An 11-year-old British schoolboy has smashed a world scuba diving record despite living almost 100 miles from the sea.
On July 23, Ethan Evans became the youngest person to complete 130 dives before the age of 12. The previous scuba record for children under 12 was 102 dives.
He reaches depths of up to 30 meters (98 feet) on each dive and regularly swims alongside tiger sharks and giant manta rays. Now, he’s aiming to log an unbelievable 150 dives before his 12th birthday in April next year.
“His words were, ‘I’m going to set the record so high so that no one can beat it,’” said his mom, Aimee. “He’s got his heart set on beating it. He turns 12 in April, so he’s got plenty of time to do it.”
The fearless youngster from Worcester in Worcestershire, England, began diving when he was 9 and became open water certified just one year later.
He took up the sport with the help of his father, Paul, 49, a trained scuba instructor. Every summer, they travel to the Maldives, where they explore the Indian Ocean and rack up Ethan’s dive count.
Aimee said Ethan often has spare oxygen left in his tanks after a dive because he remains so calm underwater—he often comes back with more air than most adults.
Aimee says the family learned about the record after Ethan got his open-water certification, and he just wanted to break that record.
The mom-of-two said: “He’s 11. At that age, they’re only really supposed to go 10 or 12 meters, but he’s so advanced—he can go much further.
“There’s no sort of hardline rules. They tend to gauge how good you are in the water by the amount of oxygen left in your tank.
“He’s gone down 30 meters before. That’s where you see the best stuff. He’s not satisfied with the little fish.
“His dad used to be a dive guide, but he now runs his own businesses in Dubai. We as a family loved the Middle East, and we would be over there. Ethan did his first dive at 9 ½ and totally fell in love with it.
“Now he goes off spending summers and weekends with his dad diving.”
Ethan wants to become a dive guide when he’s older and hopes to help clean up the ocean.
“The dives vary in time, some can be 30 minutes, some can be 45 minutes, some can be an hour. They’ve just moved to a different island where they have 7-meter tiger sharks around him,“ she said. ”You can come up at any time you want—because he has so much oxygen left, he can stay down there longer. ... He loves it; he’s extremely confident and really calm in the water even when he’s swimming with manta rays and all kinds of sharks.
On Ethan and his dad’s ocean cleanups, Aimee said: “They go out and search for metal and plastics in the ocean that shouldn’t be there. ... He loves the clean-up dives because he wants to protect the ocean and thinks that is an important thing to do.
“He is very much someone who likes to protect the oceans. He will walk along the beach and pick up the rubbish.”
