird,” I say, “should be locked up for life.” The thing got the pip because I was ignoring it and its incessant “give Bobbi a scratch” and what the staff call its “child molester’s laugh”.

To pay me back, it clambered inside my bag, hauled out the fags, flipped the lid, took a cigarette and ate it, all the while keeping its beady eye on me. When I phone Macdonald later he says, “I’ve just seen Bobbi outside puffing up large. You’ve got him addicted, God damn it!” Bobbi came to Marineland because the guy who bought him (actually a she but everyone calls the bird him) as a gimmick for his shop and was driven mad by its carry-on. When they set all the animals free, they should send Bobbi to the Sea Shepherd guy who wrote in the visitors’ book.

To pay me back. It’s a bird. “Do you think Kelly’s lonely?” I asked. It’s a dolphin. I went to one of the two daily shows before I introduced myself to the staff. It was the day of the wind, a day where you really had to conjure up memories to imagine summer.

The three keepers came out from behind the murals, in their navy blue shorts and tops and white freezing-worker’s gumboots and waved gaily to the small crowd huddled in the grandstand.

We were told Kelly was semi-retired and it was her show. Also, she hates the wind. It was her show all right. If she hadn’t been a dolphin I would have said she was in a right old mood. She didn’t feel like putting on a show, so she didn’t. From the visitor’s book: “Sack the dolphin.” It was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.

“Oh, there’s laughing lady,” said Wilton when I met her later.

Amanda Milne said, “You put us off the show. We kept whispering to each other: who’s that woman and why is she laughing hysterically?”‘ To pay me back, they persuaded me to put on a wetsuit and get in the holding pool with the big mammal. They have teeth, you know. Kelly goes into this smaller pool once a week in winter and twice in summer while the big pool is drained, cleaned and re-filled. She is supposed to swim in of her own volition. You can train a dolphin, to a point. Today she is not going in. This means the pool will be drained around her to the level three of the female staff can get into freezing cold sea water up to their thighs and play chase the dolphin. This can go on for a very long time, during which the dolphin swims at them, swerves at the last minute and does not laugh hysterically (it’s a dolphin) while they skid over in the algae on the pool bottom. Nice rugby tackle, Jacque. This is what it takes to get the dolphin caught and lifted on to a sling by five male staff and into the holding pool. This ought to be traumatic. Within two minutes of having been taken off the sling and into the holding pool I am feeding her whole, export quality salmon. Does this mean she’s happy? Or just hungry? Do dolphins have emotions? “Of course they do,” says Macdonald. “Don’t all animals?” After Shona died Kelly became agitated. She was excitable and swam about frantically. The shows were stopped, so was the swimming with dolphins attraction. But Macdonald wanted to get her “back on the horse pretty quickly. That’s terrible! A dolphin on a horse. A new behaviour! Probably never been done before.

Anyway, moving on … We wanted to get her back into doing things and the show was important and the swim was important. Kelly always liked the swim and the interaction.” The female staff reckon Kelly likes the boys they think are cute. They call her “tart.” But, really, how can they know she likes swimming with people? “Well, if she didn’t, she would go down to the end of the pool where the people aren’t. We have an exclusion zone.” MARINELAND, home to so many childhood memories, will one day, probably, become a memory. Kelly is the last dolphin. A man called Clifford Church stood for the Napier mayoralty on an issue: Replacing the last dolphin at Marineland.

He said, “Marineland without dolphins is like a dog without a bone.” He didn’t win.

Barbara Arnott won her third term. She says, “DoC doesn’t see any use for the Government using Marineland either as a rehabilitation area, or a research area or a marine zoo.” What does that mean for Marineland? “What it means is that the council has done some figures and knows that to transform it into something that would draw the crowds after Kelly dies would be a big ask. And let’s face it: the dolphin is the drawcard. The council really believes it’s the end of an era.” Macdonald doesn’t want there to ever be another dolphin at Marineland. But he would like the zoo to survive. There are the other animals to be cared for. He would like it to be brighter and smarter. He has his little family, the staff, to be cared for. His staff sit in the tearoom which smells of fish and KFC. Carie Beattie is injecting whole salmon with Kelly’s vitamins and the pills which thin her blood. The staff play cards and swear with affectionate ferocity at each other for cheating. Bobbi bops about, screeching for a scratch. “The buzzard,” as Macdonald calls the thing, sits on Milne’s head and lets loose a stream of cockatoo excrement.

Beckett says, “you read about this place being turned into a wine and cheese venue,” and you try to keep staff morale up.

And all the while the last dolphin, Kelly, 37 years old here, 160 years in human terms, swims in her pool. Outside the fences with the barbed wire on top, is the sea. The dolphin doesn’t know that, does she? The dolphin can’t know any of what has happened in her lifetime and most certainly can’t know that when she dies, so, almost certainly, will Marineland  at least in its current form.

Marineland will become a memory.

First Published in the New Zealand Herald Canvas Magazine. Saturday 12 September 2009 By Greg Dixon. Copyright New Zealand Herald © 2009.

In the deep blue of the Aegean’s fast-running Kea Channel lies one of Auckland diver Pete Mesley’s deams.
The ghostly wreck of a leviathan rests there, her 53,000-tonne body torn in two, her heart ripped out by a German mine in the third year of the Great War. The HMHS Britannic she was named, the third and largest of the White Star Line’s famous trio of gigantic transatlantic liners. Built in Belfast by Harland and Wolff, she was launched in 1914, in the last months of an age of hard steel, misplaced pride and doomed optimism.
The sister ship of the RMS Olympic, scrapped in 1937, and the equally ill-fated RMS titanic, she was designed for peace but saw only war. In 1915 she was commissioned not as a luxury liner but as a hospital ship and, the following year, had set out from the Greek island of Lemnos to collect the wounded from the brutal beaches of Gallipoli.
“Suddenly, there was a dull, deafening roar,” reported a survivor, “the Britannic gave a shiver, a long drawn-out shudder from stem to stern, shaking the crockery on the tables, breaking things till it subsided as she slowly continued on her way. We all knew she had been struck.” She sank in less than an hour, taking 30 lives with her, just after nine in the morning on November 21, 1916.
For more than 90 years since, she has slept quietly on her starboard side in 120 metres of water, visited by just a few since her remains were discovered by legendary French adventurer Jacques Cousteau in 1975.
For years Mesley had hoped he, too, might follow in Cousteau’s wake, and those of the five expeditions to the wreck since the mid-1990s. Finally, this year, the deep-sea diver and photographer from oh-so-suburban Wattle Downs in Auckland had his chance after being named in a team shooting a new documentary on Britannic for the national Geographic channel. On May 24 he and four other divers – using cutting edge “re breather” equipment – made the difficult, dangerous journey to the bottom of the Kea Channel.

Underwater Explorer and Deep Sea Diver Pete Mesley Before a Dive at the Poor Knights Marine Reserve, New Zealand. Tuesday 01 September 2009 Photograph Richard Robinson.

“When I did my descent on to the wreck, that was like my whole diving career had kind of funnelled into this point, and it was overwhelming emotionally,” says Mesley.
“When you get to tick off one of your life’s ambitions, not only just to dive deep on the wreck but to be with a great group of people and some of the world’s leading technical divers and explorers, it was just the best feeling ever.” Within an hour, however, the best dive of Mesley’s life would also become his worst.
MAN HAS dived the depths for centuries. From the breath-holding sponge divers of Ancient Greece to the development of a rudimentary diving bell in the 16th century, to the invention of the first diving helmets with surface air supplies in the early 19th century, people have sought to go deeper into the oceans for longer – with, it should be said, varying results.
It wasn’t until the 1940s that Cousteau and others invented modern diving techniques, employing compressed air in tanks harnessed to the diver’s back, allowing both commercial and, from the 60s onward, recreational divers to more fully and more personally explore our oceans and the treasures they hold.
In the decades since, the hardcore have sought to go to greater and greater depths, with the current confirmed Guinness record held by South African diver Numo Gomes, who dived to 318.25m in the Red Sea in2005.
Gomes got there in less than 20 minutes, but – and here’s the really overwhelming bit – took 12 hours to resurface in order to avoid decompression sickness, commonly known as “the bends”.
Diving deep, or what insiders called “technical diving” is, you can probably guess, not for the risk-averse. And the bends – or “getting bent” in diving lingo – is not the only risk when diving, but it is the greatest.
As arguably new Zealand’s top technical diver, Mesley knows those risks intimately and has been facing them down for almost 20 years.
Born the youngest of three brothers in Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia, 40 years ago this December, he is one a handful of divers in this country who are capable diving deep wrecks like the Britannic, according to diving buddy Dr Simon Mitchell, one of the world’s leading specialists in dive medicine as well as a consulting anaesthetist at Auckland City Hospital and a senior lecturer at Auckland’s School of Medicine.
“You could confidently say that Pete would be New Zealand’s leading technical diver,” says Mitchell. All of which seems, well, a little paradoxical for a bloke raised in one Africa’s land-locked nations.
Raised in Harare and educated at a boarding school, Mesley didn’t actually see the ocean with his own eyes until he was 11, when his family holidayed in South Africa. About a year later, he had his first, short crack at scuba diving in a murky green training pool, courtesy of a young mate’s father, a senior army officer.
“I couldn’t see a thing, it was green as …
but I thought this is just the bee’s knees, this is what it’s about.” It wasn’t until 1990, however, that Mesley, then in London working for a relative’s painting and decorating business, finally got his diving ticket, after joining a mate on a dive course.
“I just jumped into the pool and all the cogs clicked into place. I was amping, I was buzzing. I said [to the instructor] ‘I want to become an instructor, I want to get into this’.” Which, he admits, is rather typical of him. He still has, unused in his garage, a paraglider he bought 15 years ago after a few paragliding jumps in South Africa lead to a similar bout of (as it turned out, short-lived) passion.
“He’s enthusiastic all right,” says Dave Moran, editor of Dive New Zealand magazine.
“He has big dreams and sometimes I have to say ‘hey Pete, divide them by half and we might end up with something realistic’.
That’s why we like him, because he is full of enthusiasm and reminds of us what we were like at his age-and good on him. We need a few more Pete Mesleys around the place.” THEY CALL it “lust for rust”. We might call it an obsession, not for diving deep but for diving shipwrecks, particularly historic shipwrecks.

Time stands still for Rebreather Diver Pete Mesley as he looks at a ship clock deep on the starboard side of the Lounge Deck of the wreck of the Mikhail Lermontov. The Ivan Franko class, Soviet Union built cruise ship measuring 176 meters / 577 feet with a gross tonnage of 20,500 tons rests on the sand in Port Gore in the Marlborough Sounds, New Zealand. She sank on February 16th 1986 at 10:45pm after hitting Hawea Rock situated bellow the water between Cape Jackson and the Jackson Head Beacon. Saturday 31 October 2009 Photograph Richard Robinson.

It is this passion, this preoccupation, that has become Mesley’s life and work.
In the years since that London course he’s completed thousands of dives around the world – including Scotland’s Scapa Flow (where 51 World War I German warships were scuttled in 1919), South Africa, the Great Barrier Reef and the Pacific – and he has worked as an instructor at resorts in places like the Red Sea and Cyprus.
Since coming to New Zealand in 1994- he followed his New Zealand wife Kim, who he met in London-he has worked full-time in the diving industry here, running dive shops until 2002 and, since then, operating dive-related businesses of his own.
As a qualified course director, he trains other diving instructors as well as teaching recreational and technical diving and the use of the rebreathing equipment used on technical dives. He also imports diving gear and does a bit safety work on the side for television, film (including Whale Rider) and TV commercials. He has been involved with two National Geographic series already – a programme called X-Force: The Science of Diving in 2000 and the Britannic programme this year – and has signed on as a stills photographer for another show next year investigating the wreck of Nazi Germany’s only aircraft carrier, the Graf Zeppelin.
But it is his charter work – and his underwater photography – which probably best blend business with his rust lust.
When I met Mesley in late August, he was not long back from a charter to Micronesia’s Truk Lagoon, a place he calls the ultimate dive location because it contains scores of WWII-era Japanese warships and planes.
And he will run charter dives this month and next to the largest wreck in New Zealand waters, the Mikhail Lermontov. The 20,000- tonne, 175m Soviet-era liner lies in 30m of water in Marlborough Sounds. A common enough recreational dive, but Mesley likes to get deep inside the wreck – as an eerie photo of the ship’s bar on his living room wall demonstrates.
He has dived to many other local wrecks, including the Rainbow Warrior and the HMNZS Canterbury. However, it’s what he calls the Captain Kirk stuff – the boldly going where no one has been before – that really rings his ship’s bell.
His most significant dive here was on one of only two New Zealand ships to be sunk in our waters by the Germans during World War I. Although not widely known until recently, a German Imperial Navy raider, the Wolf, hunted off our coast, laying mines near the top of both the North and South Islands.
New Zealand freighter the Port Kembla was sunk by a mine in deep water off the coast of Farewell Spit in late September, 1917.
It wasn’t until 2007 that the wreck was found and positively identified by Mesley and Mitchell using information from German naval archives sourced by fellow Auckland diver Mike Fraser.
“The biggest thing about exploration diving is it is high risk and a lot of work but then it can have extremely high rewards – or nothing,” Mesley says. “But the feeling of descending on to a wreck that you know nobody has ever set eyes on before is nothing short of breathtaking. [On the Port Kembla dive] we could have just descended on to the bottom to find HMS Seabed or it could have been this big pile of rubbish. And if it had been, we would have turned round and said ‘that’s just the way it is’. But we didn’t.” Mitchell says the successful finding and identification on that dive is something wreck divers might achieve just once in their diving life-which is why the footage of the find is, well, rather amusing, partly due to the pair using a mix of oxygen and helium.
“You can hear Pete yelling ‘f**king hell’ …
it sounds like Mickey Mouse saying it, which is obviously very inappropriate. But it is a moment in time I will never forget.” The pair recovered the Port Kembla’s shipping line plaque and its bell. The bell is currently stored at his home. Mesley says it will be given to the NZ Maritime Museum, though he can’t say when.
TECHNICAL DIVING is a complicated and expensive business. It involves mixing gases such has oxygen and helium which are not expelled into the water as bubbles, as with standard scuba diving, but recycled using rebreathing equipment. And unlike recreational scuba, which doesn’t extend beyond 30 to 40m, tech diving requires “stage” or gradual decompression, which involves, often for a half a dozen hours or more, a slow, regimented, computer-aided return to the surface.
Experience, nerve, good gear and money (rebreather units start at $16,000, he has $25,000 of gear) are needed. But sometimes these things won’t keep a diver safe.
And, as Moran points out, tech diving is completely unregulated. “What you are doing is relying on a mechanical device to give you what you need but you’ve also got a huge amount of physiological changes happening to your body, because you’re breathing these mixed gases and you’re breathing at extreme depths.
“One of the scary things is that a lot of the gurus of rebreather diving are all dead. People who have written books about rebreather diving or extreme diving, a lot of them aren’t here. Every two years, over in Australia, we have a tech diving conference … and practically every two years I go over there and one the guest speakers of two years before is no longer with us.” According to research done for the international Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society, scuba diving is somewhere between 36 and 62 times riskier than climbing in your car. Here, two people died scuba diving last year and there have been 14 deaths, an average of three a year, since 2004.
However, Mitchell, who is hugely experienced, underlines there are very few people he dives with who he feels enhance his safety underwater. “I could count those people on one hand and Pete is one of them. I say that because most people you end up diving with are not as experienced as you or not as technically competent as you. Pete is all of those things and more.” But Mesley has faced his own near-death too. On a dive Mesley and Mitchell did in 2005 on the RMS Niagara – a gold-laden freighter sunk in 1940 off Bream Head by a mine laid by another German raider, Orion – Mesley found himself in trouble on the long trip back to the surface.
“I started experiencing extreme vertigo.
In a nutshell my mind felt like I was doing 3000 rpm around the ascent rope – and of course it made me violently sick. I ended up holding on to the line and I had my eyes closed and I would open my eyes ever-so slightly to look at the time I had left for decompression at that depth and when I wanted to be sick again I would move over to my open-circuit valve equipment.
“But if I had surfaced with three and half hours’ decompression left I would not have even reached the duck board [the climbing board on the back of the boat]. I’d be dead.
The amount of trauma on the body due to all those gas bubbles building up a system, I would have just turned into a giant Aero bar, I would have multiple organ failure.” Mesley stuck it out. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t be here.
“THE VISIBILITY in Kea Channel is just phenomenal,” Mesley says. “There is a huge amount of current and I was really having to work hard to get to the bottom but from about 65 to 70m I looked down and from the blueness emerged this massive hole. The Britannic has broken just forward of the bridge section. It’s kind of a 10m wide split near the bow section, and the descent line was moored just forward of the bridge.” He was, it would seem, ecstatic at the sight of the leviathan. “I felt like there were angels, a heavenly choir going “ahhhhh!’ I don’t know whether it was some form of gas in my brain, but I felt that. It was close to a spiritual experience.” For around an hour he and the four other divers, including one of the world’s most accomplished deep-wreck divers and a close friend of Mesley’s, Carl Spencer, worked around the wreck.
“One of the biggest highlights of the dive for me was that Carl and I entered the wreck area called the grand staircase … I was taking stills, and he comes over to me and gives it the old bro-hug, we gave each other a bit of a bro-hug underwater and he put his hand behind my head. It was just to say ‘mate, we’re here’ … I’d spoken to him about [diving it] for a long time and it was like ‘we’re here and it’s great that you could be in on the team’. It was very uplifting and emotional.” And then tragedy stuck. Why it happened is still a matter for an official report. According to Mesley – who was on the spot – Spencer blacked out and his regulator came out of his mouth. “There is an adage: it’s better to be bent on the surface than dead on the bottom. With him unconscious and not being able to get the reg back in his mouth, well, there was zero chance of him surviving underwater, so that’s why we took him to the surface. Now for someone to survive missing four to five hours of decompression is non-existent, but again he might have come to at the surface and they can dramatically recompress him in the chamber [on the dive tender]. There is always a chance.” Spencer, a father of two, died 35 minutes later without regaining consciousness. Just three days into a 10-day diving schedule, the shoot was called off. The future of the documentary remains unknown.
“I’d completed one of the best dives in my career and, of course, you want to celebrate, you want to talk about it. But obviously with Carl dying on the best dive that I’ve ever done, emotionally it’s like a bloody rollercoaster. Best dive, worst dive.” Spencer’s death is one of the hardest things Mesley has ever had to deal with.
Like Spencer, Mesley has young children, (his girls are 4 and 7). Both men were the same age. They both had huge reputations in diving circles.
These echoes of the other might have led some to reconsider deep-diving. However, the bloke from Wattle Downs has a sangfroid about his dangerous line of work and, though he admits he probably has just 20 or so big dives left in him, plans to keep boldly going where few have been before.
Besides, the Britannic is still waiting for his return. “Am I putting myself at a higher risk? Absolutely. With these bigger dives you could do everything 100 per cent correct and you still go wrong. So why take that undue risk? That’s a question every single person has to answer. Do I want to make my wife a widow? Of course I don’t. But I guess it’s the very essence of what makes people who they are.” !

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]]> http://blog.depth.co.nz/2009/11/19/deep-sea-explorer/feed/ 1 http://blog.depth.co.nz/2009/10/14/the-deepest-man-in-the-world/ http://blog.depth.co.nz/2009/10/14/the-deepest-man-in-the-world/#comments Wed, 14 Oct 2009 05:39:57 +0000 Richard Robinson http://diverdick.visualsociety.com/?p=52

Free Diver William Trubridge training in Lake Taupo New Zealand.

Winner : Qantas Media Awards   “Art/Portrait/Object” 2009

Award of Excellence : Society for News Design “Photography/Multiple Photos”

Award of Excellence : Society for News Design “Magazine Cover Story”

Published in the New Zealand Herald Canvas Magazine February2nd 2008.

Online at www.nzherald.co.nz March 8th 2008.

Words Claire Harvey, Photographs Richard Robinson.

Every day, William Trubridge thinks about dying.

He’s a fit, talented young New Zealander, living between the Bahamas and Italy, teaching people to share the activity he’s passionate about, and swimming every day in some of the world’s bluest, clearest water.

But Trubridge is a freediver, and that means it’s a dark idyll.

Death can never be far from his thoughts.

Freediving is essentially scuba without all the gear. In nothing but a pair of togs – or a wetsuit if it’s chilly – Trubridge strides into the water, takes several breaths as calmly as he can, makes a little duck-dive and and begins swimming downwards.

After the first 20 metres or so, Trubridge’s body loses its buoyancy and the sea starts pulling him down.

He no longer needs to swim, he just plummets into the darkness headfirst, arms flat by his sides. Everything is silent. Inside his head, Trubridge sings to himself, or counts.

Down, down he goes. Sometimes there’s a voice in his head, whispering.

“Today’s not the day,” it says, or “You’re mad, this is mad, you’ve gone too far.”

On the surface, his supporters are waiting in scuba gear, ready to dive down and rescue him should he lose consciousness.

Then, suddenly, Trubridge stops.

He somersaults and begins swimming back up again. It’s agony at first – he’s so deep, and so heavy, that every stroke requires massive effort. It’s a graceful breastroke, his long limbs arcing his body upwards.

To the fish, and the scuba diver holding a video camera nearby, there’s no indication Trubridge’s body is starving for oxygen; no sign of panic, no urgency on his face.

As he gets closer to the surface, he becomes more buoyant, lessening the intensity of each stroke.

Eventually, after four or five minutes without a breath, he bursts through the surface, gulping air into his lungs, hanging on to an inflatable ring and – if he has set a new world record – beaming with delight.

“You have to accept the idea, while you’re descending, that if you keep going down, it will kill you. On the way down you have to completely accept that idea, that you’re killing yourself,” 28-year-old Trubridge says on a brilliant Auckland day.

“Without wanting to sound too morbid, it’s like taking as big a step as you dare to the underworld across that line. When you turn around at the bottom and come back up, your will to live has to match equally the extent to which you have been prepared to kill yourself.”

He’s sitting in a cafe in Newmarket, wearing shorts and a T-shirt, gazing into the middle-distance.

“It’s about the balance between life and death,” he says.

For a while, Trubridge was officially the world’s deepest man – in an athletic sense as well as a philosophical one.

In April last year, Trubridge broke the world record for constant weight freediving without fins, descending to 82 metres.

Later this year he will attempt to break the record (which has since been pushed to 83 metres) in a cave known as Dean’s Blue Hole on Long Island, Bahamas, where Trubridge works as a diving instructor.

It’s an extraordinary natural phenomenon – the name says it all, really.

From the surface, it looks like a round, extraordinarily blue pond, but it’s actually a 200-metre hole in the limestone rock, formed by aeons of rainfall, and now filled with seawater.

From his earliest days, Trubridge has been fascinated by the water. He was only 18 months old when his family left their native England to sail to New Zealand in their own yacht.

It was young Billy’s first great adventure – and a conversation with his mother Linda reveals adventure is in the Trubridge DNA.

In 1981, Linda, a teacher, and her husband David, a naval architect and furniture designer, were living on the moors of remote Northumberland, in a house they had rebuilt from a ruin.

Despite the snow that isolated them every winter, Linda had been determined the boys (Will and older brother Sam) would learn to swim from earliest infancy, which meant the not-so-nearby public swimming pool; two buses there, two buses back.

“We had a boat and we had been doing a bit of sailing in the North Sea,” she says.

“The conditions are pretty scary up there; it wasn’t that much fun – and our boat was worryingly basic. One day [David and I] said to one another ‘well, if we’re going to do this sort of thing, maybe we should do it properly’.”

Properly meant in a decent vessel, living on the ocean – and it also meant selling everything they owned, including their precious handmade home, and setting out with no fixed destination in mind.

Once the thrilling, frightening idea was out there, the couple felt they had no choice but to seize it.

“I just saw a choice and I couldn’t turn away,” says Linda, who was already experienced in rock-climbing and kayaking, as was her husband.

“I knew it would be hard, but I also knew it was going to be vital for my spiritual growth.”

Her philosophy on life, distilled by years of yoga practice, was that experiences must be fully embraced to be real.

“We could see another life, and that life was living in a greater dimension. For me, yoga is more than just a physical discipline; it’s about living life as fully as you can.”

As soon as they reached the warm waters of the Caribbean Sea, the Trubridges knew island life was for them.

They dropped anchor and spent two years in the Caribbean before sailing on to the Pacific and settling for another year in Tahiti, where David designed and made furniture and Linda taught.

They headed to New Zealand when the boat needed repairs, intending to stay only briefly before returning to Tahiti – but 20 years later, they’re still here, living in Hawkes Bay.

Today, David is one of the country’s most highly regarded designers, renowned for his sculptural furniture pieces, which incorporate sustainably grown wood and draw inspiration from Maori traditions.

Linda is a yoga instructor and sculptor, while Sam, now 30, is a theatre director.

“New Zealand has had a huge influence on all of us, especially the boys.” she says.

“There’s an enormous sense of possibility and empowerment here – whatever you want to do, you can manifest it. I felt that in Thatcher’s Britain, people were more accepting; they didn’t tend to feel they could change the world.”

Today, Trubridge is earnest and thoughtful, tall and lean. He’s sneezing and spluttering with a cold, and his face is pale – but that isn’t just because he’s afflicted with a lurgy.

Freediving has changed Trubridge’s physique so dramatically he now has 20,000 fewer capillaries than an average marathon runner, he says.

That’s because he has taught his muscles to operate without oxygen.

Trubridge does no cardio training, except when a sinus infection or other bug prevents him going into the water, in which case he will run while holding his breath for short intervals.

Basically you need to be a cross between a triathlete and a sprinter,” he says.

“Freediving strips your muscle, it makes your blood very acidic, and if you don’t eat a pretty strict high-protein diet, it starts to cannibalise your muscle tissue.”

Most of his training is underwater swimming while holding his breath and depth training, in which he descends to a comfortable level and relaxes.

“I love swimming down to 10 or 15 metres, where I’m negatively buoyant, and staying on the bottom, watching the little fish and finding little sand gardens.

“You get a feeling you don’t ever have to breathe again, which lasts a few minutes.”

Trubridge also does the same exercise at 50m depth, pulling himself down on a rope to save energy, and remaining down for up to five minutes.

“You get a complete sense of peace and quiet, being within yourself. In the last couple of minutes, there’s more tension because of that hunger for air, but you need to be able to relax despite that. If you’re able to relax, it takes you into almost a deeper sense of peace.”

Trubridge first heard about freediving while on holiday in London in 2001.

Since those early years on the boat, he had been fascinated by water and would spend most of his time underwater – even when doing laps in a pool.

After leaving school he did a degree in genetics, but circumstance prevented him becoming a scientist; a friend who had been diving in Thailand had met some freedivers and raved to Trubridge about the sport.

Like most of us, he’d seen The Big Blue, Luc Besson’s 1988 film about two rival freedivers – and the idea that this could be a real sport was fascinating.

He dived in Honduras and Belize, then went to Italy to take a course with Umberto Pelizzari, one of the world’s best-known freedivers, at his Apnea Academy in Sardinia.

That’s where he met Tiziana Valmaggia; she was the real estate agent who rented him a flat. As the romance developed, so did Trubridge’s de facto apprenticeship with Pelizzari, 42, who is now retired from competitive diving.

The two men dived and spearfished together, and Trubridge’s previously non-existent Italian language skills developed quickly – thanks to the need to impress Valmaggia – which helped with translations for the website and publications of Pelizzari’s academy.

Their diving styles are now quite different, but Pelizzari has been invaluable in teaching mental discipline and the patience to reach one’s goals steadily rather than all in a rush, Trubridge says.

“I’m starting to learn now that sometimes less training is more. The recovery is as important as the training itself because you can overstress yourself and you can sometimes start to go backwards because of that.”

He attributes much of his mental resilience to the dedicated practice of yoga, in which he focuses on pranayama, an advanced yogic practice that involves holding and controlling one’s breath in order to achieve total, meditative calm.

Freediving is still a fringe sport in New Zealand, although its many forms are gaining popularity.

All the styles involve holding the breath, but apart from that, nearly anything goes.

In September Wellington’s Dave Mullins broke the world record for underwater breathhold swimming, known as dynamic apnea.

Mullins swam 244m in laps of a swimming pool, using a monofin, in 4:02 minutes. He also holds the New Zealand record for constant weight diving of 100m.

There’s also a great tradition of rivalry in the sport; Umberto Pelizzari’s records were driven by his contest with Cuban diver Francisco “Pipin” Ferreras.

Trubridge’s nemesis – in a friendly way – is Herbert Nitsch, a 37-year-old Austrian who also happens to be an airline pilot.

He snatched Trubridge’s constant weight (no fins) record last year by reaching 83m, and also holds the record for constant weight (with fins – 111m).

The training has left Trubridge far fitter than ever before – surpassing even his university days as a competitive rower – and he is expert in the physiological nature of what he does.

“Before I dive, I just try to relax my breathing to maintain a relatively high level of carbon dioxide, because that is what gives you the signal to breathe again. It also regulates your oxygen stores – so the more carbon dioxide you have, the better you conserve your oxygen for the brain and heart.”

When a freediver descends, the body goes into a very clever state designed to protect us underwater, called the mammalian dive reflex.

That concentrates blood-flow to Trubridge’s core, constricting the capillaries in his limbs and directing the blood to his vital organs.

Blood pressure falls, heart-rate drops to as low as 20 beats per minute, and lung capillaries swell up with blood to prevent his lungs from collapsing under the enormous pressure.

Having the right equipment also helps; Trubridge has worked with New Zealand wetsuit manufacturer Orca to find the ideal hydrodynamic – but still slimline – suit to help him slip through the water.

He is also hyper-aware of the science behind the danger.

Freediving deaths are not uncommon – often in “no limits” freediving, where divers use a sled-like device to descend to depths up to 214 metres, then rely on inflatable devices to bring them back to the surface.

In no-limits diving, equipment failure is fatal, for a human would be incapable of swimming unassisted back from such depth.

There is the possibility of narcosis, leading to unconsciousness.

“A lot of the deaths in freediving – and there are quite a lot – occur very close to the surface, when the diver runs out of air on the way back up and there’s no one on the surface to help them.

“If someone pulls you to the surface after you’ve blacked out, you’ll be fine – but if you’re by yourself it’s 100 per cent death.”

That sort of sentence would send a shiver of fear through some girlfriends, but Tiziana Valmaggia merely shrugs in a very Italian way.

“I’m not worried about him,” says Valmaggia, a tanned, compact woman with long sandy hair.

“I know he is serious about it. I only worry when he gets sick.”

And he has been terribly sick – some of the worst episodes while competing in Egypt, another hotspot of freediving.

Trubridge now suspects the pesticides used near the Egyptian resort where he stayed in 2006 and 2007 were responsible – his blood pressure dropped and heart-rate accelerated, and he entirely lost his sense of taste.

“When I arrived at the hotel, I saw him but I couldn’t recognise him; I thought ‘this is craziness’,” Valmaggia says.

Linda Trubridge has spent a lot of time conquering fears about her son’s freediving, studying the sport from a yogic perspective, and coming to the view it is the ultimate in self-control and meditative strength.

“He’s actually being incredibly responsible with his life, because he goes to the extreme with it,” she says.

“This will sound strange coming from his mother, because all mothers love their sons, but I so respect Billy for who he is.”

She relates how, on a recent dive through the underwater archway in the Blue Hole in Dahab, Egypt, Trubridge told his support crew not to come to his rescue if he hit his head and started falling through the water, unconscious.

He told them they would be unable to catch him without endangering their own lives.

“He needs to be incredibly brave to do this,” Linda says.

So where is the line between courage and recklessness? Does Trubridge think he will die one day, doing this?

After our interview, I’m still troubled by whether Trubridge is somehow expecting death; inviting it. I email to ask him to explain his feelings about, as he describes it, journeying into the underworld.

The answer is, essentially, that he doesn’t actually want to die – but he gets an enormous rush out of taunting death.

For him, that is the best kind of life; where, every day, one explores the essence of what it means to live, to take air into one’s lungs and breathe it out again. For Trubridge, getting to the edge makes him more alive.

“During the descent I have to be completely at peace with the idea that what I will do will kill me if I only do it long enough. [In the descent] if I do nothing, and continue falling, then I die. Instead I have to judge it exactly right so that when I turn around my desire to live matches precisely the extent to which I have dared to kill myself.

“This is an attraction of freediving: the thrill of how far do you dare venture across the border between life and death, and has similarities I guess to Orpheus’ journey into Hades – if you ‘look back’ or show any kind of fear then that will ultimately betray you.

“Freedivers do die, but just like in other sports like mountain climbing the rest of us still return to dance along that thin line, and in so doing taste our own existence.”