Jin’s Dive Herstory
If you are going to trust what we have to say, I think you deserve to know about my relationship with the ocean and my background in scuba diving.
In a nutshell, eggshell, I have been diving a lot since 2007.
I did my divemaster internship in Mozambique (2009), where I would compare it to the layman’s navy seal training, then continued on to become an instructor in Australia about 6 months later (Jan 2010).
Over the last 10 years, I have volunteered and/or worked in Australia, the Philippines, Singapore/Tioman, the Caribbean and Indonesia. I stopped logging my dives after about 300 (one of my greatest regrets) but if I had to guess…around 1,000 no more than 1,200. And, thanks to PADI records, I have about 500 students certified under me.
When I dive, I am looking for these qualities in my dive destinations, dive sites, and dive operators:
Visibility—I really like clear water, with a minimum of 20 m visibility. I used to joke that if I could not see the seafloor, I would not get in the water.
Quiet - I do not want to cross paths with other divers underwater. I will always choose offbeat, far-flung destinations over convenience.
Biodiversity - I want a little bit of everything. Hard and soft corals of all colours. There are so many fish that you can see layers of different species as you descend/ascend. I will always be humbled by larger-than-life pelagics and my favourite of all…sharks! Teethy ones, not gummy ones.
Safety and community connection (ideally owned and run by a community member) are the top things I look for in dive operators.
If these things resonate with you, I got your back.
These are my favourite dive sites.
And this is my advice to anyone looking to owning their own equipment.
If you want to know the details, please read on.
[DOWNLOAD DIVE GUIDE TO ASIA HERE}
My grandparents always said that I could swim before I could walk. I did my first dive when I was 11 in Hawaii. We saw a turtle, and I hated it. I remember the gear being way too big, and we had to do a massive surface swim back to shore because my brother popped up in the middle of the dive.
Almost a decade later, I moved to Australia to start my marine biology and geology undergrad. That is when I took the plunge and signed up for my open water course. The cold water (±17°C) was bearable because, on every single dive, we were with massive rays, wobbegongs, gummy sharks, and just a lot of purple-colored everything underwater. Our dive instructor just so happened to be running a trip to dive with Australian fur seals, so I signed up for that, too.
So, in my first ten dives, I had already seen so much and experienced so many different conditions. I was officially hooked.
For almost every uni break after that, I went diving - I went to Great Barrier Reef, Borneo, Philippines, Mozambique, and a lot of Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. I was doing a paper-based internship during the one break I did not dive. And when the end of my uni days was closing in, I knew I did not want to continue down the academic route to PHD, so my backup plan was to become a dive instructor. I figured if worse came to worst, I will always be able to instruct as a backup. And that’s why everyone needs YOLO skills.
Scuba diving and instructing scuba diving have taken me around the world and because of these experiences, I made lifetime friends with whom I am still very close.
Chickenfeet Travels was started because of a dive trip! And scuba diving has also brought me to places that pushed me into all of my other hobbies today: learning about and from indigenous cultures, trekking, surfing, yoga, kitesurfing, and everything about Indonesia.
The highlights have been:
A surprise visit from a school of wild orcas;
Experiencing a cleaning station where the mantas were lined up like planes waiting to land;
Feeling the vibrations and booms of a humpback swimming and singing nearby.
I have seen almost everything that was on my bucket list, and now I only have the impossible:
Witness the live birth of shark pups in the wild;
Snorkel/dive with humpback whales and babies;
Become friends with a shark or manta.
And my bucket list destinations are:
Cocos Island
Aliwal Shoal and Protea Banks
Galapagos
During the pandemic, I did not do any dives, and last year, I logged 3…I saw about 10 mantas, though! In 2023, I aim to instruct a little bit more and do at least 20 dives. We have a charter to experience schooling hammerheads in the middle of nowhere, Indonesia, if anyone is interested.
