Records — how far a human has gone on one breath

01 · AIDA · depth disciplines

Down a line, in the sea.

AIDA International is the body that has ratified freediving records since 1992. Depth is measured by a tag retrieved from the bottom plate. Marks shown with a pearl dot were set in autumn 2026 and were awaiting ratification when this page was written.

Discipline	Men	Mark	Women	Mark
Constant weight · CWT monofin, down and up under own power	Alexey Molchanov	137 m●	Alessia Zecchini	123 m
Constant weight bi-fins · CWTB	Alexey Molchanov	129 m	Nataliia Zharkova	112 m
Free immersion · FIM pulling down and up the rope, no fins	Petar Klovar	137 m	Zsófia Törőcsik	108 m●
Constant weight no fins · CNF breaststroke, the purest discipline	Petar Klovar	103 m	Kateryna Sadurska	86 m
Variable weight · VWT down on a sled, up under own power	Alexey Molchanov	156 m	Nanja van den Broek	130 m
No limits · NLT sled down, lift bag up; no longer contested	Herbert Nitsch · 2007	214 m	Tanya Streeter · 2002	160 m

Two of these are the same diver riding a stone to the bottom, in modern dress. Variable weight and no limits are the pearl diver's hajar with a brake. The disciplines we practise are the first four, and of those, mostly free immersion and constant weight bi-fins: the rope and the fins.

02 · AIDA · pool disciplines

Flat water, and time.

Discipline	Men	Mark	Women	Mark
Static apnea · STA face down, motionless, timed	Stéphane Mifsud · 2009	11:35	Heike Schwerdtner · 2026	9:39
Dynamic with fins · DYN	Mateusz Malina	325 m	Zsófia Törőcsik	280 m
Dynamic bi-fins · DYNB	Guillaume Bourdila	298 m	Magdalena Solich-Talanda	270 m
Dynamic no fins · DNF	Mateusz Malina	252 m	Julia Kozerska	213 m

Eleven and a half minutes is the number people quote at dinner. The useful one is smaller: a healthy adult with no training, lying still in warm water with a partner's hand on their shoulder, will typically hold for two minutes the first evening and three by the end of a month. That is where the stillness begins, and it needs no talent at all.

03 · CMAS · the other federation

The second set of books.

CMAS, the world underwater federation, keeps its own records under slightly different rules, which is why the same diver can appear with two numbers. Depth marks as of autumn 2026:

Discipline	Men	Mark	Women	Mark
CWT	Alexey Molchanov	136 m	Alenka Artnik	123 m
CWT bi-fins	Alexey Molchanov	127 m●	Alessia Zecchini	113 m
CNF	Alexey Molchanov	100 m	Kateryna Sadurska	88 m
FIM	Alexey Molchanov	133 m●	Nataliia Zharkova	107 m●
Variable weight	Stéphane Tourreau	145 m●	Jennifer Wendland	120 m●

Source for both federations: deeperblue.com, world records table, read 2 November 2026. Pearl dot = pending ratification at that date.

04 · The Gulf · before records

The old numbers.

Nobody ratified a pearl diver. What we know comes from the accounts of the trade and from the men who were still alive to be interviewed in the 1970s and 1980s. The numbers are modest by competition standards and extraordinary by any other.

Measure	Typical	Note
Working depth	10 – 20 m	The pearl banks of the Gulf are shallow. The deepest banks were worked by the best divers only.
Time on the bottom	~ 90 s	Long enough to fill a basket from a bed of oysters; the seeb felt the tug and hauled.
Dives in a day	dozens	From sunrise to the afternoon prayer, with short rests on the rope between dives.
Season	~ 4 months	Al-ghaus al-kabir, the great dive, through the summer when the water was warmest.
Kit	4 items	Nose clip of turtle shell, leather finger guards, a stone on a rope, a basket on a rope.

The point of the table is not the depth. It is the repetition: ninety seconds, dozens of times, every day, for a season, for a living, with no fins, no mask, no suit and no wetsuit, in a trade that fed the coast for centuries until the cultured pearl ended it in the 1930s. The first oil was exported from Dubai in 1969. Between the two, a generation remembered how to do this. We learned it from their vocabulary.

05 · GHAUS

Our numbers.

There are none. No member's depth, time or name is published, by GHAUS or by the member, as a condition of admission. The sea is the one place where the people we work with are not measured against each other, and we intend to keep it that way.

What we will say is this: every member who completed a season has left with a static breath-hold longer than they believed possible on the first evening, has reached the depth at which the body falls on its own, and has come back up every single time with a seeb beside them.

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