Nicholas
29
Marine biology
Diving since 2013
Before long I also got hooked. Did my course and never looked back. I remember my first dive. It was really life-changing, as soon as I put my head in the water I knew I wanted a big part of my life to be underwater.
So I think very early on, I fell in love with diving. The year or two after getting certified I wanted to look for sharks, look for manta rays and all that. I think there was this particular trip where we were on the Similan islands and then the whole trip we were pretty much looking for whale sharks which never turned up. And you know, that is the way with nature. Sometimes things don’t go as planned, but sure enough during our safety stop these giant oceanic mantas were just circling us. And very often this one would just come really close and look me in the eye. There was this connection which was undeniable. It was as interested in me as I was in it. So that struck a chord in me and I felt like wow, you know. It’s so amazing to connect with these creatures and I became hooked. Even more hooked. Each time I go diving it’s like more and more addiction, you know.
Since young my favourite animal by far has been the hammerhead shark. In particular the scalloped one, the ones that school. So in the last few years I’ve tried quite a few times to go looking for them. And very often it results in disappointment. You just get a fleeting swim-by or you see the school but it’s so far away you can’t really experience it. I think the best experience with hammerheads has yet to come.
Sometimes you need the stars to align. You can be in the right place, in the right season but they just don’t turn up.
In many cases our biodiversity already far exceeds many other diving destinations across the world. Of course the issue is just that you don’t really see it because of the murky water and also because in Singapore you can’t really dive anywhere you want to dive. Everyone just goes to Pulau Hantu, they think that’s it. But in truth I think we do have a lot of marine heritage we can protect. Though whether or not that opens to recreational diving in the future is out of my hands lah.
Even though I dive for work I usually have my dive trips planned for the whole year already during the holidays. Of course none of that materialized, I had to cancel some plans and sometimes you feel pretty... You know like my dreams of experiencing sharks and interacting with all these amazing animals right? It’s very hard to do in Singapore. So still there’s a part of me that just wants to get out there, you know. Life is short, get out there, experience all this and just feel the inspiration. But this year I think the pandemic has taught me to maybe look a little more inward and appreciate what we have on our own shores. Or rather our own reefs. At work I start to notice that there’s actually a lot more that I didn’t notice previously. Just changing the sort of lens that I look at life through. If we always adopt this mindset that biodiversity in Singapore is inferior to something you get on holiday, you’re not going to see much. But if you just change that lens and you try and look at it as if you are discovering something, exploring something within your own backyard then very often you find things that people would go overseas and pay money to see these same things that you can actually find in Singapore. Or even in Pulau Hantu for example, some of these critters are very rare. They are just there but it’s just hard to see. It takes skill and it takes a lot of patience to look for them.
I think very often I jump into the water expecting to see a hammerhead shark, for example. If I don’t see a shark and I surface I’m gonna feel sad. But if I jump in and I’m like, “Okay what can I see today?” chances are that whatever I see, there’s something that’s gonna make me excited. So I think this pandemic has really taught me to look not just at the sea but in Singapore in general. There is a lot of wildlife, a lot of biodiversity even in our parks, our gardens, our nature reserves. There’s so much to find.
I think we’re all in some way connected to the ocean, whether we know it or not. Obviously it is a very big source of protein. Most of us eat fish. But even more than that it alters the climate, our whole planet. It sequesters carbon, it regulates temperature and in doing that it also manages climate patterns. Winds, how much rain lands here and there. So we are all very connected to the ocean and I think in principle I would like my daughter to be able to have that connection with this powerful force that gives us food, that gives us air, regulates our climate. And even beyond that, it’s a source of so much beauty and for myself it has inspired me for so many years to spend more time in the ocean, spend time taking photographs, making drawings. It’s just a very big source of beauty and inspiration that I think would greatly benefit anybody’s life. So that’s pretty cool if I could somehow get her into it. Obviously I wouldn’t force it down her throat but I think in general there should be this appreciation and this connection to these ecosystems and processes that keep us alive.
You often hear in nature documentaries that we are a part of nature, we’re not apart from it. I think very often in today’s society this connection is forgotten. Everything is just...food just appears on your table, appears in our supermarkets. We don’t see how it’s sourced, we don’t see the things that go into creating food.
We talked about it earlier, how the ocean is connected to each one of us. And for me personally I draw a lot of inspiration from the beauty that you find in the ocean. Just finding new critters, finding scenic coral reefs, or even reefs that are not so scenic. I think there’s always something to appreciate about the natural world that is very - For me lah personally, in some ways it’s very healing. You know when you experience the stresses of life, staring at a computer, working on a project...when your thoughts and experiences go back to the ocean I find that heals me. Refreshes my soul almost.
I’m a Christian. To me, there are many worldviews, many of which are stronger amongst people who are into scientific fields like biology. You find that natural processes work in a certain way that is not so widely accepted in religious circles. For example the theory of evolution, things like that. But to me, the more intricate, the more beautiful, the more complex I find natural processes to be and the diversity of life in general, I find that actually points me to something being created. You know how it cannot be random, no matter what expanse of time - millions of years, billions of years - I don’t see how such intricacy in things that work so perfectly together can fall into place without an Artist at hand. You know, like a divine stroke of a brush or something that puts these things into motion. And obviously it’s things that are very difficult to understand or even explain using theology or apologetics but I think a very large part of it is how you make sense of it personally. Your personal convictions. For example, if I had a very bad day and then I go diving and there’s a special encounter, I could - for one it could be a random encounter - but the other way of looking at it is that this encounter was meant to happen. And I feel ever so often that when we connect with nature and these experiences, I have this sense that it’s meant to happen. I’m meant to learn something from it. My life is meant to be edified by - maybe it’s a message from the divine.
I think for me I’m a bit of a kampung boy. I don’t really need much in life to be honest. As long as I can dive, as long as I can do my photography, be inspired, be surrounded by my loved ones. And I think if I could have it my way life would be a lot simpler, so my island would look a little bit like one of those small atolls in the Maldives, just surrounded by sharks, just having this connection with nature every day. Getting my own food, prepping my own food, sharing it with people, enjoying time with the family, things like that.
I don’t really crave any of that. As long as I have easy access to the sea, to diving, to biodiversity, actually my heart feels quite full already.
Since about 2015 I’ve been involved in the Hantu Bloggers, which is a not-for-profit organization of volunteers. Most of us are dive guides, dive instructors, dive professionals, and we just bring members of the public on guided dive trips to Pulau Hantu. And during the trip we would give them the breakdown on conservation in Singapore biodiversity. Hopefully during the day we would be able to show them some of these things that we talk about. And hopefully by the end of the day they leave feeling satisfied and a little bit more convicted on the conservation cause in Singapore. Very early on when this organization started nobody would even go to Pulau hantu to dive. But today you see almost every day there are chartered boats going to Hantu, even weekdays.
So every couple of months or so we take turns to bring people out. Usually these are new divers who have never dived in bad visibility before. So very often they need a bit of handholding. You bring them down, they panic a bit. It’s actually amazing to see. You just give them some time to settle themselves and they start looking around. And you can actually show them things and they go “Wow!” You could show them something that you’ve seen a hundred times before but you know that it’s the first time for them. And then when you see them it just makes their day, like a little cuttlefish or something.
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