Today we’d like to introduce you to Andrew Ferris.
Hi Andrew, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I’ve been freediving since I was ten and my family moved from Minnesota to Papua New Guinea. If anyone had told me back then that freediving was something I could do as a job, my life probably would have taken a dramatically different course. I learned to Scuba dive at 14 and spent most of my 20s traveling and living around the world, diving in places like the Dahab Blue Hole in Egypt, the Madlives archipelago, Isla de Caño in Costa Rica and the Kona Coast of Hawaii. Any place that I went scuba diving, I would also inevitably spend time in the water freediving but I always thought of what I was doing as slightly advanced snorkeling.
In 2021, I had a friend spend a summer out on the Big Island of Hawaii and he came home with stories of these people he met out there who could dive hundreds of feet beneath the surface on a single breath. I had a little resistance off the bat, feeling a bit protective of my own little personal style of diving that had developed over the years, but my friend was so convinced that I needed to learn that he paid for my first wetsuit and my Level 1 Freediver course with his own money. By the time I finished that weekend class, I knew exactly why he had pushed me so hard and I realized that he just might have found my new career for me. I’d been working as a freelance photographer and digital storyteller since 2011 and I had been dabbling in underwater photography and video for a few years but in Freediving I found a platform for executing high level underwater photography with a level of flexibility that I was never able to achieve with Scuba.
This same friend put me in touch with Martin Stepanek, the head of Freediving Instructors International (Fii), who had been looking for someone to develop and launch a Freediving Photography course for the agency so I happily accepted the gig and spent the next year building and testing the course out before we released it in 2023. I completed my Fii Instructor Certification soon after and currently teach courses in California, Florida and Hawaii. In San Diego I am part of Focus Freedive and in Florida I teach with a group called InnovationBound which designs highly-level training corporate training focused on creativity, idea generation, and of course, freediving.
Becoming a freediving instructor was this amazing, unexpected thing that just arrived in my life with very little warning and then very quickly took over the whole game. I’d always wanted to have “a relationship with the ocean” and when I started freediving once or twice every week in La Jolla, I went from being a tourist in the deep to a regular resident, dealing with the shifting moods of the ocean on her rough days as well as calm ones. Freediving was part of what motivated me to put a pause on the seemingly endless moving and put down roots in San Diego where I hope to spend a good stretch of years working with the Focus Freedive team to turn this city into a global destination for high-level freediving training.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Ah, no. The road has not been smooth. The twenty years I had spent freediving in my self-taught, untrained manner had established some rather deeply dug habits that had to unlearned before I could step up to the level of proficiency that Fii holds out for its instructors. It took me a year and a half to become an instructor and it involved hundreds of hours of practicing classroom presentations, demonstration skills in the pool and breath hold training. Being comfortable underwater wasn’t going to cut it but there was a voice inside of me that didn’t care how long it took or how hard it was; I wanted to reach that goal and I couldn’t remember feeling this kind of motivation for anything before. What kept pushing me was seeing what Martin Stepanek and my other Instructor-Trainers could do in the water, the kinds of physical feats I saw them effortlessly achieve, and then still have the mental clarity to give precise, clear feedback to the student they just followed down the dive line. It stunned me and I wanted to be able to do that myself.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Focus Freedive?
Focus Freedive consists of three Fii instructors who teach in San Diego/SoCal and between the three of us, we offer the core Level 1, Level 2, Junior Freediver and Instructor Training courses as well as specialty courses in Basic/Advanced Freediving Safety, Spearfishing and Freediving Photography. We conduct regular freediving training sessions for our growing community as well as freediving/spearfishing trips around San Diego, Baja and the Channel Islands. Part of what makes our group unique is the diving conditions available in San Diego and the breadth of training and education we offer. There are very few cities (frankly, in the world) that have the kind of conditions we have in La Jolla, that is, up to 90m of training depth in a bay protected from most of the dominant swells and accessible by walking in at the beach and a short swim. Our visibility is nothing to write home about but if you can handle to cold water, Focus Freedive has a variety of different paths that divers can follow to develop their competitive diving, spearfishing, teaching, photography, or safety diver skills as far as they’d like.
There are a growing number of agencies in the world offering freediving training and certifications. What sets Fii apart is the extremely high bar they set for their instructors and the level of attention given to safety standards during our training sessions. One of the reasons our agency was created in the first place was experience of Martin Stepanek being a competitive freediver in the 2000s and, seeing how fast the sport was growing, he recognized that a higher standard of safety education was needed if the sport was going to survive going mainstream. I’m extremely proud of our agency’s reputation and record on safety.
Can you talk to us a bit about happiness and what makes you happy?
Being underwater makes me happy. The ocean is like this weird, trippy alternate dimension where everything is just a little extra weird and I’ve always wanted to spend as much time underwater appreciating it as I could. Scuba got me there, but I felt bulky and ill-suited to blending in with the aquatic wildlife. Freediving was the ticket to that dimension for me and one of my favorite things about teaching new students to freedive is seeing their tension melt away as they develop their proficiency and watching them have these little moments of wonder underwater, hardly able to believe they could be this comfortable fifty feet below the surface.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.focus-freedive.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andrewjamesferris/
Image Credits
Andrew Ferris
