The Maytag Effect

If you've ever pushed full-ocean scuba gear through the surfline and toward a favorite reef, especially on a day where the breakers were coming in pretty strong, chances are you've heard the term "the Maytag Effect." This is the time when, while wearing a wetsuit, lead weights, a 40lb tank, regulators, a bottom time computer and probably carrying a speargun, you find yourself caught in the biggest part of the surf and pounded mercilessly by all of the hydraulics involved. It can tear your facemask off of your face if you're not prepared. (Hint: Once you see it coming, go UNDER it and tuck your human pinipeds under yourself in a fetal-like position until the main agitation is over. Then resume your kick out to the place you're headed).

River kayakers get this idea, too. Especially on the Payette in Idaho during a record runoff. Sometimes its all you can do to keep the pointy-end facing downriver. Crabbing in the middle of the roiling whitewater is exhilarating beyond your imagination. Is that the river or your stomach churning??

No difference.

Props to the camerawork and assembly by Anson Fogel and team for their upcoming feature, "Wildwater."

Base Jumping at Dean's

Dean's Blue Hole -- Bahamas

Freedivers are unique in what they understand about their own tuning and performance. Imagine being able to not only hold your breath for almost four minutes, but to do work and remain mentally focused during all of that time.

It's a long time.

Especially if you calmly walk to the edge of a 600 foot sink hole and throw yourself into it face first, all while being entirely underwater. Underwater camera people are also unique. They despise bubbles that would distract the viewer from what they intended them to see. Often they use "rebreather" units that scrub the CO2 out of the air that recirculates in a closed system. But some of them just hold their breath, too. For this man and his shooter girlfriend, a free fall is different than others might experience. Dreamlike, even.

Guillame NERY AT THE ABYSS

The idea is that you become so comfortable in the water that your heart only beats a few times per minute. This is also because you are completely lean and physically conditioned into kinship with the aquatic mammals who divert their bloodflow to major organs during a dive. Quite tricky to do, because with each additional 33 feet of depth in the seawater column, there's an additional atmosphere of pressure that makes that breath of air you caught at the surface half as much smaller in your lungs. (Conversely, on assent, it expands, but at that time you've exchanged some of the O2 into CO2 and its the latter that tells your brain you are "hungry" to breathe air. Gulliame's poise in this clip would indicate that he keeps all of his hunger in check)

If you claim that kinship with the other aquatic mammals and believe that you have returned to an environment where all life began, then base jumping in a sinkhole isn't all that intimidating.

Maybe it's just a parallel dimension with another place and time.
Or maybe its just a dream.