What drives someone to want to dive down to the bottom of Lake Pupuke? Local freediver Max Voskob explains why the sport is gaining momentum globally and here on the Shore…

Spearos (spearfishers) and freedivers are often wrongly piled into the same category, says Max Voskob. “They’re definitely not the same thing,” he says. “But most people don’t know the difference.” He’s keen to enlighten more people, he says.
IT professional Max has lived on the North Shore for ten years – seven in Browns Bay, before moving to Hillcrest three years ago. He moved to New Zealand 25 years ago from Eastern Europe.
It was while living in Wellington, over ten years ago, that he first chose to explore water vertically instead of horizontally. “I had a mate who was into spearfishing so I thought I’d give it a go,” he explains. “We’d go into the water off the Wairarapa Coast. At first, I thought, ‘this is an awesome way to get a feed’. But I quickly found that diving down into the ocean you could discover this different realm,” he says.
“There was this whole other world down there, which I could become a part of – surrounded by fish, kelp, sea cucumber and all this other life. It was a very different place.”
He bought the kit – wetsuit, mask, flippers, weights, a spear gun – and started hunting fish to eat. “I thought, this is an awesome way to get a feed!” He soon realised his new pastime came with risks.
“If people don’t do the freediving part right, they put themselves and others in danger. Everyone wants to get the kai moana but if people haven’t learned the proper skills, the danger is that they black out underwater and that can be fatal.”
Another risk was the damage he realised the sport was doing to aquatic life. “I was just like any other spearo, but I started not enjoying it as much. I worked out how wrong my spearfishing was.”  
He realised he enjoyed the diving but not shooting fish. It was then that he decided to ditch the spear and learn to do the diving part properly. Joining Auckland Freediving Club, Max learned the correct techniques and began regular practise at AUT Millennium and pools across Auckland.
“You need about six months to get to the stage where you’re no longer a rookie,” he says. “It enables you to build the foundation for deeper diving. It’s a very safe sport when done properly.”
Max says Auckland Freediving Club, founded in 2009, has members from teenage through to over-60s. “It’s not physically demanding; you just need to be confident in the water. You don’t even need to be a strong swimmer – I’m not.”
The New Zealand Freediving Championships was held recently at AUT Millennium, with 39 freedivers competing over three days of events. Because of the depth limitations, competitors vie for top honours over the distance they can cover underwater on a single breath. This year, Max says the winning distance reached by a female was 180m, and 200m by a male. At 138m this year Max felt he didn’t quite push himself far enough. He says he gets much more, however, from his focus on the experience of diving, than any competitive side of the sport.
Taking a plunge in Lake Pupuke is Max’s passion. “We are so lucky to have Lake Pupuke here on our doorstep. It provides year-round diving of up to 55-metre depth – and that’s nothing to sneeze at!
“For me, 30-metres depth is achievable and for pretty much anyone who wants to commit themselves to learning the correct techniques and give it a good go. This, for me, is for the pure enjoyment of it.
“You have to put yourself into a certain state of mind. You learn to switch off and relax your whole body so there’s no tension or stress. When I’m down there, I’m not worried about anything. It’s just me and the darkness.”
Freedivers descend while attached to a line, with a float on top of the water and a torchlight at the bottom of the line, which they dive down towards. “I go down and I swim towards the light. When I get far enough, I turn to swim back up. But sometimes I just stay there for a few seconds and hang in this state of bliss. I’m weightless. It’s what I can only imagine being in space feels like. It’s emptiness. It’s like your own cosmos!
“This isn’t an adrenaline rush; it’s the opposite. It isn’t an adrenaline sport; it’s an endorphin sport.”
Divers wear a weight belt to prevent them from floating back to the surface in the initial dive stages. Max uses just a 1kg weight in the freshwater lake, and 3kgs in the ocean, because of the buoyancy that comes from the saltwater. Weights are only necessary to a certain depth; divers reach neutrality state after 15m. “At 15m, I can starfish! I’m neutral; I neither sink nor float,” says Max. Beyond this depth, if divers didn’t return to the surface they would sink, he explains. The whole experience, from submerging to resurfacing, generally lasts between one minute to one minute 30 seconds.
Diving off the East Coast Bays can be a decent starter sea dive experience for beginners, says Max, but, at a 30-metre depth, the Hauraki Gulf it isn’t deep enough for many freedivers. “It’s also so noisy in there because of all the boats in the channel,” he says.
“And the eco-system has either collapsed, or it’s about to. The decline in kelp and reefs is so noticeable in how much it has deteriorated over the past ten years. So much so, that I don’t want to go out there diving any more.
“You see kina have completely destroyed the remaining reefs, and the natural predators that would have eaten the kina to keep them at bay in the past, we have fished them out.”
He recommends Goat Island and Poor Knights Island as more abundant life-filled options for sea freedivers. “Compared to these places, the Hauraki Gulf is sadly a desert,” he says.
Personally, he prefers the still and the silence of the lake. He is keen to encourage others to experience the same sense of peace, camaraderie and the post-dive highs that come with the sport.
An ideal opportunity to get more North Shore people involved is the upcoming Auckland Freediving Club Safety Day, to be held at Lake Pupuke on 2 December.
“There will be presentations by top freedivers and practical sessions in the lake,” says Max. “No prior freediving or spearfishing experience is required.”

For more information and to register, visit aucklandfreediving.co.nz/ocean-safety-day-2023/