Maui Spearfishing Academy recently gave the Lahainaluna High School surf team a two-hour introduction to freedive safety and breath holding session.

LAHAINA – If you’ve been held under by a few big waves before, then you know how much a confident breath hold can mean for you. The Lahainaluna High School surf team, for the third straight year, asked Maui Spearfishing Academy to come out for a two-hour introduction to freedive safety and breath holding session.

The session was held at a local beach in Lahaina and attended by over a dozen surfers. The entire two hours is devoted to understanding what you feel as you go through a complete breath hold, the foundation safety routines among freedivers, basic breath-up strategies before a breath hold, and finally a static breath hold session in the water to practice.

With less than one hour of instruction before practicing, many of the students performed over two-minute breath holds. One of the students even broke three minutes!

Owned by Robert Twitchell, a Lahainaluna alumnus, Maui Spearfishing Academy hopes this “teaser” course will give the students a passion for the sport of freediving and, more importantly, that they will understand how to be safe when practicing the sport.

Surfers, especially those in Hawaii, tend to freedive quite often. Maui Spearfishing Academy’s goal is that the students will all be able to teach their surf and dive buddies about the dangers of freediving, as well as how to be safe and successful in the water.