Danielle Bachew follows her passion for freediving

THERE is a saying that money can’t buy happiness, and while some may not believe it, Danielle Bachew, founder and owner of eSpeara, is proof of it.

Bachew is the only female freedive instructor in TT and eSpeara is where she facilitates freediving classes, tours and adventures, and sells seafood caught using spearfishing.

With a network of divers and fishermen, she has access to boat to do freediving classes two weekends per month and tours down the islands or on the north coast on the other two weekends. During the boat tours she takes groups around an area, stop on a secluded beach, give them a snorkel class, spearfish, make a camp fire and prepare the fish she shot for them – grill, ceviche or sushi.

She explained freediving is diving underwater using one breath of air, without the use of breathing equipment.

“You can actually dive deeper than a scuba diver on that one breath of air, just by being able to fully oxygenate your body and control the way that you efficiently use your oxygen and your energy.”

Spearfishing is fishing using handheld elongated, sharp-pointed tools such as a spear or harpoon using freediving, snorkeling, or scuba diving techniques. But spearfishing while using scuba or other artificial breathing apparatus is frowned upon or even illegal at some locations.

In fact, she said, ten-15 years ago, people attended freediving classes specifically to do spearfishing.

She said freediving was a lifestyle that challenged people to control everything in their mind and body, and accept they could not control their surroundings. She said it took mental strength to ignore the urges of the body to take a breath when diving.

“With free diving, there’s so many elements that are against you. It takes mental strength to calm down, accept what’s happening and control what you can control, which is just you.”

Bachew’s love of freediving and spearfishing led her to leave a profitable job as a health, safety and environment advisor in an oil and gas company to pursue her passion full-time.

‘Follow your heart’

Bachew’s love of the ocean started at a young age.

Her mother, who was originally from Toco, thought the sea was the cure for everything. So she and her sister got comfortable with the sea, even rough seas, very early in life.

Born in Laventille, she grew up in Santa Cruz and often visited beaches in the North Coast and Toco with her family. She and her sister were strong ocean swimmers and they would compete with each other to see who could hold their breath the longest or who could dive deepest.

She started scuba diving at the age of 16 and, in 2016, when she was 21, she went on a hike and met a man who was a spearfisher. A few days later he carried her spearfishing and she fell in love.

“That was it. I was in love with the guy and in love with the sport. It was the end of the life I had before and the beginning of the life that I have now.

“When you’re under water and it’s silent, you’re completely disconnected from any other distraction. You’re not checking your phone. You can’t help anybody. It doesn’t matter if you miss a call. You can’t do anything. You’re fully disconnected, so you’re 100 per cent present in what you’re doing.

“Free diving offers all that and more. And of course when you go underwater you get to interact with a whole new universe.”

That year she did her first freediving course with Performance Freediving International (PFI), which offers educational freediving and breath-hold survival courses.

At the time, she was pursuing a master’s degree in natural and environmental resource management with a specialisation in coastal and marine resource management from UWI, Cave Hill Campus, which she gained in 2017.

Previously, she attended UWI, St Augustine, and studied biology since there were no marine biology courses that year. She graduated in 2015.

While doing her master’s, she returned to Trinidad to do her thesis on defining the spearfishery in Trinidad. In gathering her research, she worked at a spearfishing, freediving and outdoor gear company, and continued diving.

She said she was fortunate to start diving with some of the best in TT, and wanted to share the knowledge from their, and now her, experience with others who did not have the same privilege.

“In getting those opportunities I decided I wanted to share this with the world. I felt like everybody’s looking for their purpose. It just seemed like the universe was very clear and told me, ‘This is your passion. This is your purpose.’ And there was absolutely no doubt in my mind that this is what I was supposed to do. I would be a freediver and do this spearfishing thing forever.”

After getting her master’s, she wanted to start freediving and spearfishing classes so, in 2018, she went to a well-known spearfisher and asked him to partner with her. She had their first class in June of that year with two goals in mind – getting more women involved in the sport and making it accessible to the average person.

In 2019 she started teaching on her own and created eSpeara.

Bachew explained “espera” means she waits or she hopes in Spanish and “spearo” is a slang term for a spearfisher, so the name of the company was a combination of both.

She said when a person had a dream, they usually poured everything into what they wanted then patiently waited and hoped for it to work out. Comparing that with freediving and spearfishing, she said one had to put a lot of effort and energy into it, but it also took a lot of patience.

She wanted the brand to showcase what it meant to be a female in freediving and spearfishing because, when she started, there were no women in either sport locally. She also noticed all the gear, equipment and marketing in TT was for males, and felt she needed to overcome that and bring more women into both sports.

“As a girl there were so many challenges and obstacles in the beginning, especially going to different fishing depots. People questioned if I shot that fish, how a girl can’t go on no boat, if I could dive – a lot of doubts.

“Then I made a name for myself and people used to make a lot of negative comments, but I used to turn them into jokes. In being able to do that, I created a network of divers and fishers that are all allies of eSpeara.”

She recalled a couple from Florida used to come to TT to freedive, and even though the woman was more accomplished than her husband, few men would go on her line.

“I saw the difference in how they thought, and I saw why it was so necessary for there to be female representation with this sport in particular – just the gentle nature that you need to connect with nature, to connect with people, especially because a lot of the people come into the class and they have fears.

“You don’t want somebody aggressively trying to push you. Sometimes you need that gentler, more personal touch. And I got to see how she taught and I realised this needs to be more accessible in TT.”

She said certified freediving classes were very expensive and, since her goal was to get the average person to try it, she did not provide certification. However, she had several certifications including advanced scuba diver and rescue diver certifications from the Professional Association of Diving Instructors and intermediate freediver and freediver instructor certification from PFI.

She also holds a HSC certificate from the National Examination Board in Occupational Safety and Health in the UK.

After only a few months of establishing her business, the pandemic came in 2020 and slowed things down considerably. She also had her baby girl, Kaia, that year. She needed to make a living and did not think she could do so with freediving classes as Trinidad’s economy and marketing was not tourist-based.

So she got her dream job – an HSE advisor in an oil and gas company.

“But as I got it, I felt a pit in my stomach. I felt like I was doing the wrong thing. This was not what I were put here to do. I shoved that down because I couldn’t take a risk. I just had a baby. I had to do what’s right for my baby.”

She had no example to follow to show freediving classes could be a sustainable, full-time business, so she decided to stick with the job for two years while doing eSpeara at the side before deciding what she would do. But that “pit” got worse every day. She was in a lot of turmoil and fell into a depression while hiding it from everyone, even has eSpeara had its best year.

One day, at the end of her first year on the HSE job, she broke down and started crying at work. She knew it was wrong for her. So she left the job.

“It wasn’t that I’m taking a risk and risking my baby’s security. It was more like I’m doing this for her. She needs this mom. She doesn’t need mom who works in her office and has money but hates her life. She needs happy mom that is exploring life and seeing what life could give you.”

But when she quit, all her plans for eSpeara went down the drain. During her instructor exam, she got covid19 and had to wait nine months before she could get certified. Then, for three months the sea conditions were terrible.

She had to pivot and started eSpeara Seafood, selling the seafood she and other divers spearfished.

“Because the free diving is about the love and passion for increasing ocean knowledge for our island, I decided that I didn’t want to make money off of that part. So because of my marine background and environmental influences, I sell sustainably sourced seafood. That business has been growing very nicely with the help of social media.”

During that time she posted a video on social media encouraging people to get up and do something. It went viral and, since then, she has seen a marked increase in the number of women doing freediving.

For example, she said from 2018-2020, over 72 freediving classes, six women went to her for instruction. After covid19 and the video, there had been at least one woman in every class.

Bachew was toying with the idea of getting her own boat for her business sometime in the future. But, she said, right now she was an “ocean broker,” creating opportunities for divers and fishers to make money doing what they love, being on the ocean, without the hard work.

“I’ve learned to go with the flow so, in general, the plan is to grow the freedive community and eSpeara Seafood. But I never want the freediving part of it to be viewed as a business. If it was, I would starve. That’s really a labour of love. I want people to be more comfortable with and less fearful of the ocean.”

She also wanted to leave a legacy for her daughter which was being helped along by her eSpeara team, which comprised her family members and two divers who understood her vision and supported her from the beginning.