Freediving Legend Kirk Krack on How His Life Changed Forever, & Shark Researcher Dr Frida Lara on How to Sneak Up on sharks

SPEAKER_06 0:13

Welcome to the Deeper Blue Podcast, your weekly guide to everything that is happening around the world underwater. My name is Stephen Wheeler. I'm the founder of Deeperblue.com, the world's most popular diving website. Every week, the Deeper Blue Podcast covers everything that's happening in the scuba diving, freediving, diving travel, and ocean advocates world. So join us as we explore the Deeper Blue. Hi everyone. Welcome to episode 9 of the Deeper Blue Podcast. Coming up in this episode, as always, we'll have the latest weekly news from around the world underwater. Then we'll have an interview with Kirk Krock, one of the most prolific and innovative trailblazers in diving. For the last 20 plus years, he's helped develop and codify the foundations of modern freediving through his company Performance Free Diving International, or PFI. He's also been tapped by Hollywoods to bring some of the biggest blockbusters to life by training the film stars to hold their breath and be able to free dive, including the primary cast of the upcoming Avatar 2 film. In this episode, he talks to us about his career to date, but most importantly, also tells us about his life-changing experience being part of the undercover and underwater film crew filming the Dolphin Slaughter in Japan for the Oscar-winning documentary The Cove. Then we hear from Dr. Frida Lara, one of the leading authorities on sharks, especially those of the Eastern Pacific. She talks us through an important tip on how to dive safely with sharks and get up really close and personal with these majestic creatures. And then finally, we'll hear from Dean Martin on his best dive ever. So let's catch up with what's been going on around the world underwater this week. A big trending story this week is the news of a huge number, around 260, mostly Chinese fishing vessels that have amassed just outside the exclusive economic zone of the Galapagos Islands. This has sparked worldwide concern that the Ecuadorian government won't be able to keep these boats from overfishing the area. The Galapagos Islands are a UNESCO World Heritage Site and an emblem of a pristine ecosystem that is thriving with countless unique creatures, many of which are not found anywhere else in the world. It really is a living museum and a bucket list destination both above and below the water for so many people, myself included. Charles Darwin famously visited the islands in 1835, and his observations there helped him come up with his theory of evolution. Unfortunately, this isn't the first time the Chinese fishing boats have come to the region, but the sheer size of the fleet this year is raising alarms around the world, and the biggest fear here is the serious harm that they could do to the air is precious marine life. Reports have been coming in of dead sharks washing up on Ecuador's beaches, lots and lots of plastic bottles with Chinese writing on it, also flooding the beaches. There's a widely shared video from the Project Hyu Shark Conservation Initiative that shows a dead whale shark washed ashore with its fins cut off. Truly, truly horrific stuff to see and hear. There is a glimmer of hope though, as this week China has agreed with Ecuador that it will cease all operations between September through November this year. And while that is good news after the few months that they've agreed, how much damage has been done in the last couple of months whilst the fleet's been there, and what will happen after the Moriatum has finished November, only time will tell, and we'll keep an eye and revisit this story in future episodes. To help boost tourism in the wake of COVID-19, Greece has announced that diving is now allowed its most significant shipwrecks, labelled the Parthenon of Shipwrecks. The wreck, which lies at the depth of 21 to 28 metres, that's 69 to 91 feet, is an ancient treasure trove of around 3,000 to 4,000 and 4i on board. The ship is thought to have sunk around 424 BC and has laid undisturbed beneath the wades until 1985 when some local fishermen discovered it. Over time, this won't be the only wreck that the Greek authorities are going to open up. They are hoping to allow another four wrecks, these are very ancient wrecks, to allow divers on. So great news coming out of Greece for those wanting to go diving. The shift to digital in the diving world continues as Paddy has announced and launched a new diving travel app this week and is giving away a bunch of prizes in a series of weekly individual sweepstakes from now through December 29th this year. Prizes include some pretty fantastic destinations, including Barefoot Key Resort in Honduras, Papua Paradise Eco Resort in Indonesia, the W Maldives, and Paradise Tavanuni Resort in Fiji. All places that I would absolutely love to go. The app is the latest in the range designed to help divers plan their diving and trips more conveniently. We've heard of a number of others in recent weeks that you'll have heard of on the new side of things on this podcast. Paddy is actually very well placed compared to other agencies. They acquired the online diving travel portal Divyac back in 2018, and that got rebranded to Paddy Travel. Looking at the app, it looks like the extensive database of destinations and dive sites is all in there. It is a little bit depressing though that when I open up the app and it shows there's no bookable dive trips going on in Southwest London where I am right now, but I suppose I'll just have to start using the app to start planning my next big diving adventure instead. Next up is Red Bull, the energy drink that has carved itself out in niche in promoting extreme sports. They've released a 15-minute documentary on the terrifying, well, to me it's terrifying, yet fascinating world of cave diving. It features Canadian cave diver Jill Hineath and takes us deep into underwater caves in the pursuit of new frontiers of science and exploration. I'll be honest, I'm totally in awe of divers who push the boundaries like Jill. I actually have met Jill and know Jill because I've met her a whole bunch of times, and she's genuinely one of the nicest, most humble people you'll ever meet. When you talk to her a little, do you know that she really enjoys squeezing and wriggling through these tiny cracks in what she calls the veins of Mother Earth and discovers things that almost no one else has ever seen. Red Bull could not have picked a better person to represent cave diving, and some of the highlights from Jill's 20-year career include diving deeper into the planet than any other woman in history, diving the caves underneath the remote rural mountains in Siberia, and diving inside a giant iceberg. I have to say, I just feel cold thinking about all those things. So take a look at the 15-minute film on redball.com. Absolutely fantastic film to watch for those 15 minutes. Couple of industry-related bits of news now. The Diving Equipment and Marketing Association, or DEMA as we know it, has announced a few weeks ago that the annual trade show, due to be held in New Orleans this year called the Dem Show, was cancelled for 2020. They've announced that the show is now moving virtual this year with a couple things going on. So from September the 15th, there'll be a new online education series including weekly content and on-demand learning. And then in replacement of the actual four-day trade show, there's going to be a four-day virtual show this year and networking events from November 17 to 20th. And more information about the event is still pending. And while it won't be the same in-person events, it does give the industry a much needed option to do some networking, which is the primary reason most of us go to the show. What I do know though is a lot of colleagues in the industry will be happy to avoid the Saturday morning hangover that they get from the infamous Deeper Blue party that we hold every year on a Friday night. Lots of careers have been made and broken on that Friday night of DEMA, and I think everyone will be happy to give their livers a rest for this year. At the same time, the association has opened up the registration candidacy for the 2021-23 Board of Directors. This group is the steering group essentially of the agency, and it's responsible for the direction of the Trade Association and is one of the top industry positions you could hold. So if you feel you have the skills and leadership to guide the industry through some of its most turbulent times ever with the COVID-19 pandemic, then you could be a perfect fit for the DEMA board of directors. More information on how to apply on deeperblue.com. So that's it for this week. Remember, you can catch up on all the latest news and happenings around the world underwater by heading to deeperblue.com or checking us out on social media, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. And finally, if you like what you've heard, please subscribe, like, and comment wherever you hear your podcasts. These comments and subscribes really do make a big difference.

SPEAKER_04 8:49

Hi, I'm Paul Tumer, El Presidente, Raid International Training Agency, and you're listening to the best 30 Minutes About Diving.

SPEAKER_03 9:00

The Deeper Blue Podcast.

SPEAKER_02 9:06

Hi there, this is Jason Leas, producer of the podcast. Today, Steven talks with Kirk Kroc, a legend in the free diving world. Kirk's resume is long, but some of the highlights are codifying modern free diving through the agency he founded, Performance Free Diving International, as well as training Hollywood superstars for how to free dive for such movies as Mission Impossible and the upcoming Avatar 2 and 3. But in this interview, Kirk also opens up about a life-changing experience he had when he unexpectedly became the free diving camera operator during a dolphin slaughter for the Oscar-winning documentary The Cove.

SPEAKER_06 9:44

Welcome to the Deep Blue Podcast. I'm here today with Kirk Krock, the president and founder of Performance Free Diving International and Performance Free Diving Academy. Kirk, welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_01 9:58

Loving it. So first of all, for our listeners, tell us where you are in the world at the moment. I'm at home. I'm in Campbell River, British Columbia, Canada. So east coast of Vancouver Island. It's God's country.

SPEAKER_06 10:09

For those of our listeners who don't know what Performance Free Diving International and Performance Free Diving Academy are, why don't you tell them what those things are and who you are?

SPEAKER_01 10:18

So Performance Free Diving International, or what we refer to as PFI. We're a training organization that I started in January of 2000 and basically an educational certification agency, we create standards, we have educational products, we maintain a membership of instructors around the world. Performance Free Diving Academy is my training arm that I use to do the different projects I do out in the world.

SPEAKER_06 10:42

I think although that's probably what you're best known for, certainly in the free diving world, I also believe you've been involved in some pretty interesting stuff around films and documentaries, right?

SPEAKER_01 10:54

Yeah, we've always done a lot of media work with performance freediving. I mean, I've been streaming video of my athletes' record attempts and competitions. Before there was this amazing thing called YouTube, we were doing video and having to edit it for phone dial-up because that was what the vast majority of people had at the time. That led me into kind of doing a lot of media work. And Mandy, my partner, got an opportunity to be a part of what we thought was going to be like a 30-minute TV show that eventually turned into being a feature-length documentary that won an Oscar, and that was The Cove. So she was in front of the camera all the time, and I was in front of and behind the camera shooting via freediving. And we went around the world with the Oceanic Preservation Society, it was Louisa Hoyce, who was the executive director of it. And we just traveled the world really documenting the oceans and the pressures they were under, but that eventually drew us to this cove in Japan where dolphins were still being slaughtered, and which I couldn't believe that was still happening. I'd seen it in a National Geographics magazine from like 74, 76, something like that. And here we are looking at these for at our time, I think it was like almost 80 dolphins that were going to get slaughtered the next day, and we were bringing all the cameras in to capture it, and uh was a life-changing thing. And so from there, I went into another documentary with OPS, Oceanic Preservation Society, and then I started working on uh some movies as well. So I've done three feature-length movies where I've trained the cast or the crew.

SPEAKER_06 12:35

So any movies that you can name for our listeners?

SPEAKER_01 12:39

Yeah, sure. So I trained Tom Cruise and Rebecca Ferguson for Mission Impossible Rogue Nation. So I spent two and a half months in the UK. And then I trained Margot Robbie and Suicide Squad, and kind of an interesting thing is I actually got to be Batman and do a stunt. So if you see the pink Lamborghini hit the water and Harley Quinn's half out the window and Batman pulls her out, that's that's me being Batman. So and then most recently I just finished three years. Well, I haven't finished, but I'm kind of in time out at this moment working for James Cameron on the Avatar sequel. So we've been shooting sequels two and three at the same time. And number two is going to be the most significant diving movie of all time. It's just going to take place in the future on another planet with Navi or what we know are going to be called them Metakain. That was pretty awesome. And it's all done free diving, all breath hold. So these are a native of Pandora who are free divers, and we had to shoot at free diving just to get rid of the bubbles from the capture point of view. So it was pretty cool.

SPEAKER_06 13:45

Wow. I think people would kill to have one of those experiences and meet these superstars that you're talking about. With all these different, well, different experiences and all around the world doing things. Is there a story about a particular dive that has really resonated with you that our listeners might find interesting?

SPEAKER_01 14:02

Yeah, I think I've been really fortunate in designing my life around a lifestyle and sharing it with Mandy and my daughter Kyla. And but I think one of the more profound things really kind of revolved around the cove. Although I've been environmentally minded my whole life, that was the thing that really cemented my understanding. And it really led me to look in and research all the ways we were mistreating this shared house we all live in. It was after World Championships, Mandy and I were going to Japan to meet the members of OPS, and we thought we were going to be diving with almond divers, and that was the plan. By the time we got there, they had found this cove where dolphins were being captured into this cove and then slaughtered and ostensibly as meat, but probably more seen as a pest or a predator. And so by the time we have we landed, we were told, listen, we're not going to be doing the alma divers, we've got something else. It's dangerous, and we believe the yakaz are involved in it. And a couple weeks beforehand, there was a non-governmental organization lady who was beat up and her camera equipment smashed, and you could be arrested and never allowed into Japan. And we want to show you some footage, and they show us this footage of a slaughter happening, and Mandy and I were just gobsmack, stunned. You know, again, I remember back to this Nat Geo article where we saw uh just an ocean of red of these dead dolphins, and I figured, well, come on, we had stopped that by now, hadn't we? And to find out it was still going on was crazy. We had these eight or ten uh rocks that were hidden, like you know, cameras that were time to start up and shoot for the whole day, and then we had these hydrophones that we had to put in the water. So while everyone was, you know, dressed in camo and sneaking around at three in the morning after losing a tail, um, they were planting all these cameras around the cove. Mandy and I jumped into the water in the dead of night, pitch black. And we swam into the middle of this bay and we're gonna drop this hydrophone down in the water because we want to get the full sounds of this slaughter that's gonna happen, because we're gonna get all these images. But what does it sound like? How are the dolphins reacting and panicking? And so we said, you know, we didn't know how deep the bay was, we didn't know really anything about it. And we said, well, listen, we're gonna get to 25 meters in the pitch of night because we can't have lights on because the cove is has got security guards. So at 40 meters, if we don't come across the bottom, we'll come up and move shallower. So on our first dive down, we come across the bottom at around 25. We place this hydrophone and lay out a line so we can search and hopefully find the line later, come to the surface, try and triangulate where we've mounted the camera, and then get out of the water, and guards are coming, we're hiding in the bushes, and then you know, meet our getaway car dripping wet, and the adrenaline is pumping, and and and everyone had earbuds and communications, and they're talking between our spotters and everything, and all Mandy and I are hearing what everyone's saying. Like, how many are coming our way? How many guards, where are the lights from? You know, the next day the cameras all fire up at a predetermined time as the slaughter starts to happen. And so we go through that whole day imagining what we know is supposed to be about just shy of 80 dolphins, and the slaughter happens, and then that night we gotta go back in again in the two, three in the morning and grab these, all these cameras. And Mandy and I gotta dive down to find this hydrophone in a bay that's just had 80 dolphins slaughtered. So who knows what predators have been drawn into the bay? And so we grab the cameras and we see it. And then the next day we go to the bay where it's happened, and the fishermen are there, and we're gonna make ourselves known that we're filmmakers, we're here, and we're filmmaking, and they're very aggressive to us. They they want to bump us, they want us to touch them and push them away, and then we get arrested right away for assaults, stuff like that. So it's this cat and mouse game. But we're standing on the shoreline, and we're looking at this injured baby dolphin, and you can see it's bleeding from its side, it's swimming on its side, it's squeaking and squawking, and you know, it's like you can hear it just screaming out, and it's swimming towards us, and it goes under the water, and then it comes up, and it's you see the blood spewing out, and it goes under the water tired again, and you know every time it comes to the surface and then disappears, it's gonna be its last one, and then eventually it's it's gone, and you just felt so helpless. And it was really from that that made me look at a holitany of things that we do on our planet. Yeah, it's a really eye-opening, heart-opening thing that makes you look inward as to what we're doing on this planet.

SPEAKER_03 19:11

The world underwater every week. I'm Hugh Pearson, a wildlife filmmaker who specializes in working at sea. And you're listening to the Deeper Blue podcast.

SPEAKER_02 19:27

Today's top tip comes from shark researcher Dr. Frida Lara, who specializes in the sharks of the Baja California region. And she tells us the secret to getting a little closer to her subjects.

SPEAKER_00 19:39

Hello, my name is Frida Lara. I'm a shark researcher in La Paz, and I work with sharks every day. And my top tip is that normally when you see a shark, you go after it and chase them. If you want to have a really nice interaction with them, I will recommend you to get as close as you can from the bottom and stop blowing bubbles. Sharks are not very attracted by bubbles, especially hammerheads are one of the species that are the most shy. So I will recommend you to stop blowing bubbles and the shark will get closer to you. When we want to have a really cool shot of a shark in Cabo Pulmo with the bull sharks, that's the best strategy. We just get to the bottom and wait for the sharks to come closer to us. The sharks will get more interested and you will see them for longer. And it has been very successful.

SPEAKER_06 20:40

Finally, every episode we share a story from you, the dive community, where we ask you to tell us about your the best dive ever.

SPEAKER_05 20:49

My name is Dean Martin. I'm based in Manchester, the UK. My most memorable dive was whilst on a liverboard in the Red Sea in Egypt. We were diving a reef called Daedalus. The first tender had gone out with the first party of divers, and when they returned back with the boat, one of the guys on the tender said that they'd sighted a large manta. So as we're all climbing aboard the rib to go back out, we were all very excited because we were going to see a big large pelagic manta. Unfortunately, when we got there, the manta had gone. But what we did find was a school of hammerheads that literally played with us. I say played, they were swimming around, swimming between our legs, circling us. I mean, this went on for 20 to 25 minutes. We were probably at a depth of about 35-40 metres. So obviously, we're not going to be down there for too long, you know, with single tank diving. But that dive will stay with me for a very long time.

SPEAKER_06 22:01

We'd love to hear your story about diving. So at the end of the show, you'll find out all the info you need to submit your best dive ever. Thanks for listening to the Deeper Blue Podcast. Find out more on all the stories you've heard this week, plus connect to the world's largest online dive community at deeperblue.com. And if you like what you've heard, please subscribe, like, and comment wherever you hear your podcasts. These comments and subscribes really make a difference. Before we go, I want to give a big shout out to Jason Elias, our producer. In case you didn't know, he has an amazing podcast about people who have a deep connection to our world's oceans. Connections strong enough that they've dedicated some part of their lives to being in or working on behalf of the water. Take a listen when you get a moment to Jason's show, the Big Deep Podcast. Every week, we want to hear your stories and share them with the world. So please record and send in your short story of your best dive ever. Keep it brief, no longer than two minutes, please. And in it, tell us your name and location, where you were on the dive, what happened that make it so great, and why it's meant so much to you. You can get that over to us at bestdive ever at deeper blue.com or head to our website podcast.deeperblue dot com forward slash best dive ever. Join us again next week and explore much more of the deeper blue