My life: Hanli Prinsloo
The South African conservationist and former freediver tells Keira Lu Huang about making friends with sharks and bringing people closer to the ocean
AI grew up on a farm outside of Johannesburg, in South Africa. Very early on, I had a love of water. But living eight hours from the ocean, I had to make do with the local rivers and dams, and the swim-ming pool on the farm. Luckily, I had a sister who also wanted to be a mer-maid, so we had our mermaid dreams together, and had our mermaid language under water in the swimming pool, and then in the dam, and then back home in the bath.
It took me a long and unexpected journey all the way to Sweden to discover freediving. I moved there when I was 19. I was studying acting and project management within film there. There was a guy editing a film I was working on who was a freediver. He asked me about South Africa and whether I had done diving. I said, "Yeah, I've tried scuba diving." And then he asked, "Have you heard of freediving?" After he told me what it was, I was like, "Done. I need to try this."
I've swum down with a monofin to 65 metres and back up again and I've held my breath for six minutes. Once, I swam down to this ledge at about 20 metres and it was just so quiet. I just sat there, really experiencing this silence, and this chance to look inwards in the way we don't often get to in this busy life. When I was freediving competitively - when you are diving on the rope - you try to think of nothing, because you want to have your head as empty as possible. You don't want to be nervous, you don't want your heart rate to go up.
When I am diving with animals, it's different, because they pick up on your energy. When diving with whales, I try to be incredibly calm. I don't know what the science is around the stuff, but these animals pick up on our emotions. When I see sharks, I am just very focused. I started diving with sharks in 2008 in South Africa. Since then I've dived with them around the world, multiple times a year. I know these animals. With dolphins, you almost want to be in your happiest, most joyful mood ever. And the dolphins always want to play with you.
I started my foundation I Am Water in 2010, although I came up with the name in 2006. There is huge ocean degradation because people are disconnected from it, so we are practising unsustainable sea fishery, unsustainable waste management. The goal of I Am Water is to connect people to oceans. We've got projects in Cape Town and Durban, in South Africa, and in Bermuda. The aim is to grow the organisation to numerous regions. One of our slogans is "Saving oceans, uplifting people", because our belief is that there really cannot be well-protected nature and oceans without happy people.
Shark fin soup … it's just a disaster. It's not about food security - nobody is going to die if they don't eat shark fin soup. It has to become a conservation issue. It's not even a luxury that makes sense. I stopped eating seafood two years ago, because I can't support the practice. It's not just because (sharks) are my friends. I just don't think it's sustainable. It's a lot more of a head decision than a heart decision. Other activists try to make it into an emotional issue. It really isn't. We are finishing the fish. Just because we are getting better at fishing, doesn't mean there are more fish.
I was at the (freediving) world championship in 2011. I'd trained so hard. I'd taken six weeks out of my other work and my foundation and lived in Dahab, Egypt, just training in the Red Sea. But I got (to the event in Greece) and suddenly I felt so like I was in the wrong place. This wasn't important anymore. Why did I need to try to be better than all these other people? I was hanging there on the rope, getting ready for my dive, just looking down thinking, "I don't need to do this anymore."
When Peter (Marshall) was on the United States swimming team, he was coming to South Africa every year. A South African swimmer said to him, "You really have to try this shark-diving thing. You need to meet this South African freediver Hanli, you guys will get along so well." That was in 2008. But we never met. He came back again in 2009 - same thing. He was in Cape Town and I was somewhere else. We started chatting on Facebook, then on Skype. We actually spoke for three years. He retired from swimming at the end of 2011. In early 2012, he said he'd love to come to South Africa to see what I was doing with I Am Water. He came down and we were just like, "OK, this is it." We want to be together and we want to work together. Our backgrounds compliment each other so well. Peter has all the discipline of a competitive swimmer and he studied economics at Stanford University, so he had a really good education. I tend to go completely with my gut and just live from my heart. We are a really, really good team.
When I was in high school, I remember telling my dad, "I want to be a journalist and actor, or a big game keeper." I studied acting but got tired of pretending to be somebody else. Next, I worked in documentary filmmaking. So I was doing the journalism stuff. And then I moved into freediving. Now I am diving with big animals and conserving big animals. So, in a way, I feel like I have done all three things. And I am now doing what I believe is my life purpose, which is protecting and sharing the oceans.
