Hold your breath

For a time, the water seems cloudy, but as I get down a dozen feet, things clear up. Green water clears to a darker, clearer color and I see the bottom. A solitary bass eyes me before it disappears into a rock fissure as I bottom out at about 25 feet, quartzite boulders on my right and the sandy lake bed stretching out to my left.

Not too much light penetrates this far down, but what does casts a pure greenish glow through the clear water. The silence is so complete it's beautiful. One breath is not much time, but it's enough to make me feel privileged to enter another world. Less than a minute after the start of my descent, I'm finning up, watching the surface get brighter as I come back into pure sunlight. I burst into our airy world and gulp a couple of breaths before settling in again to float over a world few ever visit.

I repeat this experience again and again. Each time, my body becomes more accustomed to the nonbreathing world. Each time I can stay down a few seconds longer and feel the other worldliness of the depths just a bit more.

Snorkeling, as we saw in the August issue, gives you a view of a vibrant underwater world. Free diving - getting deeper on just one breath of air - is a far more liberating and challenging experience, combining aerobic control, mental discipline and an opportunity to feel like a fish.

Free diving gets you down deeper where encounters with the bigger fish are more likely. It's also a much more athletic endeavor, since what you're trying to do is a) get as much oxygen into your lungs, b) still your mind and slow your heart, and c) dive as deep as you can and have enough breath to get back up to the surface for more air.

Free diving, as practiced by true apneaists, is an extreme sport. Incredible depths have been plumbed in international competitions. For the rest of us, it offers a silent sport that is stunningly silent. Beneath the surface, sound from above does not intrude.

Jon Zeaman knows free diving perhaps better than anyone in Wisconsin. He has gone down over a 100 feet on one lungful. An occasional spear fisherman, Zeaman captures most of his fish as a photographer. He's cut holes in the ice in Northern lakes in midwinter to caress hibernating fish.

Free diving was popularized in the movie "The Big Blue." In the film, men and women ride weighted sleds to incredible depths in the hundreds of feet, hoping to return to the surface several minutes later. Some don't make it.

Zeaman doesn't take it that far, but free diving, which also means freedom from scuba tanks, computers and paraphernalia, has captivated him for years. Although he is a licensed scuba instructor, technical diver and salvager, he says, "I don't put on that equipment anymore if I'm not getting paid."

So passionate is he about free diving, Zeaman does it every chance he gets year-round.

Following his posts at Deeperblue.com will give you an idea of the variety he finds beneath the surface. When ice goes out, freeing up the lakes in Madison, Zeaman will try his luck spearfishing panfish and carp in Lake Mendota.

If you're imagining a pistol grip pneumatic-powered spear gun, like those seen in James Bond films, think again. "I use a Hawaiian sling," he says of a spear gun resembling a curtain rod with a pointy end attached to an oversized rubber band. "Some people spearfish with scuba gear, but to me that's about as ethical as hunting deer with a machine gun."

Zeaman prefers to hunt with a small digital camera in a sturdy waterproof housing that allows him to capture images of bigger freshwater species in cold clear water.

Zeaman is a founder and participant in Free Dive Palooza, an event that takes place each summer at Lake Wauzee in northwestern Wisconsin. Wauzee is specially set up for scuba students and enthusiasts, but once a year free divers from Wisconsin and surrounding states come together to share stories, test new equipment, but mostly to dive, dive and dive some more. "We draw about 40 divers from about a half-dozen states," Zeaman said.

Safety is stressed, with lines tethered to the bottom to keep divers on track. A carryover from scuba diving, the event's free divers strictly adhere to a buddy system in which one person dives while the other watches.

Summer weekends may find Zeaman up north. "Devil's Lake is good for photography. And when the water's warm, I go out on Lake Michigan to explore the wrecks," he said. For dives close to home on the eastside of Madison, he's equipped his bike with wooden pannierlike boxes to tote his wet suit, oversized fins, weights and photo equipment.

After the lakes freeze, he and some friends might suit up and snorkel in the Yahara River. And then there's Freeze-A-Palooza, another Lake Wauzee event he pioneered several years ago. The premise is simple. Get a saw, cut a hole in the ice, don some really heavy wet suits and hoods, and pretend it's summer. The water, after all, is still water, just a few degrees too warm to turn to ice.

While Zeaman is out on the cutting edge of this winter sport, there is room at the bottom for the rest of us. To paraphrase Carlos Eyles, an iconic figure in free diving and deep water mammal photography, find your depth of comfort and spend your time there.

For Zeaman that may be 60 feet and down. For me, it's more like 20 to 30 feet. But I still am able to feel the same physical exhilaration of entering and experiencing a different world. And for most of us, just getting down is what free diving is all about.

You can find Jon Zeaman's videos "Free Dive Palooza" and "Freeze-A-Palooza" on YouTube.