A look at Morey‘s world/free diving

Sept. 5, 2007

Years ago, when I worked for the local Traverse City paper, I was asked to cover a “polar bear dive” at Long Lake. Absurdly, I decided to engage in participatory journalism and scuba dive under lake ice in the dead of winter.
On the eve of the dive, I called my dad, who used to recover bodies out of lakes when he was a state trooper. He warned me that my regulator might freeze up with ice - it had once happened to a diving buddy in a river recovery.
The next day, I dove under the ice, as frozen with fear as the ice itself. I was bubbling out breaths so fast that the water looked like Sprite on steroids.
Ice diving is great for some, but not for me. I felt immersed in a dark freezer of frigid water.
But when I decided to do a story on free diving, I was once again invited to try it out.
Free diving means to swim underwater without the use of scuba tanks. In world competitions, divers hold their breath and swim to depths of up to 355 feet and stay down for two to three minutes. Chris Morey, one of a handful of free divers in Traverse City, told me that his deepest plunge was about 70 feet. But he assured me that since I was a complete novice, he’d keep it fun, shallow and safe.
I once again called my experienced diving dad for advice. His first question: Are you going to wear a weight that drags you right to the lake bottom? “I don’t think so. Why do you ask?” Well, my dad said, the sponge divers in Greece used to put a weight on their young kids, sinking them to a depth of 70 feet. The kids’ eardrums ruptured and never healed.
I knew it wasn’t my dad’s intention, but I felt that old fear sneaking back in. But I thought, how tough can it be? My kids “free dive” all the time. They swim underwater and dangle a worm in front of a fish and watch it bite. They call it snishing.
I called Morey back. I told him I was up for it.

THE DIVE
On Monday morning, I showed up for work at the volleyball beach in a black swimming suit. Morey pulled up in a slightly beat up Ford ranger. He opened the back. He had everything: wetsuits, hoods, gloves, masks, fins, and weight belts.
I managed to get the wetsuit on just as a nice-looking older couple approached, sweaty from their bayside run. They stopped and asked Morey about the best place to dive. He suggested a wreck, 20 feet deep, just off the sandbar, south of the Elmwood Township marina. They chatted awhile.
“Be nice to humans,” he quipped as they strolled out of earshot.
As Morey put on his wetsuit, I ventured a cautionary question about the Greek children, weights and broken eardrums. Morey was surprised. He’d never heard that story, and pointed out to me that my weight belt was light - just heavy enough to counteract the buoyancy of the wetsuit.
Speaking of weight, Morey is quite thin, and looks even thinner in his camo wetsuit. He pulled his long white hair into a ponytail, and it looked as if he was putting in red hairpins to keep his hair out of his mask. In fact, they were specialized earplugs that keep the lake water warm once it enters the ears. Morey explained that if you dive a lot - and Morey dives a lot - the cold water can trigger bone growth in your ear and make you deaf.
He pulled out a small board to carry gear, a clear plastic underwater camera, and a dive flag. The flag serves as a warning for boaters to keep 200 feet clear of the flag, but apparently a lot of boaters aren’t familiar with it. Last month, Morey was nearly hit by a motorized inflatable boat that ran directly over him in 20 feet of water. “It could have killed me!” he said, adding a few choice expletives.
Obviously the sport is not without its dangers.

BREATHTAKING - LITERALLY
Interestingly, my sojourn into the bay never felt dangerous. Morey is a “no problem” guy - very relaxed. Once we began snorkeling, it felt like a sightseeing tour.
I saw numerous empty beer and pop bottles and two huge pipes. I learned later that these were intake pipes for the city’s now demolished electrical plant. (My friend, when he was a kid, used to ride a warm blast of water from the outlet pipe, about 100 yards south.)
After a bit of snorkeling, Morey jackknifed down and swam along the bottom where the water was clear and cool. He uses a mono-fin, which makes him look like a merman. In fact, he swims like a fish with a graceful, undulating body movement.
The beauty of trying something like this yourself is that you truly grasp the skill of someone who’s good at it. My first dives were mere seconds long, and I took my snorkel out because I had this weird urge to suck in air - not good when underwater. My ears hurt, and, okay, I was scared. What if I went down too deep, and ran out of air? Just the thought of it took my breath away - literally. We snorkeled over to the breakwall at the Open Space, where I focused less on fear and more on how it felt like flying. The sun came out and lit up the water. Smallmouth bass and gobies swam by, unperturbed. A massive carp swam below - Morey said some he’s seen are the size of basset hounds.
I took one last dive, a little deeper, a little more relaxed. The real surprise: feeling like a happy little kid for the rest of the day.

SEEING CLEARLY NOW
Once ashore, Morey talked about growing up in Traverse City. He took swimming lessons, but was a lousy surface swimmer because he feared what he couldn’t see. He wondered what lurked beneath the surface.
But swimming changed for him at the age of nine, when he dove one sunny afternoon to the deepest part of the Boardman River. He gripped a rock, and watched a carp zoom by. After that, he and a friend dove often in the region’s lakes and rivers. Back then the waters were much murkier - it was hard to see any deeper than 10 feet. Now Morey can see up to 50 feet in the summer, compliments of the algae-eating zebra mussels.
At the age of 16, Morey began scuba diving and confirmed what he already knew; that he felt at home underwater. “Being comfortable is partly learned, but also a predilection,” he said. “I’ve always felt calm, even when a guy ripped off my mask and shut my air off on an open water dive - just to be a jerk. I turned the air back on, put my mask back on, and kept right on swimming.”
For a few decades, Morey didn’t do any diving, his time swallowed by work and parenting a daughter and autistic son. But his son’s behavior leveled out a few years ago, which gave him more freedom to rediscover diving (that and an understanding wife). This time around, his teenage daughter accompanied him. Their underwater world opened even wider when they connected with like-minded people on a website - www.deeperblue.net.
He found that years of yoga and martial arts served him well. Free diving requires both excellent cardiovascular health and the ability to deeply relax in order to conserve oxygen. “It’s really exacting. You have to know your body and its limits. Even thinking, even turning your head uses a lot of oxygen.”
Free diving is not so much about a person’s lung capacity, but how much oxygen is in the bloodstream and tissue. Before diving, Morey infuses his body with oxygen by doing breath-ups - floating motionless on top of the water and drawing in slow breaths. He’ll do breath-ups three times as long as he wants to stay submerged. Then on a long inhale, he’ll dive.

MOODY CARP, FRIENDLY BASS
Morey doesn’t focus on his time while he’s under: “I don’t want to make it a competitive thing with myself.” Instead, he takes pictures of fish and comes up when it starts to feel uncomfortable. Freshwater drum fish is one of his favorite species - beautiful and largely unappreciated.
“The bass are like dogs - they’re just friendly guys. And people think of carp as these lazy, easy-going fish. They’re not. They act like sharks; they come bombing up to me in pods of five or six, and splay off, and then come back at me again. I had one bump my camera lens and not in a friendly way. Carp have moods. Their aggressive, testy mood is mainly in the spring and early summer. I’ve had my mask leak from laughing, they take themselves so seriously. Salmon have no interest in me at all. They just blow by.”
Some freedivers spearfish to give added purpose to their dive. Picture-taking gives Morey the same kind of focus. Still, he’d like to see Michigan liberalize its spear-fishing rules for free divers. Salmon, steelhead, and walleye would be good targets because they’re challenging prey. “I’m not interested in spearing carp. Jack at Scuba North once said, ‘If you do that, they’ll stop talking to you.’ And not bass - it would be a massacre because they swim right up to you.”
Very few fish would be actually harvested by free divers, and it would have a tremendous upside: bringing fresh attention to Grand Traverse Bay’s beautiful underwater environment.
Morey and his daughter have themselves traveled to different free diving gatherings, including Telegraph Cove in British Columbia, where they bonded instantly with other divers, some of the best in the world.
“Free divers are kind of a tribe. We all share this great passion, this love for diving. I think we all feel the most comfortable when we’re at the bottom of the lake. Once you’re there, the anxiety simply disappears.”

RESPECTING THE DIVE SITES
For deeper waters, Morey dives south of Elmwood Township Park, where there are freshwater drum and carp. He also likes to explore the drop-off at the east end of Clinch Park, where Walleye hang out at 50 feet. Morey swims year-round, usually wearing a wetsuit because his excursions are two to four hours long. He recalls his coldest day last winter, a brittle minus eight. “Under the water, it’s brutally cold, but it’s beautiful.”
Summer brings unique challenges in the form of boat congestion and human waste. In July, he saw a 5-year-old boy squatting off a transom of a boat, effectively using the bay as a toilet. The child was on a boat moored overnight off the volleyball beach.
“The boater thing is really about respect. Also enforcement. It is going to take some serious effort to catch people doing these things - maybe get people out there with video recorders and night vision gear. A couple of serious and well-publicized busts would go a long way. As musician Lori Anderson said in one of her songs, ‘When love is gone, there’s always justice.’”
He does believe, though, in love, especially of our local waters. He wants the city to rope off the west side of the Open Space break wall for a snorkeling preserve. That way people could intimately experience the bay and want it pristine.
“It’s awesome there - little trout, tons of suckers, zillions of rock bass that stare at you in late spring and early summer. Even just snorkeling, you can see a lot. In order to effectively help our environment, we, quite simply, need to love it.”
To get a glimpse of Morey’s underwater adventures, go to www.imageevent.com/blueroom/.

TIPS FOR BEGINNERS
- To oxygenate your blood before diving, float and take relaxed, slow breaths for several minutes. If you feel light-headed or your hands tingle, don’t dive. Slow down your breathing or hold your breath for a few seconds, until those sensations subside.
- Relax.
- Be careful not to breathe too quickly (hyperventilate) prior to a dive. It artificially supresses your urge to breathe.
- Head for the surface when you start feeling uncomfortable.
- Equalize the water pressure on your ears early and often. Pinch your nose while you very gently blow air through it. Swallow and wiggle your jaw, if you need to.
- Don’t dive alone.