A BREATH-TAKING DIVING EXPERIENCE.

Byline: Brett Pauly

Try holding your breath for 55 seconds.

Come on, you can do it. One-1,000, two-1,000, three-1,000 . . .

OK, now take your act on the open ocean, miles from shore, and plunge into the deep blue abyss, down some 50 feet into the shark-infested brine. Wait for a moving target - say a 200-pound bluefin tuna - to swim by, raise a powerful speargun, aim carefully and fire.

Missed? No time for second-guessing - or second shots. Quick, fin back to the surface before you pass out. Reload. Repeat, for an hour.

Sound enticing?

Now you have a feel for some of the routine challenges faced by a daring breed of skin divers known as blue-water hunters.

They'll have none of those convenient air tanks that scuba divers favor. No sport in that. Instead, they prefer to dive until their lungs hurt, staying under the waves - between periodic rests on the surface - an unfathomable 40 minutes in an hour, long enough to make even Poseidon proud.

"Pretty much anything a scuba diver can do a free diver can do," said Ventura skin diver Terry Maas, who wrote the book - "Bluewater Hunting and Freediving" (BlueWater Freedivers; $39.85) - on the sport. "Of course, there are qualifications. We can't go to 100 feet and stay for 10 minutes, but we can get down to 100 feet."

"We have 30 seconds to hunt a fish, compared to 30 minutes," said Maas, 51, a retired oral surgeon whose slender build, mustache and salt-and-pepper mane give him a Ted Turner look. "I learned when I was scuba diving at 14 that there's not much fun in stalking the fish for an hour, just laying on the bottom, waiting."

Besides, he said, scuba noises and bubbles scare the game, and speargunning while wearing air tanks is illegal in many parts of the United States and other countries.

Four times crowned national spearfishing champion by the Underwater Society of America and a world-record holder for bluefin tuna (398 pounds) and yellowfin tuna (255 pounds), Maas is recognized around the globe as a master in a sport that is enjoying a resurgent popularity. He is also familiar to more mainstream audiences as the primary subject of the Peter Fonda-narrated documentary "Blue Water Hunters," which has aired several times on PBS and The Discovery Channel.

"I think it was quite remarkable that some of his species (he has hunted) were not within our reach," said Stathis Kostopoulos of San Gabriel, a correspondent for the Greek dive magazine Vithos who learned about Maas' records after watching the PBS special a few years back. "They are hard to find and stalk because they are fast, skittish, very big, potentially dangerous and require specialized gear (to take)." (See related story.)

The sport has a core of about 1,000 avid followers in the United States, Australia, Europe and Africa. Maas has traveled to Panama, Chile, the Bahamas, Hawaii, South Africa, Spain and Italy in pursuit of everything from wahoo and marlin to snapper and grouper. He has ridden atop giant manta rays and videotaped whale sharks.

But local divers - many of whom belong to the area's spearfishing clubs, the Fathomiers and the Long Beach Neptunes - don't have to go that far.

"You can do it off the beach. Just get offshore on a surfboard," said Maas, who once took two 30-pound yellowtails and a 40-pound white seabass in 80 feet of water off Leo Carrillo State Beach.

Wherever the sport takes them, spearfishers are ever aware of the dangers.

Maas introduces his book with an entry about an old dive partner, Al Schneppershoff, who was killed by a great white shark in 1973.

"You're out in the open, where every water molecule is connected and anything can come up that chain," warned Maas, who also is a pilot and flies weekly to San Jose to manage a family real estate business.

He once came face to face with a 15-foot tiger shark off San Benedicto Island, south of Baja, but was unharmed. Three times he has experienced shallow-water blackout - a diver's nightmare that occurs without warning when oxygen supplies are outstretched following deep descents.

He was run over by a motorboat while training for an international spearfishing competition in Italy. He was thrust into a dark cave near Mendocino by a strong storm surge and thought he was a goner, only to be propelled back out by the receding current. He speaks of the spearfishers who become tangled in their own lines and are drowned by their struggling prey.

Despite the hazards, Maas has a passion that drives him to the depths some 40 times a year. But he doesn't take unnecessary risks, as evidenced by the dropped speargun he decided not to swim after off Costa Rica for fear he would run out of air.

"Terry uses good judgment," said Beth Maas, his wife of four years and mother of their month-old daughter, Marissa. "He doesn't trust himself beyond his limitations. He knows how long he can stay under water before he gets into trouble."

. . . fifty-three 1,000, fifty-four 1,000, fifty-five 1,000.

Skin diver in full gear

Blue-water hunters require specialized gear for their specialized sport.

Ventura diver Terry Maas is on the cutting edge of the equipment evolution.

"He's an innovator," said dive-magazine writer Stathis Kostopoulos. "He helped develop the technical breakthrough in preparing spearfishing gear and the stalking techniques."

Maas makes his own spear line - neoprene tubing wrapped around a heavy nylon cord that is tied from the spear end to a string of lifeguard buoys bobbing on the surface. The setup releases from the gun when the spear is fired and acts as a giant bungee to keep constant tension on the prize.

The world-record 398-pound bluefin tuna Maas speared off Mexico's Guadalupe Island "took off like a banshee," he said. "He pulled the buoys 100 feet under. I thought he tore loose, but he went in a circle and looked like he was going to hit me."

Divers grab the spear line and fight their prey underwater. Records are official only if they subdue the game on their own, with no help from other divers in the water or on a boat. Their swim fins are extra long to provide maximum propulsion and minimum strain. They wear custom, low-volume masks.

Spearheads are multiple-barbed, ice pick-like affairs that help assure the game doesn't escape. "We don't want to lose the fish," Maas explained. "It is less likely to survive a spear-gun shot than damage from a fishing hook."

He builds a gun from metal tubing or teakwood stocks and clads it in heavier wood to provide substance. After it's shaped for two to three months, it weighs a remarkable 18 pounds. In water the gun is weightless, yet its impressive dimensions give inertia to the spear shaft and prevent recoil.

"We've had guys break their thumbs, wrists, noses and jaws because of recoil," he said.

CAPTION(S):

PHOTO[ordinal indicator, masculine]CHART

Photo (1--color) Blue water spear fisherman Bob Caruso doesn't need an air tank to catch this Mexican Wahoo. Howard Benedict / Special to the Daily News (2) Skin diver and spear fisherman Terry Maas, who lives in Ventura, indulges his passion for the sport as many as 40 times a year. Phil McCarten / Daily News Box Skin diver in full gear (see text)