SINCE 2018
Freedive Israel – How Did It All Begin?
How does a story begin?
The more I try to pinpoint a moment in time I can put my finger on – one I could point to and say, "This is where we began" – the more I discover that you can always go further back. Every event and every occurrence is directly connected to the one before it, and we too are a kind of occurrence, a phenomenon in flow. Like a river that never stays the same. After all, you can never step into the same river twice, because it's no longer the same river – and you're no longer the same person.
In other words, there's no real beginning and no real end. That's why we "created" the Big Bang – so we could put our finger on an arbitrary point in time and say, "Here we go!"
So here we go… It all began when I was working at a freediving club in Utila, Honduras.
A beautiful island in the Caribbean – wild, piratey. An island where the boundaries blur (and sometimes there are no boundaries at all).
A playground for young and old – sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, rum edition.
"There's another Israeli here asking a ton of questions about the course, but he doesn't really want to do it,"
they called to me from the office.
"Come talk to him, please – he's probably not that serious…"
If only I could have guessed where that sales chat would lead…
That's where I met Adam – later my partner in Freedive Israel and a dear brother along the way.
A young lion with long blond hair and a surfer look, who turned heads (and still does) wherever he went – girls and guys alike…
Adam was wandering around the island with not much to do. He had opened a restaurant with partners – an Israeli restaurant serving excellent food he cooked himself. Yes, good-looking and a great cook, it turns out.
Unfortunately (or fortunately) he had to close it because of issues with his partners and the authorities, and he had free time to fill.
"I came in because I saw the sign at the entrance saying 'up to 21 meters in two days' – is that for real?"
I started explaining all the principles that still guide us today – how we are aquatic creatures at our core, how our potential is mind-blowing, and on and on.
I won't bore you with the details and will get on with the story, because as we said at the start, everything is connected to everything, and nothing happens in isolation.
After researching and asking every possible question about the course (anyone lucky enough to know Adam knows he never misses a single detail), Adam signed up and started the basic course, which led to the advanced course, which led to the master course – and into the freediving family: freedivers who support each other and live together, freaks who make diving a central, inseparable part of their lives.
Life flowed on, time passed, and we set off on a short trip around Central America. Somewhere between the chicken buses and the taxi-driver rip-offs, the crazy volcanoes of the Ring of Fire and the sweet green smoke, an idea came up… a vague idea, completely illogical (for two guys who thought they'd never live in Israel again).
"If we ever go back to Israel, we'll open a freediving club together,"
one of us tossed out.
I think I was too stoned in a hammock on Lake Atitlán in Guatemala to remember which of us it was,
and to avoid any unnecessary arguments, I'll just say it was 100% definitely one of the two of us.
After the trip we went back to Utila. I went back to work, and Adam returned to Israel, worked as a scuba diving instructor and met his (wonderful) future wife, Yarden.
The idea stayed just an idea – but like any seed (of an idea) that gets watered, it began to grow. At first only in our heads, but our bodies felt more and more that it was right.
December 2016, road trip: Ariel and his girlfriend Gabriel, AKA Blue Chitta (plus Jersey the dog, who was supposed to stay with us for two weeks of fostering and ended up coming back to Israel with me).
The route: from Montreal, Canada. Destination: Bocas del Toro, Panama (the destination changed along the way).
The goal: to open a freediving school in the Caribbean.
That journey deserves a book of its own, so no spoilers here, in case I decide to write about it one day.
But there were adventures, dives in insane places, lots of miles on the car, and even working and competing at the 2017 Freediving World Championship.
In October 2017, Adam and Yarden set off for the East on a journey with no return date. There they went deep into yoga and pranayama studies, did teacher training, and ended up in Thailand learning and teaching freediving. They lived on the island of Koh Tao for a while and loved every minute of it.
Back to Gabriel and me:
After a long time on the road, we decided to end the journey where it started, in Montreal. Since we had driven down the eastern side of the continent, we drove back up the western side – the wild Pacific coast – all the way north to Montana, then east to New York and back to Canada.
There, Jersey and I got on a plane and flew back to the holy city – Eilat, of course.
We arrived with nothing – heartbroken and broke after 8 years of wandering.
We crashed on the couch of Adam and Yarden, who had arrived in Israel a month before us and were sharing a three-room apartment with another roommate.
And that's how we opened our freediving school – Freedive Israel.
Two instructors (Adam and I) and one dog (Jersey), with minimal equipment, we started teaching courses by word of mouth.
And when the landlord decided to renovate the bathroom and rip out the toilet, we realized this wasn't going to be the place – so we moved to the mountains.
"What do you mean, in the mountains?"
"Wait, how do you shower?"
"How do you cook?", "Oh, so you're the ones living up there?!"
These are just some of the questions people asked when they met the odd Freedive Israel crew – 3 instructors (Yarden, Adam and me) and two dogs – coming down the mountain, or heading up with water and food. (The worst is getting to the top and realizing you forgot something in the car, or heading down to work in the morning and discovering the keys are still back in the hut.)
Two years of incredible experiences: sleeping under the stars, ibexes wandering past our heads, and living in a big commune of mountain people – us – who chose to disconnect from city life and live in makeshift huts on a mountaintop. (OK, maybe "mountain" is a bit of a stretch… but it's more than a hill.)
We rented a corner at a dive club called Ahla Dive, and after two years there we moved into the amazing home we're in today:
the villa at 25 Mishol HaAgas St. – the jewel in the crown of the Israeli freediving world :) And no, I'm not biased.
From two instructors and a dog, and later three instructors and two dogs, the team has grown organically over time. Like the Flower of Life, it keeps expanding with overlapping circles. Every diver and every instructor who comes out of the club brings their own unique character to the way the course is taught, and we all grow together and individually (which is also together).
Alongside building the club, I kept training and competing, including competitions in Sharm El Sheikh and at the Blue Hole in Dahab, reaching personal bests of 85 m with fins, 83 m free immersion and 65 m without fins. Everything I learned along the way is what we pass on to our students today.
Our vision – to build a platform that goes beyond the course, a place that feels like home to everyone who passes through – is coming true.
Amazing people from every walk of life come here, train in all kinds of disciplines, learn and teach, share experiences on land and get hooked on this incredibly beautiful underwater world.
Today our home, which is also the Freedive Israel club in Eilat,
provides everything freedivers of every level need: lovely showers, changing rooms, and classrooms styled after Sinai and Thailand (where it all began). It's simply amazing what this place has become.
From beginner courses and first steps into the underwater world, through advanced courses and specialties, all the way to instructor level and competitive freedivers – plus Wim Hof and ice bath workshops, Oxygen Advantage, yoga classes and retreats in Sinai, and soon in more places around the world.
And there are more surprises on the way, because we never stop learning, renewing ourselves and growing.
So meanwhile, what happened along the way…
To be honest, not many people believed in us at first.
"Freediving? In Eilat? How will you make a living?"
"It's nice on a trip to Thailand, but here? It has no future."
We heard it from friends, from family, and from people in the field too. Nobody invested a single shekel in us (except us – and we didn't have many shekels to invest). So we did what you do when you live in a hut on a mountain – we saved. Every shekel that came in went into equipment. Another wetsuit, another buoy, another line. Shekel by shekel.
And people started coming. One brought a friend, the friend brought a sister, the sister brought her whole team from work. Word of mouth, slowly, with no advertising budget and no business plan (if anyone finds it, please send it back).
And no calendar, either. Really. We had no idea how to run something like this. Every booking, phone call and payment was written down on whatever was at hand – scraps of paper, the backs of receipts, and more than once a café napkin (if you have an old napkin with a phone number and "FD Saturday" on it – it's probably ours). In the mornings we taught in the water, and from noon until night we made calls and answered messages.
Only after a while did we level up to a written diary, with a pen. And only after a whole year did my mom take pity on us and build our very first Excel sheet :)
Today we have a system, an office and a whole team. But I still miss the napkins a little.
Then, a year and a bit after we opened, something happened that we hadn't planned – we had divers who wanted more. Not just to dive, but to teach. And that's how our first instructor course was born.
Five Weeks in Eilat
To train instructors the way we dreamed, we realized a course of a few days wouldn't be enough. We took the Master course and turned it into a five-week experience – water every day, training, theory, breathing, yoga, and above all a whole life revolving around the sea. We had nothing to copy – a course like this didn't exist in Israel yet, so we built it ourselves.
Then came the doubts.
Who exactly is going to leave their job, their apartment, their partner – for five weeks of diving… in Eilat?
Israelis fly to Thailand, to Costa Rica, to the Caribbean. Eilat is where you come for a pool weekend and tax-free shopping.
But they came. A first group, then another, and another. We fine-tuned the course again and again, group after group, until it became what it is today – the heart of the club. Every instructor we've trained has gone through it. To date, more than 120 Master freedivers have trained with us, and many of them went on to become instructors – more than 50 instructors who came out of this home.
And today? When I hear about similar courses opening in Israel, sometimes even under the same name – I smile. It means the seed took root.
The Big Bang
Remember the Big Bang from the beginning of the story? Well, it turns out we created one in Israel's freediving world too.
What started with two instructors and one dog, and grew to three instructors and two dogs on a mountain, became a community. Thousands of divers and participants have come through our doors. Some came for five weeks and stayed for five years. People moved their whole lives to Eilat to dive, teach and live by the sea – and Eilat, the city of pool weekends and tax-free shopping, became a place people move to in order to settle down and learn freediving.
And the river kept flowing. Our graduates have started their own operations around the country – like Orca at Olga Beach and Kokodivers in Herzliya – and Yoni Kokernot, who also came out of our home, now runs a diving and freediving club in Haifa. Some take part in competitions, some teach, some work as safety divers at the world's biggest competitions. Each of them takes a piece of this home with them and passes it on – and today the community dives from Eilat all the way to Haifa. (So if you've dived with a freediving instructor in Israel, there's a fair chance they started out with us. Ask them – and say hi from us 😉)
In recent years, as the country went through what it went through, the sea also became a place of healing. That's how "Sfat HaYam" was born, together with our partners Yoav and Amit Yizhar – and more than 3,000 soldiers, reservists and participants have already found a little quiet in it.
And if there's one thing I've learned from all this – it's that the most exciting thing isn't the depth or the numbers. It's watching someone who once got into the water scared, and a few years later stands in front of a group of their own and explains, just like I explained to Adam in Utila, that we are aquatic creatures at heart, and that our potential is insane.
(And it's still not clear which of us came up with the idea in that hammock in Guatemala. But at this point – it doesn't matter anymore.)
Who knows how and where a story begins – and who knows where and how it will end.
All I know is that it's been a huge privilege to be part of the life journey of so many amazing people in so many places around the world – and now at the magnet that is Freedive Israel.
All that's left is to hold on tight and let the current of the river of life carry us to wonderful places.
"As you start to walk on the way, the way appears." – Rumi
Written by: Ariel Kedmi