Dynamo Alumni Spotlight

How has your time at Dynamo impacted your life:
All the normal ways that all of us who made it through morning workouts in high school now take for granted: discipline, accountability, self confidence, grit, appreciation for physical fitness, experience in how to deal with severe sleep deprivation (great skill for parents), how to deal with success, how to deal with failure, how to define success, how to prioritize and set goals, a ruthless understanding for what parts of one’s identity and self value ought to be fueled by performance… all the good stuff. And, not to be forgotten, an insane level of water competence, which we all have as people who spent such an inordinate amount of our lives in a terribly over chlorinated swimming pool.

We trained at such a maximum, world class level of water fitness that when I retired from competition and decided I wanted to dabble in ocean lifeguarding on the beaches in LA County, it was a total, laughing joke doing the swim test and dealing with rescues in 6-8 foot swell in Los Angeles. What was life threatening conditions for the victims was honestly a walk in the park. Rescuing people was a fun, enjoyable, excuse to get in the water as a lifeguard. It took me a while to realize that some people cannot swim- it was almost unbelievable to think. I would sit in my lifeguard stand saying to myself, “yeah, that person is in a rip current but I’m sure they’ll just swim out of it; and even if they don’t, they’re only a 50 meter swim from safety.” Turns out that’s a huge deal to 99% of the public beach users. Spending countless hours chasing the black line in the Chamblee garage made swimming second nature and opened up the possibility of exploring the ocean like a playground. For most people it’s a terrifying place but after a lifetime in the pool and a little ocean knowledge, the ocean is a playground. Ed Spencer’s 14 x 400 IM Saturday mornings and 10 x 200 fly sets are phenomenal preparation for ocean enjoyment in all conditions.

I’ve been able to join some beautiful underwater production shoots and learn how to work an underwater camera. I’ve been able to experience some incredible marine wildlife encounters. And I absolutely loved rescuing people in rip currents in Los Angeles. If I wasn’t living in South Africa now, I’d be doing that on the weekends. While I would never even attempt a set of 14 x 400 IMs again (and would think twice about signing my kids up for it), it set me up to enjoy my life now.

Favorite or funniest or most embarrassing swimming memory:

A bucket of BBQ:
Carl Nylander (well it was either Carl or Tim Montgomery) found a massive vat of barbeque pulled pork the size of a 5 gallon paint can in the coach’s refrigerator one day. Why would the Dynamo Coaches miss 10 pounds of BBQ?

I think we were finishing a lifeguarding first aid and CPR course on a Saturday afternoon; whatever it was we were doing at Dynamo that day we were obviously bored. We had finished our pool session of velcro-ing dummies to backboards and pretending to resuscitate drowning victims and were busy using all the hot shower water available when I felt a cold slop of something hit me in the back. I turn around and see Carl (or Tim?) with a giant white bucket of brown pulled pork and for some reason we decided to take handfuls of cold BBQ pork and sling it all over the men’s showers in a 2 person food fight- like I said, we must have been bored. Actually, I’m not sure there is anyway to redeem ourselves in this story, but it was absolutely hilarious at the time. Once we stopped laughing and slipping in the BBQ, we were left with a nasty mess. Luckily it was an easy clean up. We turned on all the showers and used our feet to slide all the BBQ into the tiny drains in the corner of the showers. No problem. All clean. Who would ever find out?

Well the drains in the showers could deal with a lot of crap but 10 pounds of sticky pulled pork? Nah, the plumber must have pulled all that pork out of the drains and just scratched his head wondering how it wound up there in the first place. Never underestimate how bored you can get at Dynamo during a CPR lifeguarding course. I don’t exactly remember what Carl (or Tim) and I had to do as penance, but the coaches figured it out. We spent a few more weekends at the Chamblee pool paying for our pulled pork hilarity. I do miss Carl (and Tim). I hope our kids eat the barbecue and keep our plumbing bills low.

Where are you today?
I’m currently in our office above Kalk Bay Harbor in Cape Town, South Africa. My wife, two kids, our dog, 4 silkie chickens, and I live in a small fishing village close to the Cape of Good Hope (or the Cape of Storms, depending on how you look at it). When I was competing at a World Cup Event in South Africa a South African swimmer friend set me up with a shark dive. Those dive operators wanted to put me in touch with a South African freediving champion to help with my breath hold because I apparently needed help. But whenever I visited South Africa for the yearly World Cup Event, this freediving champion was always somewhere else teaching big wave surfers how not to die on a big wave hold down. I suppose those guys do need help holding their breath, but I was losing patience to meet this champion freediver. Eventually I traded messages with the breath hold guru on facebook, and we had a few Skype calls. Then when I finished competing and had loads of frequent flier miles from all the World Cup meets saved up, I decided to head down to Cape Town for a break, and I hit it off with that champion freediver and now I live in South Africa with her and our kids (and soon to be garden farm).

When I retired from competitive swimming, Hanli and I poured ourselves into an ocean conservation non-profit here in South Africa and in the USA called I AM WATER that connects youth from low income coastal communities with their oceans. We partner with marine scientists and the South African Department of Education to create 2 day marine science and snorkeling workshops, and after a long 10 year slog (much like a set of 14 x 400 IMs), we are proudly cranking out more than 3,000 first time ocean connections each year.

Most of our work in the early years of the non-profit was always around fundraising, so we hosted trips for donors to learn freediving and put their new skills into practice with bottlenose dolphins in Mozambique, our neighbor just north of South Africa. There are more than 200 resident bottlenose dolphins that live along the coast and they come inshore to hunt, rest, and play each morning. We took donors diving with these pods of dolphins, and we found that the donations from those trips and the relationships we built with those donors was incredibly valuable for the non-profit. Eventually this fundraising arm became its own business (www.oceantravel.co) and my wife and I began leading trips to areas where we knew large marine animals congregated. We work with scientists, bring paying clients and our chef to a destination and curate 7-10 day trips for anyone who wants to learn how to freedive and experience wild whales, mantas, whalesharks, dolphins, sharks, seals, or whatever the ocean has in store.

We’ve had a few memorable moments with humpback whales in the South Pacific when my wife was pregnant with our first child. We spent 45 minutes in the water with 2 humpbacks who came as close as one pectoral fin while they danced and played and breached all around us. They never touched us, but we felt a couple times like they might. They kept swimming and spinning underwater either because they just enjoyed it or because they knew Hanli was pregnant and they were celebrating. I will always remember how big that whale’s eye was; it must have been the size of my head! We bobbed on the surface and watched its eye move around watching us, and they kept performing and playing. I’m sure they knew Hanli was pregnant and decided to put on a show for her. It was spectacular.

Then in Ecuador we led one of our very first trips to a place with giant mantas. The researcher was a friend of my wife’s, and she showed us a place where oceanic mantas came to visit sections of a reef to have the parasites picked off their skin by reef fish- it’s like an oceanic manta spa treatment. We jumped in the water to see and sure enough there were sometimes up to five giant manta rays circling around and around the same spot on a reef about 25 feet underwater. They came in and hovered as long as they could while the reef fish frantically nibbled all the ocean parasites possible. Then as the manta stopped swimming it would sink down onto the reef for a while until it would flip its wings and push its way back into the holding pattern with the other mantas until its next turn at the spa. These mantas just kept coming and coming. We were diving with some scuba divers, and if you’ve ever been scuba diving you’ll know that you only have so much dive time before it is unsafe to continue diving. So as a freediver we waited and waited until all the scuba divers had to exit the water, and we were able to enjoy these mantas all to ourselves for almost 2 hours. At one point the mantas began circling in a shallow part of the bay next to the reef, and we dove down and blew bubbles under their bellies. Their bellies were covered with around 30 large remoras, hitchhiking a ride at the manta’s expense, and the mantas didn’t like them. When we blew the bubbles, the remoras would move around, and the mantas loved it. They would hover and shimmy their wings and lower down almost on top of you, which is an unreal experience until you realize your lungs are empty, and you don’t want an animal the size of a small plane landing on your chest 25 feet below the surface. But we kept diving down and blowing bubbles, taking turns to keep the mantas engaged and coming back. And they did. They kept coming back and coming back until finally the scuba divers were fed up with us getting all the fun, and we had to jump back in the boat for the trip to shore.

We ran those trips for years until we had some clients who we had gotten to know as friends approach us with a new idea. These friends had joined us to all our destinations and supported the non-profit and now they wanted to support something new. We started discussing ideas and decided to start a new freediving gear brand. The brand is called Agulhas (www.agulhasocean.com) after the warm ocean current that pushes down the eastern side of the African continent to fuel the abundance of life we have here in Cape Town’s oceans. So that’s what I spend most of my time doing now: developing, manufacturing, and selling our sustainable freediving gear.

Luckily in between teething babies and the joys of running a business I get to work on product testing in the kelp forests. And we still run some trips, so if anyone wants to visit us in Cape Town, let us know.

I miss familiar faces and friends and would have loved to see everyone at the recent reunion, so I look forward to the next one.