Freediving for Underwater Seafood

What is Freediving?

Freediving is all about swimming down into deep waters with no breathing aids, relying only on your own abilities. It can be a competitive sport, a hobby, a deeply meaningful life practice, or a way of hunting your own food.

It’s a way of intimately connecting with the ocean around you. You’re only limit is how long you can hold your breath. You can explore freely, with no bulky equipment or worry about depth and breathing nitrogen. You can feel free to flow wherever the current takes you.

A collection of our guides and chefs had the opportunity to take a freediving course with Bottom Dwellers Freediving this spring. The purpose was to offer the team some more skills and techniques that they can use at Nimmo Bay while foraging under water and guiding our guests on snorkel trips. It was an incredible training. The coaches at Bottom Dwellers shared their collective knowledge and helped our team grow together, build confidence and up skill for the season ahead.

Freediving for Shellfish

One of the ways we practice freediving at Nimmo Bay is to provide the freshest seafood to our guests. Our chefs and guides can dive below the water’s surface and collect the most delicious seafood. They can scoop sea urchins off the ocean floor and bring up sea cucumbers for our guests to try something new. There’s nothing quite like being served the freshest Uni, brought out of the ocean just seconds before.

This is a guest favourite during our Taste the Wild experience. A true feast for the senses, this culinary journey includes foraging for wild ingredients, snorkelling for fresh seafood, and enjoying a meal alongside our expert chefs. Back at the lodge, you’ll have time to unwind before enjoying a culinary demonstration with one of our front-of-house team members. This could be a cocktail-making lesson, wine tasting, or something else inspired by your interests. Throughout dinner, you’ll see more of the chefs, and when you return to your cabin, you’ll find some goodies and recipes to take home. This whole day focuses on specially designed, hands-on experiences with our passionate food and beverage team.

Thoughts from Our team

At Nimmo Bay, offering development and training to our team is incredibly important. Our desire is to provide growth opportunities wherever we can. We connected with our team right before they got into the ocean waters in Victoria. We asked them to share what they thought about learning to freedive and forage! Here are some of their thoughts.

“Never, never, in my wildest dreams, did I think I’d be able to connect to food this closely. It’s really cool, being able to share that experience [Taste the Wild] with the guests. And teach them about the oceans where we work and being able to translate that to their dinner plate” – Kyle

“I think it’s super awesome that we have the [freediving] training, both for the kitchen staff and the guide team. We get to put our forces together and do the training together so that we can create an even more unforgettable experiences for guests by combining our expertise.” -John

“A lot to discover is only 5 to 10 feet down, not even meters. So it’s just under the surface, there’s abundant things to see. Sure you can go deeper and find more things. And the team were all talking about how they’re excited to take the skills that they’ve learned from this and look for things that are deeper. Perhaps scallops and things like that! But I think that there’s just so much to see right underneath the surface, which is really cool.” – Em