Page 4 - Hawaii Island MidWeek - August 17, 2022

4 HAWAI‘I ISLAND MIDWEEK AUGUST 17, 2022
he morning of her inter- view with MidWeek, En- chante Gallardo decided to squeeze in some pre- cious water time before
Drawn by an unconditional love for the ocean, Enchante Gallardo dove headfirst into the world of free diving and quickly became America’s best female at it.
“I was really nervous about it yesterday. This is a depth that I’ve been wanting to do for some time now,” says Gallardo, who was born and raised on O‘ahu. “It’s been taking a lot of training to get up to this place, physically and mentally. Part of it is being able to let go and surrender to the experience as well as not completely attaching yourself, saying that it’s OK if it doesn’t go the way I want.
surf during free periods in high school, fishing with her dad or spending summer breaks knee boarding on Kaua‘i’s Wailua River with her cousins, that was sure to be her happy place.
jumping on the phone call. It was late July and she’d been on Long Island in the Bahamas for nearly three weeks training for the Inter- national Association for the Development of Apnea’s Vertical Blue 2022, one of the most prestigious, invitation-only competitions in the free diving world.
Right before dialing in from halfway across the globe, Gallardo experienced one of the greatest dives of her life, besting a personal record of 90 meters (nearly 295 feet) in a sin- gle breath of air. For context, that’s only 10 feet shy of the Statute of Liberty.
Mākaha resident Enchante Gallardo (middle) is proud to represent Hawai‘i on a global scale. She’s pictured with fellow female free divers Kristin Kuba (left) and Alessia Zecchini at the Caribbean Cup 2022 Free Diving Competition in May.
“Sometimes it’s hard — if you have a bad dive, it can be emotional and heart wrenching and you just feel really sad about it. But if you go out and try again, you can have this amaz- ing dive. Today, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I’m just so happy to be here.’ It’s quite an amazing feeling.”
Always content on the water’s surface, Gal- lardo didn’t have a desire or even curiosity to venture beneath it. But that all changed when she followed a man — who turned out to be the father of her two boys, Santiago and Kymani — to Puerto Rico after college (she earned a degree in business marketing and finance from Chapman University) and began dipping her toe into the metaphorical — and literal — wa- ters of deep-sea activities.
Perhaps an even better feeling came just a few days later when Gallardo officially broke the USA Women’s National Freediving Re- cord for constant weight with bi-fins — a dis- cipline that requires the diver to descend and ascend along a dive line without touching it (except once at the bottom to turn) and without altering their weight — by diving to a depth of 85 meters (278 feet). This is her fifth national record, making her the No. 1 female free diver in the country.
“I did a scuba diving course in Indonesia whenIwasonasurftripandIwantedtodo something different,” Gallardo recalls. “That’s how I really discovered the underwater world, the ecosystem, the marine life — it was quite amazing, and I really wanted to keep going with that.
“It’s really cool to be accomplished in the United States, but also to be representing Ha- wai‘i is something that I’m really proud of be- cause that’s my home, the people of Hawai‘i feel like my family and that’s where I came from,” says the Mākaha resident. “I carry that with me in my heart all the time.”
“Along the way, I had a friend in Puerto Rico who I was doing a rescue diver course with and he had taken a free-diving course,” she says. “He would take us to the pier and drop down to about 40 feet on a line. I thought it was really fun and cool to challenge your- self.”
Back at home, Sandy’s is the beach she con- siders her home break, but Gallardo grew up all over O‘ahu, from Salt Lake to Hawai‘i Kai. Her favorite might’ve been Kahalu‘u, where she lived in a house next to a farm and had chickens and calves as next-door neighbors.
Homesick and yearning for her ‘ohana, Gal- lardo and her keiki moved back to the islands in 2017. On the hunt for a job (she was a certi- fied scuba dive master at the time), she pivoted when a local dive shop said they were actually looking for free-diving instructors instead.
Feeling like a fish out of water at times, Gal- lardo took any chance she could get to be in the ocean. Whether it was sneaking away to
“So, I took my first free-diving course and fell in love with it,” says Gallardo. “I liked scuba diving, but I feel like free diving is less disruptive to the environment and it also takes a certain level of skill. Scuba diving is very external, you’re observing the outside world, but I think free diving is something very in-
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