Tank-less in the sea.

Byline: Mike Stahlberg The Register-Guard

After 20 years of SCUBA diving, Dan Pesznecker "got tired of wearing all that stuff and decided it was easier to go down and jump in the water and hold my breath."

That was about three years ago. Now Pesznecker, a Portland-area machine shop owner, is hooked on "freediving," the sport in which holding your breath is a must.

Freedivers eschew air tanks, regulators and hoses and rely entirely on the air they can hold in their lungs.

It's a sport that's becoming popular in warm-water regions. And it has some dedicated devotees in Oregon, as evidenced by the the six men - including Pesznecker - and three women who participated in the second annual "Freediving Frolic," an underwater spearfishing competition held earlier this month near Port Orford.

For SCUBA divers, who can stay submerged at great depths for long periods of time, catching a fish is as easy as spearing a martini olive with a toothpick.

For freedivers, however, spearfishing is a sporting proposition, said John Cheesman of Seasports Dive Center in Springfield, which sponsored the event and offers classes in breath-hold diving, as well as SCUBA training and offshore fishing trips.

"It's more of an athletic, challenging event," Cheesman said of freediving. "Most of the bottomfish we have in Oregon waters are very easily taken on SCUBA, so this evens the playing field a little bit."

Indeed, with the cold water and low visibility found off the Oregon Coast, a fish is likely to escape more often than not.

Freediving is to spearfishing what the bow and arrow is to deer hunting - a great equalizer.

Ken Baldwin, one of Cheesman's partners at Seasports and a recent convert to freediving, said the lack of air tanks changes everything.

"In SCUBA, I sit on a rock at 50 feet and simply wait until the fish come to me - it's a shooting gallery," Baldwin said. "Freediving, I had to sneak up on fish, be more calm in approaching the fish and more selective in choosing the fish."

All in the matter of however many seconds a diver can hold his breath while swimming, which varies from person to person.

Pesznecker, for example, said he's comfortable holding his breath "for about a minute." During that time he reaches depth of "about 70 feet in warm water, about 50 feet in cold water."

Water temperature makes a difference because "in colder water, you have a lot thicker (wet)suits, you have heavier gear and it's harder to relax when you have more stuff on," Cheesman said.

Relaxation is the key to freediving, because the more effort that is expended, the faster the muscles use up the available oxygen. Freedivers use huge, oversized fins so they can propel themselves farther with less oxygen-burning muscle effort.

"A lot of people who are very good freedivers are 50, 60, 70 years old," Cheesman said. "They have that calmness about them, their technique is down and they do it great."

The Port Orford competition, in fact, was won by 49-year-old Andrew Burnett, a Portland print shop owner who was the oldest person in attendance.

Burnett took up freediving only three years ago.

"But it's something I wanted to do my whole life - ever since watching `Sea Hunt' (on television) as a kid," Burnett said. "It's an exciting sport. One of the things I like about it is you never know what you're going to see or what's going to happen."

Burnett said he didn't have to dive very deep - "probably no more than 20 feet" - or stay down longer than 45 seconds while accumulating his winning stringer of 14 fish in two days.

All together, the freedivers shot black sea bass, kelp greenling, purple perch, a China rockfish and one copper rockfish - "all in 10 to 50 feet of water right off Port Orford, near the kelp beds and offshore rocks and reefs," Cheesman said.

Spearfishers are covered by the same bag limits as anglers. However, they are not allowed to spear any freshwater game fish, such as salmon and steelhead, that have gone to sea.

Freedivers "use snorkels to rest and relax on the surface so we can keep our face in the water," Cheesman said. In clear water, they can sometimes spot fish from the surface and dive after them. Off Oregon, however, they usually have to dive below the surface several feet before fish come into view.

The snorkel is usually spit out once the dive begins. "It makes a lot of noise if you don't pull it out," Cheesman said.

The absence of bubbles and other noise associated with SCUBA gear makes it easier to approach within speargun range - usually no more than 25 feet - of fish in the short time available to a freediver.

"The main thing is you kind of have to be real smooth and quiet so you don't scare the fish," Burnett said. "And there are some techniques you learn to dive down without making a lot of noise."

Breath-hold diving "is a mental game as much as a physical game," according to Corrina Wood, who teaches Seasports Dive Center's classes on freediving. "You can learn to ignore the urge to breathe for a while.

"It takes a while to develop the skill because you have to learn to relax, but as your relaxation grows, you can get deeper and deeper and stay down longer and longer."

Tuition is $295 for a six-session class that covers breath-holding techniques, kicking techniques, diving techniques and gear-handling techniques and practice.

"It's a lot to handle all that gear the first few times that you have it," Wood said.

The gear includes wetsuit, weight belt, fins, mask and snorkel and - if you're going to be hunting - a speargun powered by rubber tubing. Every diver also has a line attached to a buoy so people on the surface can track his or her location. In addition, the buoy line is connected to the spear, which helps in the recovery of larger fish.

After not diving for a while, Wood said she gets "the burning lungs and shoot up to the surface gasping for air. But after a few dives I don't have that reaction any more and I can very calmly come back up."

The freediving that Seasports teaches, incidentally, should not be confused with no-limit breath-hold competition, which is sometimes also referred to as freediving. That competition involves the use of weighted sleds to carry breath-hold divers to extreme depths, and the use of air-filled balloons to speed their ascent to the surface.

"That's a different sport entirely," Cheesman said. "We don't want people diving deep while holding their breath. I don't think that's necessary. Most of the big game fish that Corrina or I got have been in 5 to 30 feet of water. You do not need to go deeper than 30 feet, really, to have nice fishing. We don't want people holding their breath too long and having other medical problems, like blacking out, because you can do that."

Cheesman said recreational freediving has proven to be a nice addition to his charter business, allowing him to offer "offshore adventure trips" aboard his 31-foot boat Seasport I. The trips include angling for tuna and/or halibut, SCUBA diving, freediving or various combinations of all three.

"The combo thing works well," he said. "If conditions aren't right offshore, we'll come back in and dive in sheltered water.'

CAPTION(S):

A freediver heads into the water with speargun in hand to hunt for game fish off the Oregon Coast. John Cheesman Corrina Wood surfaces with a black sea bass she speared near Port Orford. Corrina Wood John Cheesman of Seasports Dive Center works off the Oregon Coast on a recent freediving outing.