Tag: scuba

Diving Updates!

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Hey there!

I wanted to let you know that I recently shifted all my diving content to our blog We Are Divers (which you can find with the previous link or through the What I Write About section at the top).

My goal with the site is to share the underwater world with non-divers and diving newbies as well as those with lots of dives in their log book, so even if you’ve never set foot in the sea, you might still find some stuff you’ll like!

What’s over there, you ask? Hmmmm… Let’s see. 

Here’s a recent series I did on basic underwater photography tips and tricks.

And here are some of the videos I made from our dives around Indonesia this summer – the Underwater Dance Party is my favorite.

I’m also working on some other fishy products (wait, that doesn’t sound right…) that I hope to be sharing with you soon!

For those uninterested in diving, no worries. I will still post my creative projects and thoughts here from time to time. For now, the sea seems to be calling to me more and more, and all my creative pursuits revolve around fish and weird ocean creatures. I’m sure these two worlds will continue to overlap – I’m just happy to have you be part of either of them.

Have a good weekend!
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Riding the Tide

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There’s a great big ocean out there, and I sometimes feel like we’ve been dropped right in the middle of it.

In many ways, that’s exactly what we want. We want a sea-filled life, full of fishy wonders and underwater adventure. But attempting to turn our hobby into a business – and doing it in far-flung corners of the world, no less – can sometimes make me feel lost at sea.

We have so much to do to make our dream a reality. Way back in January, we made a list of all steps we’ll need to take, the decisions we’ll be faced with, and the vision we hope to achieve when it’s all said and done. Then we promptly tucked that list far away because it was completely overwhelming. We need to book courses. We need to plan research trips. We need to learn about our business, gathering all the information we can from those who have gone before us.

Until this week, we were a little paralyzed by the immensity of it all, not sure where to start or which direction to head in. But suddenly our course has started to take shape. This June, we’ll be off to Indonesia for five weeks (five weeks!) for a diving extravaganza. Chris will work on his Dive Instructor certification while I complete my Rescue course, after which we’ll stick around for a couple of weeks to enjoy some fun, non-academic diving in some of the weirdest, most beautiful sites in the world. I cannot wait.

Most exciting of all, we’re slotted to spend some serious interview time with the owners of Blue Corner Dive, our home-base for the trip, learning the in’s and out’s of dive centre management. I’ve got stacks of notebooks at the ready! And better yet, they aren’t the only dive centre letting us pick their brains. I’m also set up to do some internship work with Global Scuba here in Muscat, where they’ll let me ask all the questions I want and fill as many tanks as my little heart desires.

Slowly but surely, we’re starting to drift along in the direction of our dreams. I know there will be unexpected diversions (especially if we pass by a reef that we’re tempted to explore) and scary moments of sheer panic at the scale of it all. But for now, at least, I’m putting my feet up and happily riding the tide.

Our Big Dream

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There’s something I’ve wanted to share with you for a long time, a story I want you to be a part of,  involved in, helping to direct. But I’ve been really freaked out that it is not that interesting for you, that it is me just talking about my life and that’s not a very exciting or meaningful thing when you’ve got all kinds of other things going on in yours.

I don’t know why I’ve cared so much, but I have.

Maybe it’s because I really want to include you in the story, make you a part of it, get your ideas and your insights, learn from you, share with you and interact with you along the way. The idea that you might not find it remotely interesting, that you will be bored to tears by it is just too much for me to handle.

I’ve finally decided to tell you anyway.

What I want to share with you is our dream. Chris and I have a dream that we have talked about for years. It’s something that lights us both up in a way that nothing else ever has. When we start talking about it, the vision is so clear, the purpose of it so strong that it feels like it is anchored in my chemical makeup. It feels like the thing I am meant to do with my life. It feels like what I was put here for. But, it is not going to be easy. It’s going to take some time. It’s going to take some dedication, and it’s going to take a lot of pushing when we might feel like we’re out of gas.

What we want is to create a place that makes a positive difference to a community (two communities, actually) and the surrounding environment. We want to create a home away from home for travellers – a place where they can feel completely at ease and where they can reconnect with nature. We also want to create a place that adds value to the surrounding area –  a place that builds up the people who are associated with it and puts that value back into the community and environment.

Our dream is to open a small guest house (maybe 10 rooms or so) and accompanying dive centre somewhere in east Asia (probably). We don’t know where yet, that will depend on timing and funds. We don’t know how yet – we are both totally freaked out but crazy excited at the same time to see how it unfolds.

We do know a few things though. We know we want it to embody some fundamental concepts:

  • It will support the local economy. We will hire locals and use local vendors. We will decorate with local artists. We will support local businesses by teaming up with them. We will tap into the knowledge of the people who have been there forever and give them fair compensation for their time and effort.
  • It will be as eco-friendly, sustainable, etc as possible. We have a lot of ideas about this and we have a lot to learn to make them happen, but we want to eliminate plastic at our hotel, organise clean up dives for the reefs,  and educate locals and visitors alike in the value of respecting nature.
  • We want it to be about people. We will create a welcoming environment that helps people unwind and relax but also helps them meet new people, learn about new places and cultures, and feel at home no matter how far they have come to get there. We will treat our staff well, pay them fairly, give them holidays and sick leave, ask only for reasonable working hours and give them an education that they can build on in the future.

That’s it. That’s our dream. That’s where we’re headed and where we hope to end up. We mostly don’t know what we’re doing, but we know we want to do this. We also know that we’ll need a lot of ideas and support from other people to make it happen.

My big dream in sharing this with you is that you will journey along with us and help us make it the place we envision – help us choose our location, cast your votes for the hotel design, share your ideas for eco-friendly systems we can use to make it even more green, maybe even come and visit us when it’s all said and done.

Who knows. Maybe it’s possible to do it without you, but it would be a whole lot more fun to have you along for the ride.

See you next week,

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My Life With Fish

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My relationship with fish has always been a confusing one.

I grew up in a house with a big pond full of goldfish. I loved them. They were my friends (and my cat’s enemies). I fed them every day in summer and worried about them every day when our pond was frozen over in the winter. I loved them endlessly.

But, for the vast majority of my childhood I had one recurring, anti-fish dream that was really terrifying. It happened in two very consistent forms over the years and the premise for both was the same: I had to complete a task that involved going through water to get from A to B.

At the beginning of the task, the water was like unto a swimming pool. Clean. Clear. Chlorinated. As I progress, it got more natural – muddier, smellier and with more floaties. Panic started to set in as the seaweed appeared, tickling my toes and wrapping around my legs. I ran or swam on (depending on which version of the dream I was having) into the deeper water; the murkier water; the fishier water.

Things carried on getting more and more hairy until I was nearly at the end, almost free of this horrible experience. That’s when the piranhas came, snapping at my ankles – the sparkle of their teeth the only light coming from the now nearly opaque water. I always managed to get out just in the nick of time (with only a few nicks on my toes as evidence of the encounter).

Needless to say, it was terrifying.

Looking back, I think there were a few things that led to this fear of the water.  A) Jaws. Just like the rest of the world. 2) A particularly awful experience on a canoe in Montana. C) my very active imagination. 4) That time my mom told me the log bobbing up and down in the water (water we were sitting on top of in a tiny boat) was a monster. I crawled up to the top of my dad’s head to try and hide under his hat.

While most of those are typical childhood fears, it’s C that really kept the panic afloat well into my adult life. I am now 32 and I am happy to say that things have changed. Slightly. Ponds can still fuck off. But there’s this new and wonderful thing I have discovered about swimming in what used to be my nemesis: the big, endless, deep, unfathomable ocean.

I have finally discovered my super power.

I can see under water.

You may know this by it’s more common term: goggles.

You know those stories you hear as a kid where someone is afraid of something so they are given a magical item (maybe special shoes or a magical hat or fairy gloves or something) and then they go along doing things they could never do before, not realising that the magic wasn’t coming from the thing but from inside of them without them knowing it? It’s was all so terribly heartwarming.

Well, that story happened to me. In fact, it is still happening to me. I haven’t quite gotten to the part where I can get along without goggles, but I am getting better. You see, before I had goggles, I imagined that when I was swimming, all the fish just below the surface were eyeing me up and planning their imminent attack, and  that all the seaweed was wrapping itself in to tight curls around my ankles so in one swift move it could drag me down to the mer-world, never to set foot on land again.

When I wear goggles, though, I can see what’s actually down there. And what’s actually down there is a whole lot of fish who are either completely uninterested in me or very interested in not being anywhere near me. Then my biggest frustration is trying to get close to the damn things so I can see them and all their colorful glory without them running away from me in fear of their lives. Oh the irony.  Now I am the scary thing stalking poor innocent creatures under the water.

After I started diving (that’s where this whole goggle thing came into the picture), I noticed something weird happening with my dreams. Instead of having scary dreams about water and the fish it contains, I started having dreams where I got into the water and actually went down to see what was going on down there. It was still a little scary (and, in typical my-dream fashion it was dark and mysterious and more than bizarrely surreal – think underwater gorillas), but I started to dream about being under the water, purposefully going check stuff out and to follow the fish and observe them going about their business.

It was a weird and wonderful thing.

Like I said, not all water is my friend now, but the ocean is a big enough place to keep me entertained for quite a while to come. Thanks to my new superpower, that is finally a fact that excites me much more than it terrifies me.