Spearfishing and Freediving Quotes and Poem

"Freediving is about silence...the silence that comes from within.."
Jacques mayol

"Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way round or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.

Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend."
- Bruce Lee

Once a ballerina, then a showgirl, now a Cancan dancer and freediver. I live with my body on the stage and my heart in the ocean...

“From birth, man carries the weight of gravity on his shoulders. He is bolted to earth.
But man has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free.” 

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean - roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin - his control
Stops with the shore.

Lord Byron, The Ocean
(Sadly not true now)


Calm or convulsed, in breeze, or gale, or storm,
Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime
Dark-heaving - boundless, endless, and sublime.

Lord Byron, The Ocean


...plunging down
Into their green and glassy gulfs, and making
My way to shells and seaweed, all unseen
By those above, till they waxed fearful; then
Returning with my grasp full of such tokens
As showed that I had searched the deep

Lord Byron, With a Swimmer's Stroke


I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied

John Masefield, Sea-fever


Weed in the wave, gleam in the mud -
The dark fire leaps along his blood;
Dateless and deathless, blind and still,
The intricate impulse works its will.

Rupert Brooke, The Fish
(That was my signature for a while)

Swimming without a roof over your head is now a mildly subversive activity, like having an allotment, insisting on your right to walk a footpath, or riding a bicycle.

Roger Deakin, Waterlog