The Acapulco Cliff Divers: Leaps of Faith

Story and photography by
Nancy & Eric Anderson 

 

Rolando Carbajal Andraca stood on a cliff atop Acapulco. One hundred and thirty six feet below him, a high-tide sea rushed in to fill the narrow inlet between the rocks. Gusts of wind raised dust from the sharp rocks of the cliff.

He frowned and concentrated.

Though high tide raises the level of the water below him three feet — to nine and a half feet, it also creates larger waves and a rougher surface. The divers who comprise the La Quebrada Divers’ Union actually prefer low tide for their activities. The wind, too, can be a problem even though the divers are in the air and at its mercy for only four seconds.

He raised his arms and the crowd, moving restlessly below, hushed.

To avoid injury, he will have to leap eight feet out from the cliff before he starts his plunge and already he has scars on his left cheek and left thigh from striking the rock face on previous dives. Aged 30 years, he’s proud of his scars; he shows them to the ladies like a bullfighter.

And like bullfighting, cliff diving at Acapulco is a long-established dangerous event that defies the odds, draws the crowds and delights the spectators. It began in 1935 when young fishermen started diving to retrieve lost spears that were caught in the rocky bottom of the shallow water around La Quebrada, an inlet on the Acapulco coast. Soon in a spirit of bravado, the men were climbing higher and higher on the sheer escarpment to see if any would jump or dive from the highest point, which is 100 feet higher than the High Dive in the Olympic Games.

The divers, then performing informally for visitors, became a top tourist attraction when a friend of Erroll Flynn’s, Swiss entrepreneur Teddy Stauffer, built a nightclub around them in 1949. It still exists as La Perla in the Hotel El Mirador, one of the best viewpoints for this spectacle, which is now staged five times a day — and night when the performers dive with flaming torches.

Diving skills are often passed down from father to son. Rolando’s father, Bulmaro Carbajal Rendon, started diving at the age of 16 but had to quit ten years later with bilateral detached retinas, his legacy from the cliffs. The divers have to enter the water with straight arms, fists clenched to protect fingers in front of them, but with eyes open — the sea is so shallow they have to bend their wrists upwards the instant they hit the water and they need to see  that moment.

The eyes are indeed vulnerable. A piece of orange peel floating on the surface once blinded a diver for life. Common injuries are broken noses and dislocated shoulders followed by elbow and wrist fractures. Ear drums rupture too because the divers perform even with a bad cold; it would be too easy not to dive the next time, they say, if they used that excuse.

The senior divers have helped the younger ones to mature. They’ve shown novices as young as 13 how to hit the surface, how to climb up the cliff safely and how to judge the seas: it takes almost — but not always — the same time for the waves to rush in as for the diver to fall the distance, so they have to start their ordeal when the inlet below them is almost empty of water.

So Rolando now waited, arms uplifted, like a Christ of the Andes.

He had prayed at the shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe behind him thus he was not overly concerned that the unpredictable wind was increasing and erratic. The gusts might move him in flight yet he knew he could adjust his body to accommodate, to a degree, especially if he stuck to the classic swan dive.

Below, the wind scampered across the sea, scattering the whitecaps. Cameras tilted skyward. The crowd got ready.

Rolando’s toes curled around the rock he was standing on.

He took off.

His body arched in flight. Languidly, lazily he twisted into a double somersault, then, diving without demons, with barely a splash, he plunged into his special domain, the blue world of the deep Pacific.