Calaveras Enterprise

Award-winning author speaks at Calaveras High




Award-winning author James Nestor has been to Greece, Reunion Island and Japan while researching those who descend hundreds of feet beneath the ocean on only one breath of air. The intrigue of speaking to a marine biology class for more than two hours brought him to Calaveras High School on May 14.

“The kids are studying an environment they do not have immediate access to, learning about it peripherally through books and film,” said Nestor. “That is usually not how biological study works. The fact they’re so entranced by the ocean says something about the magnetic pull the sea has.”

He discussed his studies from his book, “Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science and What the Ocean Tells us About Ourselves,” which received awards from the BBC, Amazon, The New York Times and other contests.

The concept of the 2014 book was born after Nestor covered the 2011 free diving world championships in Greece for Outside magazine. Competitors in the event pushed themselves to the brink of death by plunging deep into the ocean without oxygen.

There, he knew there was a book waiting in what he saw, Nestor told about 30 students inside the Performing Arts Center in San Andreas Monday.

Nestor came to the school three years ago, after he met the Calaveras High School photography teacher Roger Salter at a free dive shop in Sacramento, where he spoke about his book. It was from that connection that Sarah Swift invited Nestor to speak to her marine biology class about the book. Nestor said he stayed with Swift and her husband Chuck, who was the captain of a ship that hunts illegal whale hunters on the 2015 Animal Planet television show “Whale Wars,” in Jackson.

Nestor, unfamiliar with the area before the discussion years ago, has since found peace in the Mother Lode, where he spends about 12 days a month in a cabin in Volcano as he works on another book on how two-thirds of the population is breathing incorrectly.

“It’s just the mental space. There are no distractions,” he said. “No judgements.”

The book is expected to be finished by next summer. The untitled piece investigates a theme from Nestor’s 2014 book in which athletes emphasized the benefits of correct breathing techniques.

“The only way these people can hold their breath (so long) is by breathing correctly,” Nestor said via telephone Monday. “This is a full evolutionary history of what has happened with respiration, focusing on the last 500 years, where we now have a mechanism in our mouths and noses that is not enabling us to breathe normally.”

Underwater, the human body constricts itself from the pressure in the ocean to allow some people to hold their breath for three minutes and reach depths of up to 300 feet, he said during Monday’s presentation.

At 150 feet deep, a human’s lungs shrink to half their normal size, Nestor said. By 200 feet, they’re the size of two fists. Our organs allow for the flow of fluids, preventing collapses during descents. Body functions, like the heartrate, slow down.

Nestor said he has seen people while covering international competitions emerge with bloodied noses. One was technically dead for three minutes, but was resuscitated.

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