Playback: One Breath Away From Death

Now, have you ever been diving? And I don't mean knees trembling, braving the middle diving board at the leisure centre diving.

I mean deep diving, taking the plunge into the big blue.

If you have, you probably had a scuba tank attached to you for obvious reasons, so that you could breathe underwater.

So now, just imagine doing that deep dive in the ocean, for minutes, just by taking one breath and going under.

Well, that is what freediving instructor Emma Farrell trains people to do.

The advantage is, without the distracting sound of a scuba tank around you, freedivers can hear the ocean wildlife all around them, with no bubbles obstructing their vision coming out of the snorkel.

But when Emma first decided she wanted to give it a go, there was at the time nowhere in the UK she could officially learn the craft.

So she taught herself.

I found some freedivers up north, one in North Wales, one in Cheshire and one in Manchester.

And we formed like our little club.

So I travel from Manchester once a week to a pool in Chester and and practiced and I practiced basically holding my breath which is a discipline called static apnea where you you just lie on the surface of the pool holding your breath and then I practiced dynamic which is going backwards and forwards up and down in a pool and then we moved to a quarry in North Wales called Dorothea which was and still is quite basic I mean you're not really legally allowed to go there because there are you know it's there's nothing really set up And so we'd drive down this to this old deserted quarry, which had no toilets, no shelter, nothing.

We would have bottles filled with warm water wrapped up in towels.

We would then get out and you can imagine it's sleeting with like horizontal rain.

You get out of the car in the middle of an old quarry, take all your clothes off, lube with hair conditioner up.

And then try and squeeze into this wetsuit, which is a specialist freediving wetsuit, which is quite difficult to get into.

And then get into a freezing quarry and dive down.

I mean, that shows how dedicated I was and how much I wanted to do it.

What could you see at the bottom of the quarry in Wales?

Nothing.

You couldn't see anything.

So it's there's a big difference between I think freediving is an internal journey.

much more than people realize.

So you're free diving there for the internal experience, whereas you then put those skills to use when you then go into the sea or into like where I teach in Bobster Quay in the South, in Somerset, where they've put thousands of fish, they've sunk parts of a plane, they've sunk boats, they've sunk cars.

So you can go through and like chill out and kind of explore all these things.

But people who competitively free dive, they are literally diving and they can't see anything because they're diving and it becomes black because it's so deep.