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Audrey Mestre
Summary
Audrey Mestre (11 August 1974 – 15 October 2002) was a French world record-setting freediver.
Mestre was born in Saint-Denis, Seine-Saint-Denis, to a family of snorkeling and scuba diving enthusiasts. She began swimming when she was a baby. She became a seasoned scuba diver by age thirteen but did not get full certification until her sixteenth birthday due to French law. She was still in her teens when her family moved to Mexico City and, fluent in the Spanish language, she eventually studied marine biology at a university in La Paz, Mexico.
In 1996 her interest in underwater sports led to her meeting free-diver Francisco "Pipín" Ferreras. They developed a relationship and Mestre soon moved to Miami, Florida to live with Ferreras. There, she took up serious free-diving and with Ferreras as her instructor was soon reaching record depths. In 1999 the two diving aficionados married and the following year, off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, Audrey Mestre broke the female world record by free diving to a depth of 125 meters (410 ft) on a single breath of air. A year later she broke her own record, by descending to 130 meters (427 ft).
In October 2002, Mestre died in an early attempt to break the 160 meters no-limits free-diving world record that Tanya Streeter had established a few weeks before on August 17, 2002 (at that time this was both men and women's official AIDA record).
On October 4, 2002, with a dive team under her husband's supervision, she made a practice dive off Bayahibe Beach in the Dominican Republic to a record depth of 166 meters (545 ft). After more deep dive practices, on October 12 she prepared to attempt a dive to 171 meters. On reaching 171 meters she opened the valve on the air tank to inflate the lift bag which would raise her rapidly to the surface but the cylinder had no air in it. A rescue diver arrived and inflated the lift bag with his air supply but the bag did not rise fast enough due to insufficient inflation, a strong current, and the riser rope being non-vertical.
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