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33 f e et b e l ow t h e o c e a n ’ s surface, the human body is neutrally buoyant — essentially weightless. Above that, the gases in your body naturally make you float upward. Below it, the atmospheric pressure compresses those gases, and you sink at a rate that increases with your depth. Divers call this phenomenon “the doorway to the deep.” ¶ Thirty-three feet down is exactly where I found myself recently, floating statically, swaddled in 2,000 feet of warm Atlantic Ocean in the Bahamas, with only the air in my lungs to sustain me. When I looked up, I saw strands of gauzy light reaching toward the water’s surface, where a roaring Bahamian sun silhouetted my fellow divers and the Pursuit S 408, the vessel that had brought me to this strange space. When I looked down, all I could see was dark-blue nothingness. Back in college, I would often begin term papers with a favorite quote from Friedrich Nietzsche: “If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” Back then I was grasping at wisdom I didn’t quite understand, in an attempt to pad my intellectual credibility. But in that moment, down below, as I floated Zen-like in a boundless expanse, fully mortal in an immortal place, I finally understood what the great thinker meant. So I bent at the hips, flipped my fins over my head and kicked downward, feeling the sea’s gaping maw suck me in. Don’t worry guys, I lived to tell the tale. ¶ The plan for this story was hatched nearly two years earlier, over beers in a West Palm Beach bar with Pursuit’s inhouse photographer, Marc Montocchio. He is a former South African Navy underwater demolition diver — both a serious waterman and a bit of a hell-raiser. When I told him I wanted to do a freediving and spearfishing expedition with Pursuit, he was all over it. Pursuit’s marketing director, David Glenn, who is a waterman himself and has a family with some serious aquatic bona fides, including three sons who have surfed professionally and a wife who is a former pro water-skier, also loved the idea. ¶ It seemed like everything was in motion. But then, as it has a habit of doing, life happened. We didn’t have quite the right boat. We had difficulty finding an instructor. I changed jobs. A year dragged on, then another. The story moved along like all the important things in life seem to do — that is, at a glacial pace, and then all at once. Pursuit launched the S 408, a versatile, monster-size center console built for fun and adventure. We came into contact with Errol Putigna, one of the world’s foremost freediving instructors. And I found myself desperately trying to remember my high-school Spanish as I directed a cabdriver from Palm Beach International Airport to a marina in Fort Pierce, Florida, where the S 408 was docked. Allá derecha! Allá derecha! That was pretty much all I could recall, but somehow, we found the boat anyway. ¶ Once on board, I inspected the vessel and found it well-suited to our needs. In-