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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. Buoyed by —water, he can fly in any direction—up, down, sideways—by merely flipping his hand. Under water, man becomes an archangel.
—Cousteau
The water may be the turquoise Mediterranean, an ice-skimmed quarry in Vermont, the translucent waters off Bermuda, the Pacific rolling in majestic rhythm toward the shores of San Diego. Around the world and across the nation, swimmers are sinking beneath the surface to fly like angels through an alien realm. This fascinating new playground, alive with beauty and tanged with danger, belongs to the skindiver.
Off Cannes, skindivers soar around beds of jeweled coral—reds, violets, purples, yellows—in pursuit of sea bass and mullet. In Australia they prowl the caverns of the1,250-mile Great Barrier Reef, or play tag with the gregarious seals that frolic off Carnac Island. Near London, divers happily muddle through the ooze of a dank lake in Black Park.
But the surrounding seas and inland lakes of the U.S. are the world's stronghold of skindiving. Since World War II, U.S. swimmers have created a mass sport out of a pastime that once belonged to an adventuresome few. This week some 1,000,000 dedicated U.S. skindivers are getting ready for their biggest year. They are pro halfbacks, harried housewives, gawky teenagers. Detroit tycoons, retired schoolmarms sunning in Miami. For skindiving has the great virtue of letting each swimmer make his own terms with the deep. With no need to compete or excel, the skindiver can choose a way to have fun beneath the surface that suits his nerve and pocketbook.
Mask & Fin. Since the naked eye is all but blind under water, the basic equipment is a good face mask that will transform the murk into a wonderland. With the addition of a simple snorkel tube poking above the surface, the swimmer can cruise indefinitely on the surface with his face buried under water. So equipped, swimmers can peer for happy hours into the depths of the Gulf of Mexico or forest-bound lakes in Wisconsin, study the toadfish that fusses like an old lady off Long Island. Ducking beneath the surface, the strong-lunged pry abalone from the California shallows, or spear unwary fish that hover near the surface. Experts like Miami's great Pinder brothers. Art, Fred and Don (see SHOW BUSINESS ), can easily go as deep as 70 ft., stay under for up to 60 sec., and have individually landed catches as big as an 804-lb. jewfish.
But the sport's aristocrats are the ''free divers." Spurning any line to the surface, they go down with tanks of compressed air strapped to their backs, a rubber mouthpiece between their teeth, and froglike fins on their feet. Experienced free divers-some prefer the term "scuba,"' for "self-contained underwater breathing apparatus'"—can cruise as deep as 130 ft. for up to 15 min. or at 40 ft. for two hours.
Prince & Pugilist. Drawn by the deep, the elite free divers range from Lord Louis Mountbatten and his royal nephew Prince Philip to Heavyweight Champion Ingemar Johansson, from Russian Nuclear Physicist Bruno Pontecorvo to Gary Cooper and U.S. Rocketeer Wernher von Braun.