Bobbing in the morning swell beneath the Golden Gate Bridge’s north tower, five divers in thick, hooded wetsuits clung to an inflatable paddleboard anchored precariously on the bay floor by an 80-pound rock tied with fraying jute rope.
The morning tide had just begun to ebb, sucking water from the bay into the Pacific and dragging the divers and their makeshift raft toward the narrow opening to the sea.
The divers were there, just outside Horseshoe Bay in Sausalito, to prove that deepwater free diving is possible in perhaps the most unlikely place: turbulent San Francisco Bay.
At its core, free diving is the simple act of underwater immersion without the assistance of a breathing apparatus. As its popularity has swelled in the past 15 years, it has become a global competitive sport with divers pushing to once unfathomable depths on breath-holds lasting several minutes. Most commonly, it involves a person descending vertically along a dive line to a predetermined depth and returning to the surface on a single breath.
As one might expect, free diving is enjoyed primarily in clear, calm, warm waters. The bay, with its swift currents, harsh winds, chilly temperatures, low visibility and resident white sharks, is not an inviting destination. But a cohort of determined divers has quietly been pursuing a risky quest to establish a site there for the past two years. Ultimately, they’d like to secure a permanent mooring near the Golden Gate for free diving — sort of like a vertical underwater hiking trail.
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Last month, word of their efforts reached the ear of the world’s top free diver, 34-year-old Russian Alexey Molchanov, who holds dozens of records, including a free dive to 429 feet. He flew into San Francisco to join locals in their latest attempt.
On the morning of April 30, Molchanov met a small crew at Horseshoe Bay’s harbor led by one of the men pioneering free diving in the bay, Jason Brown, a 43-year-old San Francisco fintech executive. Together, the two men and a third diver named Olya Lapina assembled their gear, squeezed into wetsuits and paddled out of the harbor’s protection toward the Golden Gate.
The plan was for Molchanov to follow a weighted anchor line to the bay floor — roughly 150 feet deep — grab a handful of dirt at the bottom then kick back to the surface. Accompanying the divers was a sailboat of friends on hand to assist and run interference between passing watercraft. The three divers were joined in the water by two photographers to document the feat.
After verifying the site via a digital depth gauge, Brown raised a dive flag, tossed his rock anchor and commenced pre-dive breathing exercises to stretch lungs and relax.
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But after an hour in the water, the swell was kicking up, and the excursion was on the brink of bust.
“Dude, it’s now or never!” Brown hollered to Molchanov.
A moment later, Molchanov dipped his head under the surface and kicked downward, his fins flapping at the water’s surface.
‘Like you have a superhuman ability’
Why people would go through the trouble to free dive in a place as hazardous as the bay speaks to the activity’s allure.
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“It’s one of the most powerful, magical, meditative, connected things that I’ve ever done in my life,” said San Francisco author and waterman James Nestor, who wrote a 2014 bestselling book on free diving called “Deep.” “I dream about it all the time. It’s part of me.”
“Once you learn, it feels like you have a superhuman ability — even though it’s just a human ability that we’ve forgotten.”
Wrapped up in free diving’s appeal is a conviction divers hold that a person’s ability to safely achieve depths of hundreds of feet on a single breath is indicative of an ancient evolutionary link to life’s beginnings in the deep ocean.
Research shows that submerging in water activates our “mammalian dive reflex,” a set of physiological changes that slow a person’s heart rate while pulling oxygenated blood away from their limbs and toward their lungs and brain (a process called peripheral vasoconstriction). Prolonged, deep dives intensify the shift, allowing a person to remain conscious under heavy water pressure and creating an overall effect divers describe as euphoric yet calming. Nestor and others refer to this transformation as the “Master Switch of Life.”
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“When I hit the surface, it’s like being rebooted. Every dive is like a power cycle,” said John Prins, a 40-year-old master free-diving instructor in San Francisco.
“Free diving … helped me start feeling great again,” says John Prins, who credits the sport with helping him cope with his father’s death and job-related stress.
Benjamin Fanjoy/Special to The Chronicle
Prins established a Bay Area Freedivers group on Facebook in 2019 — it is nearing 900 members — to connect disparate divers here, and he has been exploring the bay with Jason Brown.
Prins says free diving helped him cope with the death of his father and counterbalance a high-stress hedge fund job. “I became a tense and angry person when I came back to my family home and free diving helped wash that away, little by little, and helped me start feeling great again,” he said.
Many divers say the practice has improved their self-esteem or imbued their lives with newfound clarity and purpose.
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“The first thing I tell people is it is very addicting,” said Renee Blundon, a free-diving instructor in Monterey who counts 275 feet as her personal best. “For me, it’s hard to live without it.”
A different type of rush
Free diving draws comparisons to pursuits like BASE jumping or rock climbing, but Bay Area divers say it’s on the less extreme end of the sports spectrum.
“It’s not an adrenaline rush,” said Aleksandra Simonova, a 36-year-old Berkeley free diver. “It’s more like yoga, where you slow down and relax.”
But there’s no denying the high stakes and inherent dangers that come with pushing the limits of human ability. Free diving’s global expansion and development into a competitive sport — in which divers push depth, distance and time underwater — has come with casualties.
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Blackouts from oxygen deprivation are somewhat common and can at times cause divers to drown if they’re not resuscitated at the surface. In his book, “Deep,” Nestor recounts a free-diving competition he attended in 2011 in Greece when divers lost consciousness underwater and had to be rescued, or blacked out upon surfacing, or emerged with bleeding noses. In a separate case, he reported seeing a diver come up paralyzed.
“What I saw was horrific,” Nestor said. He believes the activity can be done safely, but not as a contest. “I think if more people understood that it doesn’t have to be done competitively, it’d do everyone some good.”
Several divers took umbrage at the sport’s portrayal in “Deep” and other publications, saying free diving has come a long way in the past decade as the community has gained experience — even as divers push deeper. Divers contend that mortal dangers are remote when people dive with trained buddies while connected to a dive line.
But not even experienced divers are immune from the risks. Before Alexey Molchanov’s global ascendance, his mother, Natalia Molchanova, was widely considered as the sport’s greatest. But in 2015, during a dive in the Mediterranean Sea, Molchanova went missing underwater. An extensive search was conducted, but she was never found.
No organization keeps precise statistics on free-diving deaths in the U.S. or worldwide. In a 2021 report, Diver Action Network counted 59 fatalities globally in 2018 associated with underwater breath-holding, a category covering snorkeling, spearfishing and free diving. But the report notes that the “amount of data captured each year is only a fraction of all incidents that occur.”
The International Association for the Development of Apnea, a standard-bearer of free-diving certification, declined to provide information on deaths or incidents. In response to a Chronicle inquiry, the organization wrote back: “We don’t share any sort of data with third parties.”
The perils of the Golden Gate
Before Brown and Prins began testing the waters in San Francisco Bay, they canvassed the region for other, easier dive sites.
Most of the Bay Area’s larger, deeper lakes and reservoirs don’t allow public use. Prins established a site approximately 200 feet deep on Lake Berryessa in Napa County, but it has a steep approach that divers say makes it impractical for daily use.
An area among the kelp forests in Monterey Bay off San Carlos Beach popular with scuba divers is an option, albeit a far one for Bay Area free divers wanting a quick weekday session. Plus, it’s a shallower, beginner spot, Prins says.
So they turned to the rough waters near the mouth of the Golden Gate, an area just outside shipping lanes where depth ranges between 150 feet and 200 feet, and access is a quick paddle via Horseshoe Bay. Brown and Prins say it’s the only suitably deep spot in the bay.
One of the only suitable dive sites in the bay happens to be near the Golden Gate Bridge, just outside Horseshoe Bay.
Shao-Feng Hsu/Special to The Chronicle
“What drives me is, we have this incredible natural resource here and we’re trying to unlock more of the potential and beauty of the spot where we live,” Brown said.
“It’s a risky spot, there’s no way around it,” Prins said. “I wouldn’t take beginners there or teach classes there.
“But for those of us who love (free diving), we can’t get that deep mental reset — this mind-emptying feeling of total rebirth — anywhere else,” he said. “This is our drug, we have to chase it, and we don’t mind going out to a risky spot to get it.”
A permanent home in S.F. Bay?
Outside Horseshoe Bay last Sunday, Molchanov dove for 2 minutes and 30 seconds down 190 feet to the bottom — deeper than Brown, Prins or anyone else known to have dived in San Francisco Bay.
He surfaced excitedly, tossed back his head for air, then curled his upper body onto the paddleboard. Brown whooped ecstatically, smacking the water with a gloved palm then slapping Molchanov’s back.
“That’s the record! Wooo!”
Minutes later, out of the chop and on the deck of a sailboat anchored in the nearby harbor, Molchanov shed his wet gear and reflected on his dive. Light doesn’t penetrate below about 40 feet in the turbid bay, so most of his time underwater was spent in pitch black, fighting the dizzying currents.
“Crazy, for sure. Epic,” Molchanov said. “Normally you can predict the dive. But in this environment, that’s very difficult. … It’s a big challenge.”
“This is why we want to install a mooring,” Brown replied.
Brown and Prins have inquired with the U.S. Coast Guard about plugging a permanent dive buoy in the water. They say the agency hasn’t responded.
Before Molchanov’s dive, Lapina went down 114 feet before turning around.
“The funny thing is,” she said, “I’d do this whole thing again tomorrow.”
Reach Gregory Thomas: [email protected]
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