They simply prefer to venture underwater unencumbered by pounds of scuba equipment. The aquatic environment accepts you more as a free diver. You get to see fish that might otherwise shy away from bubbles and the noise of scuba mechanisms. T HE quest to make the world's deepest dive unaided by breathing equipment began in earnest about thirty years ago, when Enzo Maiorca, an Italian, and Jacques Mayol, a Frenchman born in Shanghai, separately developed methods using heavy weights to speed their descent. As they plummeted five feet per second, they grabbed their noses and blew like crazy, racing against time to equalize the mounting pressure that could otherwise burst an eardrum.
Divers hold on to a weighted, rope-guided sled.
Delivered by this aquatic luge to the prescribed depth, they detach themselves from the sled and pull a pin that releases compressed air from a cylinder into a balloon, which they grab to buoy themselves back to the surface in a storm of bubbles. In the late sixties Mayol and Maiorca achieved depths approaching 240 feet. Physiologists, groups of whom curiously follow free divers, cautioned them against going deeper. But Mayol was convinced otherwise. During his studies of the diving behavior and anatomy of dolphins at the Seaquarium, near Key Biscayne, Florida, he witnessed autopsies that revealed no obvious anatomical structure preventing thoracic squeeze.