Aurore Asso

Free diver, film-maker, and perfume-maker, 36 year old Aurore has a passion for the intense beauty, deep silence and extraordinary life found in our oceans. She’s been diving since a childhood holiday in Greece, when she became mesmerised by the natural treasures to be found on the sea floor. Her life has been about the ocean ever since.

Free diving, long practised by the pearl divers of Tahiti and now an international sport, is the practice of descending as far as possible under the water without breathing apparatus. Aurore can hold her breath underwater for a staggering 4 minutes 50 seconds, and can descend 150 metres below the surface: a depth far beyond most of us can manage even with oxygen tanks. In order to reach such great depths in competition, a concrete weight is attached to the diver, and special breathing techniques are employed to lower the heart rate and use oxygen reserves effectively. As you’d expect, this is not a sport without considerable risk, and roughly 100 of the world’s 5000 free divers die every year from what’s called shallow water blackout as they ascend, as their vital organs succumb to lack of oxygen and pressure. Apparently it’s a euphoric feeling down there, and extremely addictive. (It would want to be.)

Free diving is an intensely graceful thing to watch. One You Tube clip of Aurore shows her swimming down into the depths, wearing only a flesh coloured wetsuit and a small piece of plastic to block her nose. Seeing a woman swim vertically down past cliffs and coral to the sea bed far below, unfettered and free, is a surreal image. It looks almost like special effects, like a Steven Spielberg CGI movie: a human being seemingly so far out of her natural environment, in a silent underwater world full of beauty and strange creatures.

In Aurore’s opinion, these creatures of the deep are very much worth fighting for- she’s a strong campaigner and ambassador for marine and ecological causes, as well as making documentary short films. On a local French Riviera note, she makes her protest known about Orca captivity at the Marineland theme park along the coast at Biot.

In May of 2015, Aurore will be joining the Maewan adventure cruise on one part of their global endurance and exploration adventure- she’ll be diving icebergs in Greenland to study iceberg stability. This is not her first experience with diving under ice in very cold waters. Recently she broke two world records swimming under ice in Antarctica-swimming 112m horizontally under ice, for 1mn 47sec, and diving down in the dark frigid depths to a new record of 52m.

It’s a stretch for most of us to see the appeal of taking such risks, but as you watch the end of the clip and see Aurore breast stroke gracefully back up to the surface through a shoal of small darting fish, it’s almost enough to make you believe in mermaids.