Interview with Nuno Gomes and Olo Sawa during the promotion of the book "Beyond the Blue"

During the meeting promoting the book “Beyond the Blue” in Gdansk’s club 18 Południk, we had the opportunity to conduct two interesting interviews with its authors – Nuno Gomes and Olo Sawa. Today, you have the opportunity to read the first of these interviews, whose main character is a living legend of diving – Nuno Gomes. Apart from talking about the book, which was the main reason for our meeting, we also talked about many other interesting things such as the recent record set by Ahmed Gabr.

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D24: Where did the idea to write the book come from

Nuno: This idea has always been with me somewhere, but there is usually a long way from an idea to its realization. Then, at some point, Olo spoke to me and said “let’s write a book” and I said – ok. From that moment to publication, it took us about 3 years?

Olo: Yes, I think the idea came in 2009, when Nuno was in Poland promoting two other books – Sheck Exley’s “Autobiography Under Pressure” and David Shaw’s story “Darkness”, written by Philip Finch. It was then that I suggested to Nuno that we do something together, but when he asked me what I had in mind, I still had no answer. The situation lasted for a year maybe two, when we wondered how to bite it all? Until finally one day I called Nuno and said ok, I got it, let’s write a book! From then on it took us another 3 years to create ‘Beyond the Blue’.

Nuno: Yes, it took us quite a long time…

D24: This book seems to be a compressed history of your life. Chapter by chapter, all the major projects, the greatest achievements…

Nuno: Not really, not all the big projects and ventures I was involved in are in the book. It’s a selection of what I’ve had the opportunity to be a part of, if I wanted to include the story of all the big projects, the book would just be too long. What is not missing in “Beyond the Blue” are the references in each chapter to parallel events taking place all over the world. What concerns me is inextricably linked to the exploits and achievements of other people and together they form an interesting whole. All the names I mention can easily be found on the internet. These are not anonymous people, but the history of diving. I think that the picture that emerges from this can be very interesting and more complete than if we focus only on my person. A careful reader will easily pick up many things that were not known before. Using film jargon, we can say that these are things that happen outside the frame, but that does not mean that they are unimportant.

D24: When you started your adventure with world records, diving was a bit different. The equipment was not that advanced, the knowledge of its capabilities and the knowledge of using different gases was also significantly different from the level we have now…

Nuno: Exactly, when I went for my first record in 1988(Nuno is referring to his own record of 123m set during a dive in the Boesmansgat cave – ed.), there was very little knowledge about mixed diving. There were no tables at all for helium diving, and during the preparation for this dive, I was using different US Navy tables, trying to correctly calculate the available data.

D24: As you can see, it worked…

Nuno: It worked out perfectly. In general at that time only a few people tried to use helium for dives and my descent turned out to be the second or third deepest dive in the world. At the same time, it was a new African record, because, interestingly enough, in 1969 a South African guy carried out a helium dive (!). (!) a guy from South Africa made a dive using helium.

D24: Did you use any key when selecting what to include in the book and what not?

Nuno: I think the main criterion was rank. I tried to describe the most outstanding of my achievements, but as I said before, there are many references to other, also important projects, where I just don’t go into details, but I don’t leave them out completely. It came out very naturally.

Olo: Basically, from the very beginning we knew what we wanted to include in the book, there wasn’t much problem with the choice and selection of content. We knew how the book will be created chapter by chapter. The only problem was probably the choice of where to start, what to include in the first chapter. In fact, each chapter is a separate story…

Nuno: …exactly and we wrote each of them separately.

Olo: At the end when everything was written, all that was left was to decide the order in which they would appear in the book.

D24: Speaking of details and what you find in the book, are there details about dive planning and what always interests technical divers the most?

Nuno: Well, regarding this issue, nothing is written directly, but if you are at a certain level as a diver and can read between the lines, you will find quite a lot. In my opinion, if you want to go for the world record then you just have to do it yourself.

D24: Talking about records, recently your world record from 2005 (318.25m) was broken by Ahmed Gabr. (318.25m) was broken by Ahmed Gabr. Did he contact you before his record dive e.g. to consult something?

Nuno: No, he did not contact me planning his dive. He did it 2-3 weeks after setting the record. He asked when I would be in Egypt and if he could meet with me. Of course, I wrote back that as soon as I am in Egypt, I will certainly let him know. Naturally, I congratulated him on his record and asked him when it will be possible to see a video of his dive, unfortunately I have not heard back yet. Probably his e-mail box is quite full lately.

D24: If Ahmed or anyone else who is trying to break a world record contacted you and asked for help or expressed a desire to consult on certain issues, would you take that step?

Nuno: Well, Ahmed didn’t contact me, at least not directly, but some of his friends asked me things. I suggested that he do some training dives below 240m. The thing is that his previous deepest dive was at 214m and in this situation to attempt a world record is a huge jump… too big in my opinion. In fact, I didn’t even expect for a moment that he could succeed. I’ve seen a whole bunch of other guys who dived much deeper than him and didn’t make it, even though they were more experienced and had made much deeper dives than 214m. So I was completely surprised. To this day I can’t figure out how he did it, because it seemed highly unlikely from the beginning, but you know… the Guinness people were there, so everything had to be done according to procedure.

D24: Will we witness another record performed by Nuno Gomes? Decide to claim the No1 spot on the list of deepest open water dives?

Nuno: If this were to happen and I were to go deeper than the current record, I would have to have completely new mixes and technology, because I know I wouldn’t be able to do it with the solutions I used before, in 2005. I remember that hpns (high pressure nervous syndrome ) made me so twitchy that I was afraid I might lose the regulator and not be able to put it back in my mouth. But that’s just me, every diver is a different body and physiology.

D24: What do you plan to do next? Do you already have an outline of what you want to do in the near future?

Nuno: The immediate plan is to publish ‘Beyond the Blue’ in English. The Polish edition was the first and this is just the beginning. Now we are looking forward to working on more language versions. On the more dive-related side, I’m working on the feasibility of using new mixes in deep diving. I have not dived deeper than 150m since the record in 2005, so if I undertake any project, it will take some time, because I will be starting from scratch.

D24: Many thanks for the interview. We wish you success with the book and your next projects, especially if they involve pushing the boundary and setting another record.

Nuno: (laughs) Also thank you very much, and as for the record it certainly won’t be in the near future.

Olo: Thanks for the interview.