Making Waves

South African freediver and ocean conservationist, Hanli Prinsloo, talks to Heather Richardson about her life of competitive diving, swimming with sharks and how she hopes introducing people to the underwater world might eventually help change attitudes towards protecting our great blue planet.

The first thing Hanli Prinsloo does, as she sits down opposite me at a seaside café in her Cape Town home suburb, Kalk Bay, is ask if I know why the area’s famous great white sharks have suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. “There have been four sharks washed up around Gainsbaai with their livers bitten out. They’ve been doing all this research – and it’s the orcas!” she exclaims, excitedly. “These poor little things – poor little five-metre things – are targeted. They’re hiding.”

You may already know who Prinsloo is, especially if you know anything about freediving – the practice of diving on a single breath – in which she set 11 South African records. Prinsloo now devotes her time to coaching and ocean conservation, primarily through I Am Water, which she co-founded with her partner in business and life, Peter Marshall, an American swimmer who held eight backstroke world records throughout his career.

Marshall is also the photographer behind Prinsloo’s Instagram profile, which has close to 16,500 followers at the time of writing. It’s a grid of unreal images, mostly taken by Marshall, of her swimming mermaid-like alongside an array of mesmerising ocean animals: placid whale sharks in Mexico, bizarre-looking hammerheads in the Bahamas, soaring manta rays in the Maldives and frolicking dolphins in Mozambique.

Farm to fjord

You might – as I did – immediately imagine that Prinsloo was virtually brought up by the ocean. In fact, she was born just outside Pretoria on a horse-breeding farm, in inland South Africa.

“Something that a lot of people misunderstand about a love of the ocean is that it’s really just rooted in a love of wilderness,” Prinsloo explains. “Then you get the opportunity to be in the water, and that’s what makes you fall in love with the ocean. The farm I grew up on was really wild, a huge farm, and my sister and I had so much freedom. I think that’s really what shaped who I am today and what I want to do with my life.

“One of the rules was get home before the sun sets, and the other one was don’t die,” she laughs. “We would climb the tallest trees and explore all the rivers and dams. But being underwater was already, even then, a huge passion for me – whether it was swimming laps underwater in a pool or in the dam where you couldn’t see anything. My sister and I just wanted to be underwater.”

Her introduction to freediving began in the icy waters of Sweden, where she moved to study performing arts after school. Following a disappointing scuba diving experience in South Africa – “I felt so limited and it was so loud” – freediving in a frigid fjord struck a chord.

“The wetsuit didn’t fit and the mask leaked and everything was wrong, but as soon as I got underwater and swam down – well, 20 years later, I’m still doing it! It really was a sense of coming home. It sounds like a cliché, but it’s quite powerful when you find that.”

She began to compete and realised she had a natural talent for the sport. “It taught me so much,” she says of her freediving career. “When you’ve really explored your own limitations and challenges and physical restrictions, it makes one a much better coach. That’s what I’m really happy for, those years of figuring things out in my own body. It’s helped me to help others figure it out.” She now trains top athletes in freediving and breath control, including the South African rugby team.

Many consider freediving an extreme sport, but Prinsloo is not happy with this definition. “We often get lumped together with adrenaline sports like base jumping and off-piste skiing, you know – I’ve been interviewed in those ranks so many times. I’m like, but all I really do is very, very good relaxation and focus.” She stresses that freediving – when done correctly with an understanding of personal limitations and a lack of ego – is a very controlled, calculated sport.

The mammalian dive response

Personally, I am fascinated by the science of freediving. I’ve read about the mammalian dive response and ask Prinsloo about it. “Phenomenal,” she agrees. “Our body has the same adaptations for being in and under water and for breath-hold as ocean mammals do. So, whales, dolphins and seals have this mammalian dive response – it’s part of the mystery of how a breathing creature like a sperm whale can dive down to three kilometres and spend an hour down there.

“The first thing that happens in the human body that’s similar in aquatic mammals, is that when water touches our face, our heart rate slows down. That’s bradycardia, the slowing down of the heart rate to conserve oxygen. The second thing that happens is that the body starts noticing the rising levels of carbon dioxide (as you hold your breath, it’s not low oxygen that triggers a reaction, it’s rising levels of carbon dioxide). Blood gets flushed from your extremities, from your hands and feet and arms and legs, back to the core, to the vital organs, to be circulated to where it’s most needed – and that’s vasoconstriction, the constricting of the blood vessels in your arms and legs. It almost feels like your wetsuit got four sizes too small.” Prinsloo sucks in her breath with a pop to suggest a vacuum-packed wetsuit.

“Then the spleen response is something that’s like total magic to me, that we have this little organ that’s always been kind of low-glory, nobody really sings the praises of the spleen and we can live without one,” Prinsloo continues. “It’s a storage space, like a warehouse of oxygen-rich haemoglobin. When we freedive, and the body realises it wants and needs more oxygen, the spleen constricts and releases this oxygen-rich haemoglobin into the blood stream. It’s almost like blood doping – except that our bodies do it for us, it’s totally legal and you don’t wear Lycra for it to happen,” she laughs. “Slowly, the body turns into some memory of what we once were – some aquatic past that we have shared with these animals.”

Swimming with giants

Prinsloo can hold her breath for over five and a half minutes, which allows her a different kind of access to the underwater world and the creatures that live there, one that removes the need for noisy diving equipment. “When I get to use those skills to keep up with these animals for a while,” she says, “or to dive deeper to a pod of whales that’s sounding or something like that, I’m really grateful.”

Her first experience of swimming with big animals was off Aliwal Shoal in South Africa’s eastern province, Kwa-Zulu Natal, just outside Durban. “There are tiger sharks that come there during the warm summer months. Seeing these huge females coming up, seeing their curiosity, their intelligence and just how unbelievably beautiful they are – they’re just so graceful and languid, it’s almost like this sinuous swaying – I was hooked.”

Since then, she has spent time with many of the most iconic creatures on our planet, but she can’t choose a favourite. “They’re all so different. I don’t think it’s fair to compare the curiosity and playfulness of a juvenile dolphin, that’s swimming around you like a crazy person wanting to play, with the majesty and grace of a giant manta ray that’s like a small aeroplane underwater. And then, compare that to the absolute bizarreness of a hammerhead shark that’s confident and comfortable enough to swim right past you, almost brushing past, with those weird protruding eyes.”

Prinsloo does seem to have an affinity with the sharks she encounters. Fear is replaced with a mixture of fascination and deep respect. “They’re just so mysterious,” she says. “There’s that intelligence and that incredible instinctiveness, because they’re just ancient. The seven-gill sharks we have here are literally like swimming fossils. Most sharks have five gills, they’re the modern sharks, but these have seven. They’re ancient.”

However, it’s with mammals that there is a real connection. “When you have your first experience swimming with whales and dolphins, you get it. With the dolphins we swim with in Mozambique, they recognise us now. There’s three or four of them that just love Peter! Whenever he gets in the water with a camera, he gets circle-swum by four dolphins – and that hardly ever happens.

“There’s research that shows that of course they have a language – we just don’t know how to talk to them. I think these animals really offer us an opportunity to reassess how we look at other species and how we’ve seen our superiority and to question that a little more. That’s really exciting.”

The orcas currently hunting apex predators in the bay we overlook are perfect examples of that high intelligence. “There has never been a negative encounter between an orca and a human in the wild. Ever. So, they know we’re something else,” Prinsloo explains. “They come into our bay and they’re hunting dolphins right here, but my friends who have been in the water with them say they know we’re not food. How the hell do they know?”

Changing behaviours

Prinsloo encourages people to get in the water and physically see how much could be lost when we avoid complex issues such as climate change, pollution and overfishing (she no longer eats seafood, believing it is currently impossible to do so sustainably). “I think part of what puts the ocean at risk is that people look at the surface, and they look at this expanse, not understanding that the topography of the mountains we see rising up here is even more fascinating down there,” she says. “We don’t have a single Cape leopard left on this peninsula, but all the predators that were here hundreds of years ago in the water are still here. It’s remarkable. They’re not contained in parks. It’s a different kind of wilderness. I think what we’re trying to do by sharing the ocean with others and sharing these big animal experiences is just to open people’s eyes to what’s going on down there and to its majesty, fragility – all those things.”

I Am Water has a foundation side, working with children to foster an early passion for the sea and its inhabitants, but it also offers paying clients the opportunity to explore the world that dwells beneath the water’s surface, in the hope of inspiring a shift in attitude. “We all agree that we are the biggest problem. But it’s not until we understand how we can be part of the solution that we actually change,” Prinsloo notes.

It’s true that being with animals in the ocean evokes powerful emotional reactions. Prinsloo tells me about a businessman from the UK whom she and Marshall took swimming with dolphins in Mozambique. He’d not been overly interested in the experience, but had gone along with his wife anyway. “Peter swam up to me and said, ‘Don’t look now, but he’s crying’,” Prinsloo remembers. “This 55-year-old man in the water, taking off his mask, wiping his eyes and looking down again. You could hear him crying through his snorkel. That’s not from anything we do. We just facilitate nature to do its thing. That’s our alchemy.”

Jacada Travel is working with Hanli Prinsloo and I Am Water to offer our travellers the chance to experience the ocean’s marine life up close. For more information, please email enquiries@jacadatravel.com.