There’s something mesmerising about being in the sea and looking down at where your feet should be and seeing a gorgeous, glimmering mermaid tail instead.
For a few short hours one recent Saturday morning, I was a mermaid in training, under the watchful eye of Brittany Balli, a certified mermaid instructor, whom I watched enviously as she performed perfect underwater backwards flips and glided gracefully through the water while blowing kisses.
Welcome to ‘Discover Mermaid’ – a Professional Association of Diving Instructors-approved course that prepares you for the various others that can follow – including Basic Mermaid, Mermaid, Advanced Mermaid and Mermaid Instructor. While there are no scuba tanks involved – the discipline does involve swimming skills and some freediving though – PADI and other dive-certification companies in recent years have added mermaiding to their courses.
Before the dive bodies got involved though, the Mermaid Swimming Association had been working with mermaids and wannabe mermaids for many years, offering training to those who want to be real-live Ariels.
Balli, who goes by the name ‘Cayman Mermaid Bubbles’, has been a mermaid since 2014.
Explaining how she first felt the urge to don a tail, she says, “Back in the States, I used to be into Renaissance festivals. That’s what got me into like dressing up in the first place. I used to play all these different characters, like pirates, villagers, royalty and fairies. And mermaids were something I always loved, but I never knew that I could actually be a mermaid until I came here.
“It was in 2014, 2015 – the mermaid industry was really starting to blossom. People started making more tails and the tails became more available for people.”
Keeping mermaids safe
As a dive instructor, Balli quickly realised that being a mermaid isn’t as simple as just shimmying into a beautiful tail and going for a swim. For one thing, mermaids use ‘monofins’ – a single fin that fits inside the bottom of the tail, allowing them to propel themselves through the water.
While most divers and snorkellers are familiar with using two fins, switching to using one while manoeuvring in a heavy silicone or neoprene tail can be challenging.
“As a dive instructor, I knew how to swim, but not how to swim properly in a monofin… I became a mermaid instructor because I saw how hard mermaiding was, as I was practising so much myself,” she said.
“I also saw others who weren’t in the diving industry or who had no swimming skills, who tried mermaiding as well, and who shouldn’t have been in the water with a fin that they didn’t know how to swim in. So I thought it was so important to learn about safety along with mermaiding.”
At the time, with the Mermaid Swimming Association being the only company teaching people to be mermaid instructors, Balli signed up for its week-long course in the Florida Keys.
“It was like a mermaid bootcamp, teaching us how to properly swim, how to teach the courses, how to freedive. It was a very hard week,” she said.
Since becoming a mermaid instructor, Balli has taught dozens of kids and adults to be mermaids or mermen.
Some get entirely engrossed in their mermaid characters, she said.
“I had to teach kids that just because you put on a mermaid tail doesn’t mean you can breathe underwater,” she explained.
“A lot of times, the girls would put on a tail and go straight under the water and not come back up because they thought they could breathe underwater. So I had to teach them that we’re still mammals, even as mermaids, and we still need to come up and breathe. I had to teach them proper breathing techniques and how to properly swim.”
Growing interest
Interest in mermaiding has been growing, most recently driven by the live-action version of ‘The Little Mermaid’ and the Netflix show ‘Merpeople’, which follows several individuals from across the US on the trials and tribulations of breaking into the industry as professional performers.
It’s a fairly small community with a solid online presence, Balli says, as she knows many of the people featured in the Netflix show.
She caught up with lots of fellow mermaids recently at Merfest International – a festival of all things ‘mer’ – in South Haven, Michigan.
For mermaids who don’t live on an island, much of their mermaiding is done in swimming pools or water-filled tanks. For Balli, her trip to Merfest marked the first time she’d been in a tank.
“When you’re doing poses and things like that in the water, you have people who are there seeing you through the glass, you have to make sure you smile and wave and that your hair doesn’t fall in front of your face,” she says.
While at Merfest, she completed her National Association of Underwater Instructors (NAUI) mermaid certifications.
Now, not only is Balli a NAUI-certified mermaid, she is also a PADi-certified mermaid instructor – as far as she knows, the only one in the Cayman Islands.
Looking the part
Meanwhile, back at my mermaid training session, Balli lays out her assortment of tails – she has a fairly large collection. She also brings along some of her mermaid accessories, azure wigs, tiaras and head-dresses adorned with shells, clam-shell bikini tops and shiny hair clips.
Anything that might easily be washed away by an errant wave, however, is only used in the swimming pool, she said, as she doesn’t want gorgeous mermaid jewellery to be added to ocean debris.
After we drop into the seapool of Sunset House for my mini training session last month, Balli demonstrates how to use a monofin. Being used to diving with two fins, my natural instinct is to kick my legs individually, but with a single fin, you need to concentrate on keeping your feet together while propelling yourself through the water.
Twenty minutes or so of getting used to the monofins, and trying out some mermaid moves, such as forward and backward flips and blowing kisses underwater, it’s time to get into my mermaid tail.
Balli chooses a beautiful colourful neoprene one for me. She has other ‘beginner’ tails made from lighter fabrics, as well as ‘professional’ tails, made from silicone, which are considerably harder to get into.
Putting on a mermaid tail isn’t easy or graceful. You have to sit down and wiggle your way into the tapering material, slotting your feet into the monofin at the bottom. Especially with the silicone one, it’s often a two-person job. That’s where a ‘mermaid wrangler’ comes in – in Balli’s case, her husband Aaron Hunt, with whom she works at Eco Divers.
After we both don our tails, we sit on the seawall, ready to get back in the water, and then lower ourselves into the seapool.
The tail is heavier than I’d expected, especially now it’s wet, but my practice time on the monofin makes it manageable. Sadly, I’m unable to replicate an almost perfect backward flip I’d managed earlier with just the monofin on, because the wonderful feathery tail proves a bit too heavy. I vow to master it next time.
With our intrepid breath-holding videographer kneeling on the sand bed below us to capture our mermaiding, Balli demonstrates how to relax your face, smile and wave while holding your breath as you freedive with the giant fish tail. I console myself that she’s been doing this for a decade and makes it look effortless, though I now know it’s certainly not.
I give it a try. I envisage myself as elegantly moving through the water, waving tranquilly and smiling serenely to the videographer. The video footage tells a different tale of clunky efforts to freedive to 10 feet, with puffed-up cheeks while I try to hold my breath and squinted eyes to keep the water out.
I’m going to need a few more lessons before being mistaken for Ariel.
Balli can be contacted on Instagram and Facebook at Cayman Mermaid Bubbles.
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