WETNOTES

As divers, our adventures above and below water, fins on and off, allow us to see what others often don’t - bringing to the surface what’s beneath the waves. We experience first-hand how quickly overfishing and pollution can alter underwater life, irreversibly damaging ecosystems that are critical to marine health.

With the lure of a popular dive site and stunning landscapes, we hopped over to Sweden to join Dive Team Lysekil to shoot our two latest campaigns, our drysuit and drysuit underwear range and our Winter 2018 life collection.

Next week is a very significant week for ocean protection and sustainability. World government ministers, ocean advocates, observers, scientists and business leaders are all coming together to identify solutions for a healthier ocean. And it’s all happening in Bali.

Charlotte Young is the Principal Scientist for the Micro Plastic Survey on the Elysium Heart of Coral Triangle Expedition 2018. Her mission was to assess how Raja Ampat, the marine biodiversity hotspot of the world is affected by plastic pollution.

The Green Fins initiative, established by UN Environment and The Reef-World Foundation, encourages you to follow some tips for responsible underwater photography, minimising impact on the coral and the surrounding marine life.

The Coral Triangle is the epicentre of marine biodiversity on the planet. Stretching from the Philippines and Indonesia in the west to the Solomon Islands in the East, this vast region holds some of the most pristine habitat left in the world, yet like everywhere else, this region is also threatened.

Thousands lie dead beneath the Goodwin Sands. Thousands of lost lives from thousands of lost vessels return slowly to a formless nothing. Some twenty-five metres above the remains and remnants of peoples and worlds past, the sea rises and falls with a semblance of reliability; yet its movements stir and shift the unpredictable and deadly forms of this grim, underwater desert.

All divers can relate to those terrifying moments underwater during the first few years of their diving careers, feeling helpless and completely out of control.

This week, we were at TekCamp at Vobster Quay in the UK - a project we helped to launch seven years ago which won the Innovation Award from the Eurotek Diving Conference.

Dr Eugenie Clark was a pioneering marine scientist and a leading authority on sharks, devoting her life to understanding their behaviour and promoting shark conservation.