Oceans In Peril

Check out my latest video on ocean conservation and why it's so important to me

Are you sitting comfortably? Don't. Life is short

Are you sitting comfortably? Don't. Life is short.

People constantly aspire to have more, to be wealthier, own more possessions and be successful. Which is crazy when you think that there is someone out there aspiring to just have what you already have. There are always those better off and worse off than you. Remember that.



 I was lucky to have been born in a developed first world country, to have; not just education, food and clean water everyday, but also so many opportunities. I'm far from the wealthiest person I know, but I still have so much, I am extremely fortunate. I don't know why I was born into these circumstances and not different ones, but I do know that I definitely won't take it for granted.







I have been that girl; working two jobs, seven days a week just so i can afford to cover my costs. I was literally working to afford working. However, unlike many of my peers, I now refuse to work a job I don't like- just to make money- to carry on living a life I'm unhappy in.





So people should not aspire to materialistic goals. They should strive to improve themselves in some way; making money doesn't equate to making yourself better. Travelling changed my life. My mindset used to be all about money. It wasn't really MY mindset though, I was just a product of the society I was raised in. Aspiring to make money and orientating everything around that is seen as being sensible and realistic.






I had myself lined up a successful career based on the hard years spent working to get my degree, but then I boarded a plane to travel the world working as a dive instructor instead. I defied the stereotypical expectations people held of me.The best decision I ever made. I quickly came to realise that making money was most certainly not the most important thing in life, not for me anyway. Now I would gladly live out of a suitcase; sacrificing material possessions for life-altering experiences.







So don't waste your life aspiring for things that can only be measured in materialistic success because "Life isn't about how many breaths you take, but the moments that take your breath away."

Empty the tanks

Many animal advocates are wondering what’s going on with Lolita, the loneliest orca. Miami Seaquarium abruptly cancelled the whale shows that normally feature Lolita, an orca who was captured off the coast of Washington in 1970 and transferred to Florida, where she’s been living by herself ever since.

Read the full article about Lolita here

Save Sharks

If sharks were the cruel, menacing man eaters that the media makes them out to be then I would have probably been eaten years ago. However, I believe that sharks know we are not prey and I intend to prove that.

Swimming with sharks I feel vulnerable, clumsy and small. They have an aura of invincibility, but with these top predators in the ocean nothing is as it seems.

Great white shark

Sharks are in serious trouble. Every single second of every single day around 3 sharks are killed by us. We are destroying their homes, polluting their seas and catching them by the million. And there is one practice that could empty our oceans of sharks for good... Fishing. Unfortunately this has become a much more common way that humans now interact with sharks, and it's not just their meat they’re caught for, but their fins. The fins are used for shark fin soup, an Asian delicacy and status symbol; although the fins do not even add to the taste they are just used to enhance the texture.

 In the time is has taken you to read this over 2,000 sharks will have been killed, all for the sake of a soup. If this carries on in the next 4 years as many as 20 species of sharks could go extinct. Every year 70-100 million sharks are taken from the oceans purely for their fins.

The natural world is all about balance. Sharks are top of the marine food chain and like all apex predators they're especially important. We don't know what the impact would be If we lost them but the effects could be catastrophic. Without a healthy ocean, the world as we know it would cease to function and the horror of a world without sharks is a very real one.

Over 500 million years sharks have evolved to become complex, sophisticated and utterly magnificent. To lose them in the age of man would be truly unthinkable. We need to tame our fear and learn to love sharks. 

10 things that change when you start scuba diving

This article is funny and so true.

 Click here to read it.

Orcas at Seaworld

"Life is as dear to a mute creature as it is to man. Just as one wants happiness and fears pain, just as one wants to live and not die, so do other creatures." Dalai Lama

That orca you see at seaworld is not an orca. 

It looks just like one but the captive orca is an artificial representation of the real animal. Everything that constitutes an orca has been taken from it, nothing it does is what an orca should be doing. It has been conditioned to eat dead fish and gelatin rather than hunt live prey in the wild, it has been bribed into performing tricks which is an unnatural behaviour and imprisoned in a pool rather than swimming up to 100 miles a day in the wild.

Orcas at Seaworld spend the majority of their time floating at the surface of their tanks, with no shade from the sun. Orcas in the wild spend up to 95% of their time submerged in the depths of the ocean. Seaworld's deepest tank is only 40 feet, not nearly deep enough for them. Due to this the orcas have constant sunburn, which is covered up with black zinc oxide.

Orcas in the wild have an average life expectancy of 30-50 years and their estimated maximum life span is 70-100 years. The median  age of orcas in captivity is only 9.

In captivity all adult males have collapsed dorsal fins, the sign of an unhealthy orca. This is due to the unnatural environment they are kept in and is very rarely seen in wild orcas.

Marine parks claim that first hand experience with captive animals is essential to build respect for nature. Scientific studies say otherwise: people show the same appreciation for nature whether going to marine parks or not. 

Seaworld has recently claimed that they "need to keep orcas in captivity to save them."

No large whales like blue or humpback whales have ever been held in captivity and yet their numbers are now rebounding in the wild after being hunted close to extinction. It would appear that the best conservation strategy is the most humane- all we needed to do was stop killing them.