Diving on a single breath lets you have an encounter with yourself. That’s why free-diving is so often known as underwater meditation.

It’s 1957. Miami. A well-built man with a luxuriant mane of dark hair and a thin moustache walks into the Seaquarium. It’s 30-year-old Jacques Mayol, editor of the French newspaper La Floride Française and a Radio Canada correspondent. He’s received an assignment: a reportage on the first underwater surgical operation, to be carried out on a grouper who lives in one of the tanks. “Without knowing it, I was about to make a decisive step that would at that moment completely change the course of my life,” he would write 43 years later in his autobiography Homo Delphinus. That day he also couldn’t have had any idea that 19 years later he’d be the first freediver to descend to 100 metres, and 31 years later the whole world would find out about him from the Luc Besson film The Big Blue.

In the Seaquarium, Mayol went onto the catwalk over the main tank, where the dolphins lived. He had seen dolphins before. First in the Red Sea, when he was seven years old and was sailing with his family from China to France. Leaning on the steamship’s railing, he observed in silence how the dolphins would swim up to the sides of the ship: “But the thing that struck me the most were the dolphins’ eyes, which radiated intelligence, their eternal smile, and the almost human sound of their breathing. […] Even then, intuitively I sensed in their look, in their smile a message, a still-indefinable message. I felt that we had something in common, that the dolphins were a little like brothers who lived in the sea.”

Learning from the