Francisco Ferreras was a bald, macho Cuban; Audrey Mestre was his 'auburn-haired French goddess'. Their goal was to be the world's best freedivers. But when he pushed her to try for a new record, diving to unimaginable depths, tragedy struck. Here, for the first time, in a remarkable and gripping narrative, he reveals what really happened during his wife's final harrowing descent into the deep... On the morning of October 12, 2002, shortly after dawn, I awoke and turned to look at my beautiful wife, Audrey. She was asleep on the unfamiliar bed next to me. Audrey Mestre and I had been together for almost seven years, and I was still filled with awe when I looked at her; sometimes I felt as if I didn't deserve her. I stood and made my way across the grey light of the hotel room and lifted the edge of the curtain. For the past two days, we had enjoyed perfect weather, but that was over. I could hardly see the rising sun beyond the purple sky, and the trees along the shoreline were wailing in the wind. We had come to Bayahibe Beach, in the Dominican Republic, to set a new world record in freediving. No, not me: Audrey. I had been practising the sport for more than two decades - diving to unimaginable depths without tanks - but she was a relative newcomer. Still, here we were to show the world that Audrey Mestre could beat the benchmark I had set two years earlier, when I had wrapped myself around a weighted sled, plunged 162 metres (531ft) into the sea, inflated a balloon at the touch of a button, and rocketed back to the surface - all on a single breath of air. The entire trip - the distance of three football fields - had barely taken three minutes. But those three glorious, death-defying minutes are what the sport is all about. Those three minutes define me. Every time I reach the bottom and prepare for the long journey back, I think to myself: here I am, where I belong. I looked over at Audrey again, just now waking up. She smiled at me, and stretched her long limbs. 'I don't like this weather,' I said. 'Don't worry,' she said. 'It'll clear up.' That was Audrey for you: completely unflappable. In a matter of hours, she was going to try to set a world freediving record, and she behaved as if she was looking forward to nothing more than a quiet stroll on the beach. That was part of her charm. She took life as it came, and she treated every day like a gift. For Audrey, today was a day like any other. For me, her polar opposite, it was critically important. I had taught Audrey everything I knew about the sport. I had taught her how to survive at a water pressure that is 800 times denser than air; how to cram her lungs with oxygen while ridding them of carbon dioxide; how to coax her mind and body into a trance-like, energy-conserving state; and how to equalise her screaming ears at crushing depths. She had taken to the sport effortlessly, as if she had been born to it, and before long I realised she would soon surpass me. She had another advantage: at 28, Audrey was 12 years my junior, and wholly undamaged by freediving. No blackouts, no crippling bouts of decompression, no close calls, no fear. But the biggest point in her favour was her unbeatable attitude. For Audrey, freediving was, above all things, a journey of self-discovery. For me, self-discovery was part of it, certainly, but I was also hooked on competition. I was the king of freediving. I was in the business of endorsing diving products, filming underwater documentaries, and setting world records. And, yes, I know: at that point, my last record was almost two years old. But that wasn't the issue. I wasn't there for me that day. I was there for Audrey. I was there to watch her turn herself into a star. I was there to watch my protégée become my successor. 'What are you thinking about?' she asked. 'I'm thinking about how beautiful you are,' I said. She got out of bed, moved toward me and gave me a kiss on the lips. 'Relax,' she said. 'It's going to be great.' I ran into a small knot of reporters near the lobby, all of whom were disappointed that Audrey wasn't with me. One of them was this nerdy little Mexican who the previous day had come right out and asked Audrey, in my presence, what it was she saw in me. I had to laugh at his audacity, but I saw his point: a lot of people asked themselves that question. I was a bald, outspoken, macho Cuban with a gift for pissing people off; she was a beautiful, auburn-haired goddess. I wasn't always sure what she saw in me, either, but I wasn't complaining. I waved at the reporters and went to meet the guys. I found them in the dining room. 'Well, here's the beast. Where's beauty?' That was Carlos Serra, my right-hand man, a bearded, garrulous Venezuelan who lived near us in Miami. He was in charge of organising the logistics of each dive, which can be as complicated as surgery. A meticulous planner, Carlos never left anything to chance. We often butted heads, but I needed him and we both knew it. Kim McCoy was seated next to him. Kim was our resident scientist, a short, always smiling oceanographer from San Diego who had led expeditions to the north and south poles. He was in charge of the computers, notably the one inside the 2ft cylinder that was strapped to the diver's back. The system allowed Kim to review the entire dive with pinpoint accuracy, second by heart-pounding second. Kim was the guy we turned to whenever things got crazy: our very own Spock, the voice of reason. Pascal Bernabe, a schoolteacher from France, was seated next to Kim. Pascal was our most experienced safety diver. He was always stationed at the bottom, at the point where the diver completed his descent and made his turn, a sort of lifeguard of the deep. At extreme depths, even oxygen becomes toxic, so Pascal was trained to breathe a special mix of gases, comprised of oxygen, nitrogen and helium. When he wasn't working with our crew, he could be found diving for red coral in Tunisia or exploring the labyrinthine underwater caves in southern France. Then there was Orlando 'Tata' Lanza, and Eduardo 'Wiky' Orjuales, friends of mine from Cuba. Tata, slim and soft-spoken, was a spearfisherman in Mexico. Wiky, rotund and jovial, had fled Cuba on a raft two years previously and was now managing a dive shop in Boca Raton, Florida. The last member of the team, as well as the oldest guy on the crew, was Matt Briseno of Hawaii. He was meddlesome, opinionated, and thought he could do everything better than the next guy - which wasn't far from the truth. Still, despite the quirks, everybody liked him. Missing, however, was one of our regulars, Cedric Darolles. Thin and baby-faced, with delicate, almost feminine features, Cedric was a superior scuba diver. We had met him five years earlier in La Palma, Spain, where Audrey and I had been giving freediving classes. Pascal Bernabe was there to help us, and Cedric had been his assistant. He was smart, funny, sweet, patient, and full of life, and we immediately asked him to become a member of our regular crew. From our first day in the water together, he held a special place in Audrey's heart, and she took to calling him her guardian angel. But now he was gone, having drowned a year earlier in a cave-diving accident in Saint Sauveur, France. Audrey flew to France for the funeral. She was the only one who had been able to soothe his grieving mother, but in many ways she was still grieving herself. Audrey told me she was feeling confident that morning - perhaps more confident than usual. Her practice dives in the glassy waters off Bayahibe had gone well. She flew down and up the cable with such ease that I kept moving the target deeper. The crew was leery; Carlos and I argued about the change in plans. Yes, Audrey was making a substantial leap in a sport where progress was typically measured in one- to five-metre increments, and her previous personal best, which set a female record a year earlier in Fort Lauderdale, was 130 metres. And, yes, I was asking her to descend another 45 metres, a full 10 metres beyond the maximum depth recommended even for recreational scuba divers. But she was in a groove, in the zone, and both Audrey and I felt we should capitalise on it. Neither of us thought we were being reckless. Audrey would have been happy to have done it without all the international attention - without the reporters and the camera crews and the devoted fans. She wasn't about competition, or about setting records, or about seeing her name in the paper. But this was one for the books - 171 metres (561ft) - and the aficionados had come out in droves. We didn't talk much over breakfast, which is often the case on the day of a big dive. We all had our roles, and we were lost in our own heads, preparing for the day ahead. When I got back to the room, Audrey was reading a book about Egypt. 'How are you feeling?' I asked her. 'Never better,' she said. I kissed her. 'Get some rest,' I said. 'I'm going to get the boat ready.' It was drizzling lightly by the time I reached the lobby, but the wind had died down and I was feeling optimistic. The media were still waiting, and now included two cameramen from National Geographic, and news crews from PBS, Univision, Televisa, and Canal Plus. A team of documentary film-makers was also present. I assured them that the dive would go ahead as planned. Then I hurried to the beach to help load our bulky equipment on to the 85ft catamaran that was to serve as our dive platform. We all remained a little tense. Conditions were less than ideal, we were behind schedule and the length of the dive itself - the equivalent of a 55-storey building - was weighing on all our minds. 'Where's Wiky?' I said, feeling very much on edge. Wiky had been hitting the discos every night, staying up late, and I didn't approve.'He's on his way,' Tata said, coming over to help me haul a tank on deck. The amount of gear, as always, was staggering. Everywhere you looked there were hoses, gauges, tools, wetsuits, weight belts, fins, masks, snorkels and cameras. The bulkiest piece of equipment was the sled that Audrey would ride to her target. It was weighted down with 100lbs of lead, and it took three of us to get it on board. At this point, Wiky showed up, still unshaven. He looked tired. I didn't like the shape he was in, and I made it clear. 'Thanks for coming,' I said with an edge. 'Can you handle a 295ft dive?' 'I'm fine,' he said. Tourists on the beach had gathered to watch us. We finished loading the boat and I saw that it was getting late. I told Carlos to bring Audrey out at 2pm, and off we went. As we motored out to the dive site, I noticed that the dark storm clouds were retreating. I noticed, too, that Pascal was checking the five tanks he'd be using on the dive, then turned to see Matt and Tata fiddling with the sled's decoupling pin. 'I'll take care of that,' I said. 'You guys did it wrong the other day.' I went over every inch of the sled. I wasn't done checking it until we reached the site, 15 minutes later. We dropped anchor and got to work rigging the sled. First, we put the lift-bag in place, then we hoisted the whole unwieldy thing over the boom and swung it out over the port side of the catamaran. Using the boom as a crane, we carefully got the sled into position and lowered it a few feet into the water. Tata and I jumped in and swam over to make sure everything was good to go. I checked the lift-bag first. I reached for the small yellow tank under it and gave the valve a quick twist, to test it. It hissed, puffing the lift-bag, and I screwed the valve back down, nice and tight. I looked over at Tata, treading water next to me, and he turned and hollered up to the boat. 'The yellow tank - it's full?' The answer came back: 'Yes.' To this day, we don't know who answered. Our entire crew was up there, along with the crew of the catamaran, and the answer had come back loud and clear. Yes. Carlos looked down at us. 'Ready to put the line down?' he asked. I nodded. We shoved the 100lb concrete disk at the bottom of the line into the water, then let out the cable and fed it through a pulley. 'Here comes one-seventy,' Carlos said. 'And... one seventy-one.' Kim tied it off. Just then, I noticed that a hinge on the housing of one of the video cameras was loose. It was leaking slightly. I called up for a screwdriver and a hose-clamp and went to work on it. Now the boats began to arrive, crowded with fans and curious tourists, and they kept coming: sponsors, resort employees, reporters, photographers, two paramedics, four lifeguards from the beach rescue squad. Audrey arrived with Carlos at 2pm, while I was still in the water. She was uncomfortable with all the attention, but smiled for the cameras. I got out of the water and joined her and gave her a little kiss. 'Everything good?' I asked. 'Yes,' she said. 'I'm anxious to get started.' She went off to the bow to meditate, to cloak herself in serenity. Football teams like to get psyched up before a big game, working themselves into a crazed frenzy, but freedivers do the exact opposite: they need to escape to that quiet place within. I returned to the water to finish fixing the camera. Unfortunately, it was taking longer than I'd anticipated, so I turned to Tata and told him to ask Audrey to start getting ready. He swam over to her, and she slipped into her fins and lowered her body into the choppy seas. By this time, my safety divers were encased in black neoprene, hunched under the weight of their tanks. Pascal clung to the side of the boat, dwarfed by the five tanks he was carrying. He would be spending more than four hours underwater, decompressing, and he intended to pass the time by reading a soggy science fiction novel. I finally finished fixing the camera and looked up at the leaden sky, which was now a faded, denim hue, then turned as Audrey surfaced nearby. She had just completed a short, warm-up dive. I swam over to join her. 'You ready?' I asked. 'Yes.' 'Let's do one more warm-up,' I suggested. We gulped air and dived down together, staying under for about three minutes. When we surfaced, I again asked her how she felt. 'Great,' she said. She was calm, unflappable, glowing with good health. I, on the other hand, was a nervous wreck. I kissed her. 'When you come back up, I'll kiss you again,' I said. 'Only it'll be different. You'll be in the history books with a new world record.' We swam over to the sled and she lifted herself on to the crossbar. 'All good?' I asked. She half-smiled, not answering, and turned her attention to the horizon, getting focused. Now she began to ventilate, inhaling and exhaling with mounting force, each breath deeper and more powerful than the preceding one. Carlos called out: 'Five minutes!' Pascal and Wiky and our third safety diver disappeared into the water, to take up position. It was happening. We were on a strict timetable now. There was no turning back. I watched Audrey as she neared the end of the countdown. She took one final, powerful breath - sucking every available particle of air into her abdomen, into her rib cage, into the upper lobes of her lungs, into her throat even - then looked across at me and nodded. I pulled the release cord - once, twice, a third time - and the sled sank. She was on her way into the deep dark blue, and I'd been down that same route so many times that I could feel exactly what she was feeling. The way her wetsuit was becoming welded to her skin. The excruciating pain in her ears. The pull of the weighted sled as it propelled her toward the target. The 264 pounds of pressure pushing against every square inch of her flesh, compressing her lungs to the size of oranges. Her falling heart-rate, by now slowed down to no more than 20 beats per minute. At this point she'd be quizzing herself to avoid nitrogen narcosis. What is my phone number? What is the capital of France? How old am I? Who's waiting for me up top? I was hanging onto the cable, treading water. Right about now, her body would be supersaturated with oxygen, and she would be feeling energised and euphoric. I, on the other hand, was feeling anything but euphoric. I had been keeping track of the time in my head, and I feared she was moving too slowly. But just then, boom. The cable jumped. I looked at my stopwatch: one minute and forty two seconds. She had reached the bottom of the line a full 14 seconds ahead of schedule. She had made better time than she'd managed on any of her practice runs. I was ecstatic. I could imagine her down below, directly beneath me but 171 metres away, disconnecting herself from the sled and inflating the lift-bag that would propel her back to the surface and into my arms. I could imagine her shooting past Pascal, stationed mere yards away, ready to help in the unlikely event that something went wrong. Carlos called out the time: 'Two minutes!' She was getting closer. In another 60 seconds she would burst through the water's shimmering surface, and I would swim to her side and take her in my arms. I looked through my mask into the water, expecting to see the flurry of bubbles that would announce her approach. But I saw only shafts of light coming from above and behind me, trying to pierce the gloom. Three minutes had passed and there was still no Audrey. I dived into the water and sped down to 50ft, hoping for a glimpse of her yellow wetsuit. But the line was empty and still. I swam back to the surface and looked at Tata. He shook his head anxiously; he was in the dark, too. We had no way to communicate with the safety divers below, no way to see or hear what was going on. Three minutes and thirty seconds had passed since Audrey rocketed into the water. No free diver could descend to 171 metres and hold his or her breath for that length of time. She must have aborted the dive. Yes, that was it! She was probably buddy-breathing with one of the safety divers, and she couldn't come up because she needed to decompress. A moment later, the lift-bag bobbed to the surface. I felt a rush of blood to the walls of my throat. Something was wrong. I had to go to help. I yelled for the crew to hand me a tank. Five minutes had elapsed. I went down to find my wife. I met Audrey Mestre in 1996, in Cabo San Lucas, at the tip of the Baja Peninsula, where the Pacific Ocean meets the Sea of Cortez. My favourite spot is a set of rocks known as Neptune's Finger, where a colony of sea lions makes its home. On the other side of the bay, there is a line of jagged peaks that poke out of the water like the spiky back of a sea serpent. The town of Cabo itself, part honky-tonk tourist trap and part five-star resort destination, changed my life forever. I was there to bust my career wide open. My plan was to advance the no limits world record to 130 metres, and I'd received $120,000 in sponsorship money, a portion of that from Emilio Azcarraga, the wealthy Mexican media mogul who owned Televisa, the network that would be covering the event. | | Cabo is a hub of diving and sport fishing, but freediving had always been a European phenomenon. The reason I was here, beyond the hope of setting a record, was to introduce the sport to the western hemisphere. In the weeks leading up to the event, my crew and I were consumed by the logistics of the operation. We had to find a location in the bay that was deep enough to handle the dive. We needed to recruit local scuba professionals to serve as safety divers and cameramen. I had to spend hours in the water, day after day, preparing, mentally and physically, for the main event. And after every practice we had to deal with the press. The sport was relatively new to most of them, and it was my job to answer their questions. One evening, I went off to join my crew at Margaritavilla, a bar near the marina. All the familiar faces were there, crowded around three tables, but there was one attractive woman I didn't recognise. 'My name is Audrey,' she said in flawless Spanish, when I was introduced to her. 'I wonder if I might ask you a couple of questions.' She had beautiful, brown eyes. 'Sure,' I said. 'You a reporter?' 'No. I'm a student in La Paz.' 'A student?' 'Yes,' Audrey said. 'I'm studying marine biology, and I've been reading about you. I'm curious about a couple of things.' 'For example?' 'Well, I've been looking at the way the human body adapts at extreme depths,' she said. 'And I'm interested in blood shift.' Audrey was referring to the physiological changes that affect every freediver. The pressure is so intense that one's lungs threaten to collapse, and all of the blood in one's extremities rushes to the centre of the body to keep this from happening. The lungs themselves shrink to the size of oranges, and actually fill with blood, and the heart gets pushed up and off to the side, tight against the chest cavity. She seemed very knowledgeable. There was something magical about this woman. I needed to know everything about her. And by the time the sun came up, I had made a pretty good start. Audrey Mestre was born on 11 August, 1974 in Saint Denis, France, a suburb north of Paris. When her parents brought her home from the hospital, her grandfather clapped his hands with delight. 'Look at her feet!' he cried. 'They're as big as flippers.' He was a diver. He saw the baby's distinctive feature as a sign that she would be one, too. She was named Audrey by her parents, Anne Marie and Jean Pierre Mestre. It is an English name meaning 'goddess of the water' and she showed an affinity for water very early on. By the age of two, she was already swimming. During the summer, Audrey travelled to the south of France, to spend a month with her grandparents in the seaside town of Palavas on the Golfe du Lion. Both sides of her family were born in Algeria, and they loved the ocean. Her parents were devoted scuba divers, and her maternal grandfather, Claude Rey Marechal, had been a champion spearfisherman in Algiers. Every morning, he and Audrey would walk to the shore. He taught her how to breathe properly, so that she could take full advantage of the sport. By the time Audrey was five, she had her first wetsuit, mask, snorkel and fins, and whenever anyone offered to help her with the bulky equipment, she replied with the phrase that would soon become her trademark: 'I can do it myself.' 'The French have salt water in their veins,' Audrey's grandfather used to say. And he wasn't far wrong. Diving had been popular in France since the 1920s. The early freedivers called themselves 'gogglers' after the goggles they wore, and they were something of a tourist attraction along the French Riviera, where people would gather to watch them harpoon fish. Frenchmen patented the first modern mask, as well as the first snorkel. Then Jacques Cousteau came along with his Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus (Scuba). Audrey was lucky to have found her calling so early in life, but less lucky with her health. She had mononucleosis at age five, an appendix removed at six, and at seven she fell and broke her nose, which was thin and angular. At 14, the bad luck continued when she contracted typhoid fever and scoliosis, and was left with a badly curved spine. For the next four years, she spent most of her waking hours trapped in a plastic corset, and her only release came during visits to the shore, when she removed the brace, slipped into the water, and was able to become herself again. In 1987, when Audrey's father, an engineer, was told that he was being transferred to Mexico to work on a new water treatment plant in the capital, Audrey's first question was: 'Is it near the water?' Unfortunately, it wasn't. They were going to be living in the heart of Mexico City, the sprawling, noisy, congested capital, and they didn't go happily. 'No water,' Audrey said. 'How will I survive?' Soon, however, their apprehensions lifted. They were won over by the Mexican people, their culture, their weather. Whenever they could, the Mestres drove to Tequesquitengo, a resort area near Mexico City, where Audrey could indulge her love of the water. Within a year, Jean Pierre Mestre was called back to France, his assignment complete. That same year, Audrey went to see the movie Le Grand Bleu. Directed by Frenchman Luc Besson, it was a portrait of the intense rivalry between the two most famous freedivers in the world, Jacques Mayol and Enzo Maiorca, and, for her, it was a transcendent experience. 'I have decided on a profession,' she told her parents a short time later. 'I'm going to become a marine biologist.' Not a day passes now when I don't think of what happened on that afternoon of Audrey's dive. I look for her in the water, but she's already inside that soundproof room in her head, her eyes hooded and distant, her breathing rhythmic. Audrey looks at me and I see a hint of that impish smile in her eyes, distant now, turned inward. One final, protracted breath - and she's gone, the cable vibrating in my hand. Audrey slowed by that touch of air in the lift-bag, but still ahead of schedule. I see it all coming back: how I picture her down there, as calm as a safe-cracker, disconnecting herself from the sled and opening the valve on the pony tank, to fill the lift-bag. She wasn't even feeling the urge to breathe yet. She didn't need to breathe. Now she was on her way. I imagined her turning to look at Pascal, smiling, and flashing a thumbs-up. She'd be inflating the bag and by now she'd be shooting towards me, coming back to me. But where was she? At precisely two-and-a-half minutes, I lowered my goggled face into the water, expecting to see the rising bubbles that would announce her arrival. Tata dived to 20 metres, but quickly came back up, looking alarmed, and shook his head. There was no sign of her. Nothing. Nothing but the line disappearing into the blackness. Five minutes had now elapsed. Kim handed me the backpack I'd prepared and Tata helped me into it. I shot down the line like an arrow, kicking as hard as I could, and passed Wiky and the other safety diver. There was still no sign of Audrey. When I hit 90 metres, I saw bubbles. And there she was. She was with Pascal, her trusted friend, and they were breathing together. But as I got closer, I saw that she wasn't breathing. She was unconscious. Pascal was frantic, struggling to wrap an orange marker buoy around her wrist. I raced closer. Pink foam was coming out of her mouth. I could see her eyes beyond the mask, open and unseeing. We reached the surface. The foam kept oozing out of her mouth and nose. That meant there was water in her lungs. We wiped it away with a towel, but it kept coming. There was so much of it I could hardly bear to look. Carlos tried to give her mouth-to-mouth, but he couldn't clear her airway. We had no intubation kit or defibrillator aboard. We had to get her ashore. I stroked her forehead and spoke into her ear. 'Fight!' I said. 'Her pulse is fading,' Carlos said. We transferred Audrey to a launch and roared off. Her eyes were still open, but fixed and dilated, unresponsive to the light. One minute into the trip, she stopped breathing altogether. One of the paramedics began giving her mouth-to-mouth. Matt held her head, and the foam kept coming from her mouth, followed now by a thick green fluid. Nothing worked. Audrey was gone. Nobody understood what had gone wrong down there in the deep. Three days earlier, Audrey had done an almost identical dive without a hitch. Now we were sitting in a semi-circle, a group of devastated people, trying to make sense of something that would never make sense. We were studying Kim's data. The descent had gone flawlessly. Wiky remembered Audrey shooting past at 90 metres, ahead of schedule. At the bottom, everything went like clockwork, too. For the first few seconds, anyway. Pascal watched as Audrey drew out the pin, separating the weighted portion of the sled, and that, too, went without a hitch. But then Audrey unscrewed the valve on the pony tank and the lift-bag failed to inflate. In fact, it actually sank a little. 'It looked like no air was coming out of the tank,' Pascal said. No air in the tank? That couldn't be possible. I had checked the tank. It was full. I had opened the valve and felt the tell-tale hiss and even heard the crinkle of the lift-bag as a burst of air found its way inside. 'Did you check the pony tank?' Carlos asked. 'Yes,' I said. 'Yes.' Tata spoke up. He said he had called up to the boat, to ask if the pony tank had been filled. 'And somebody said '"yes".' 'Who?' Carlos asked. 'I don't know,' Tata said. 'I heard it, too,' I said. But I didn't know who it was, either. Everyone looked at everyone else. No one knew who had spoken up earlier. And no one spoke up at that moment. The fact is, the responsibility for filling the tank didn't fall on the shoulders of any single member of the team. We were a team, and that's how we always operated. One day I made sure the tanks were filled. Another day it was Tata. Another Wiky or Carlos or Matt. It was the way we had always done it, and it had never failed us. Until now. Carlos turned his attention back to Pascal. 'What happened next?' he said. 'I swam over to help Audrey,' Pascal said. 'She opened her eyes briefly, but I saw no panic. She tried to push the sled upward, but it stalled. So I tried to push it, too.' According to Kim's graph, Pascal and Audrey spent 17 seconds struggling with the sled, which barely climbed two metres. Pascal then used one of his regulators to pump air into the lift-bag, and it moved a little further up, to 165 metres. The next 30 seconds were critical. Pascal continued to add air, but the bag barely moved. Audrey had been at the bottom for a full minute, and it had been two minutes and 42 seconds since she'd taken her last breath. She should have been seconds from home, and she was barely seven metres from the bottom. 'She didn't ask for air,' Pascal said. 'She appeared calm.' For the next 18 seconds, according to the data, Audrey began to rise, haltingly, at about half her normal speed, but the bag stalled again at the three-minute mark. Just before the four-minute mark, Audrey reached 120 metres. But according to the depth gauge, as recorded on Kim's computers, she suddenly stopped climbing and began to drop. 'She'd been holding her breath for four minutes,' Kim said. 'I'm assuming that she lost consciousness and lost her grip on the lift-bag.' She was at the 120-metre mark. This was where Cedric would have been waiting for her; Cedric her guardian angel. But we had decided not to put another safety diver in his place. Audrey was almost precisely halfway between Pascal and Wiky, all alone. 'I was below her,' Pascal said. 'Coming up slowly, at my usual ascent rate. Suddenly I saw her drifting off the lift-bag. She was falling toward me at a strange angle.' Within 15 seconds, Pascal stopped Audrey's fall, literally catching her. She was no longer breathing, so he couldn't put a regulator into her mouth. He inflated his vest and began to carry her up. After one minute and 55 seconds, he had reached the 90-metre mark, but Wiky wasn't there. Six minutes had elapsed since Audrey had taken her last breath. 'At that point, it was life and death for me,' Pascal said. 'I had already missed one decompression stop at 100 metres. I couldn't keep going. I have a wife and daughter. I couldn't take the risk.' Pascal didn't understand why Wiky wasn't at his post, and neither did we. Hadn't Wiky seen the lift-bag go by, without Audrey on it? How could he have missed it - it was moving very slowly. We were all staring at Wiky. 'No, no,' he protested, near tears. 'You don't understand. I saw the empty lift-bag. But six minutes had gone by. It was obvious the dive had been aborted. I began to return to the surface. I figured Audrey was below, with Pascal, and that they were going to decompress together. I didn't want to think about any other possibility...' After climbing toward the surface, Wiky couldn't have returned to that depth without risking the bends, and he didn't actually think there was any reason for him to go back. Meanwhile, Pascal waited at the 90-metre mark for one minute and three seconds. He tied the buoy around Audrey and began to inflate it, thinking he would have to release her and let her float to the top. That's when I arrived: seven minutes and three seconds into it. Audrey had been unconscious for more than three minutes. It took me another minute and 35 seconds to get Audrey to the surface. She had been under water for eight minutes and 38 seconds. At that rate of ascent, I could have died. And as I sat there with the others, trying to figure out exactly what had happened, trying to understand where we went wrong, I found myself wishing I had died. We want answers from life, but life doesn't often provide them. And when it does, they are seldom the answers we are looking for. I remembered having asked myself on more than one occasion what I had done to deserve a woman like Audrey. Now I wondered what I had done to lose her. The autopsy report listed the official cause of death as accidental asphyxiation by immersion. In other words, drowning. We flew back to Miami, taking Audrey's body with us, and a representative from the funeral home met us at the airport. We had made arrangements to have Audrey cremated, and went to the funeral home for a ceremony. We scattered Audrey's ashes at sea. We took the urn out on the Olokun to one of our old practice sites, three miles off shore. It was an overcast day, and brutally hot. When we arrived at the site, I slipped into the water and was handed the urn. It was my last dive with Audrey. I went ten metres down, opened the urn, and scattered her ashes. The particles hung in the water for a moment, refracting the light like a school of tiny fish. In short order, very short order, the world must have felt that I'd had enough time to mourn, because suddenly the attacks began: on our website, in the newspapers and in magazines. People were looking for an explanation for Audrey's death. They wanted answers. But I didn't have any answers. Were mistakes made? Yes, absolutely. We never double-checked the pony tank. We should have checked it with a gauge. But we had always worked together as a team, and that system, however haphazard it may have looked to other people, had always worked for us. Until then. Another point: we didn't have a diver at 120 metres. Should we have had? If I think about it now, I'd probably say yes, sure. But if we'd had a diver there, would Audrey be alive? I don't know. I can't answer that question. I doubt anyone can. I was even criticised for not hiring a doctor, and for not having a defibrillator and an intubation kit on the boat. We had a medical team on board with vast experience in treating divers. Wasn't that enough? To my critics, the tragedy was ultimate proof of my cavalier attitude. I didn't care about safety. I had done it on purpose. I wanted to stage a dramatic rescue at sea. Or, worse: I was too scared to go to that depth myself, so I had used Audrey. The attacks were truly beneath contempt. Didn't these people realise that I had lost the woman of my dreams; a woman I loved more even than my own life? Am I responsible? Yes. It was my crew, and my organisation. And no doubt mistakes were made. But I'm not sure that anyone else could have done any better. Skydiver, tightrope walker, slalom skier, mountaineer: it's all about risk, about living on the edge. For Audrey and for me, life was an adventure, and no limits diving was a big part of that adventure. This is the life we chose, or the life that chose us. We would not have wanted to live any other way. Extracted from The Dive: A Story of Love and Obsession, which is published in August by HarperCollins, £16.99 About the author Francisco 'Pipín' Ferreras was born in 1962 in Cuba. As a young spear-fisher, he found that he was able to swim to depths of 150ft, holding his breath for up to four minutes. It was not long before word got out about his unusual underwater endurance and Soviet scientists arrived to monitor his progress. In 1989, however, he left for Italy and began his professional career as a freediver, setting a record depth of 112m (367ft) in the variable ballast (descending on a weighted sled and ascending unassisted) category in the same year. Married in 1999, Ferreras and Mestre were soon trading world records with one another in the no-limits (as above but ascending with a lifting device) category. A year to the day after Audrey's death, Pipín broke his late wife's own record with a dive of 558ft. Ferreras established the International Association of Freedivers (IAFD) in 1997 as a rival to the AIDA authority under which Britain's Tanya Streeter has set several records. Streeter has criticised Ferreras and the IAFD for its allegedly casual approach to diver safety. But Ferreras refuses to change his approach. He argues that to eliminate risk would diminish the challenge. by FRANCISCO FERRERAS |
