I left Atlantic College with a heavy heart. The journey of a life-time seemed to be over.

I watched the buses pull out of main drive, scattering my friends to the four corners of the Earth, each now starting down a new path. I was no exception.

As far back as I can remember I have always had a passion for the Ocean. It’s untamed power, storms throwing foaming mountains of blue from shore to shore. The infinite possibilities that lay beyond the horizon - where sea meets sky.

My decision to take a gap year came quite easily. I wanted a way to get out into the real world, to get a feeling of what a life at sea could be like, before settling down to a four year Master of Oceanography degree at the University of Southampton.

I had seen a documentary on National Geographic about the SV Infinity. Here was a ship travelling the world on a mission  to monitor and thereby help protect the failing health of the world’s reefs and oceans, a cause which has long been a passion of mine.

I was immediately hooked, and sent off an application by email after finding the website of the Planetary Coral Reef Foundation (www.pcrf.org), the group who operated the ship.

Two weeks after the end of AC, I found myself on a grass landing strip on the island of Gau in Fiji, carrying all of 42 kilos of dive gear and luggage. After a half-hour trek through the bush ,and across a swamp marsh or two, I was again on board a small RIB with the engine gunning and the spray flying high on the sea-wind. We crested a wave and there she was! My home for the next 11 months, a large purple sailing boat called Infinity.

I was thrown straight into the day to day struggle that is keeping a ship afloat  - strangely enough applying almost all of the lessons I had learned from AC.

You don’t get to pick your dorm-mates, and exactly the same is true of shipmates.  If eating, sleeping, working, learning and living with an international crew of 15 volunteers on a ship sounds like a challenge, that’s because it was. A challenge that was certainly made easier by my experiences at AC.

The ship’s social structure was also designed specifically to meet these challenges; everybody on board cooks, cleans and does watches, from captain to apprentice. Regular group gatherings and creative sessions helped to maintain a healthy atmosphere. This novel community structure was pioneered during the Biosphere experiments and has since proven to be remarkably effective in the context of expedition living.

As well as sharing basic responsibilities, each crew member has the opportunity to specialise and take on areas of ship’s life that interest them. I took what I had learned in ILB’s and got back on the tiller, helming the ship’s small boats as well as supervising their operation and maintenance. I would later gravitate towards the engine room where I could indulge my passion for mechanics.

Later, I would find myself with a constant supply of bananas and other gifts, from grateful villagers for repairing their small generators!

We sailed from Fiji to Vanuatu, Vanuatu to the Solomon Islands, The Solomon Islands to Papua New Guinea, Papua New Guinea to Indonesia, stopping along the way on many remote islands and settlements. I was immersed in countless new cultures as I experienced the legendary hospitality of the south Pacific from village to village. From learning to catch fish in Fiji, to launching a new Kula canoe in Papua New Guinea, learning how to dance in the Solomon Islands and drinking Kava with tribal chiefs in Vanuatu. The new friends, and in some instances, family, (adoption is a common practice in Papua New Guinea), I have gained have certainly given the region and it’s people a special place in my heart. However, that place is not shared by yam, which I now know for a fact to be the staple food of most of the South Pacific!

As well as local people sharing their culture with us, we also shared our own ship-board culture in the form of plays, dances and songs. We regularly traded both knowledge and gifts with the islanders, usually in the form of fresh produce in exchange for some of the rice from our stores - a welcome change from yam...

Aside from rice for a change and petrol for long crossings, the people I encountered on the various islands were (quite necessarily) almost completely self-sufficient. They survived by farming and catching all their own food using traditional methods. I have never before seen a man catch in excess of a hundred tuna using a rusty hook and a piece of onion sack material, nor have I witnessed gardens growing as lush and plentiful as those on the hillsides above tiny Fijian villages. The fact that these people not only survive, but thrive in such remote places, with very little contact or support from the outside world is a testimony to their ancestors’ knowledge, and the strength of their character as a race. 

Infinity’s nomadic nature was what made it such an interesting research platform. We were able to study and document reefs that have never been dived before, affording valuable information on global reef health, as opposed to information gathered on the most accesible and usually the most exploited reefs.

This  proved to be a double edged sword. Often we were treated to seeing almost entirely intact reef ecosystems, swarming with fish and glowing with colour and vitality. More often than not, we were witnesses to dying reefs, grey and silent.          

One of the most depressing sights was seeing the almost entirely destroyed reefs of Gizo in the Solomon Islands, decimated after a recent tsunami. The local people were especially hard hit, having lost hundreds of people, their homes and villages and now one of their most important resources, both as a food source and as a valuable part of local tourism.

However, I hope that the data that has been gathered and hosted on PCRF’s online database may prove useful in changing global legislation and raising awareness about the plight of reefs and of our one truly shared resource, the sea.

This is especially important work considering that the greatest threat both to reefs today and to quickly vanishing local cultures, is climate change. Significant rises in ocean temperature threaten to completely wipe out reefs, which are extremely sensitive to environmental change. We documented many incidences of coral bleaching caused by temperature rise throughout the region. Along with the demise of coral reefs we may also see the disappearance of entire cultures, along with their millennia of accumulated knowledge, traditions and art. Many of the islands of the South Pacific are no more than a few metres above sea level at their highest points, and as such are threatened by a rise in sea level caused by climate change.

However, it’s not all bad news. I am firm believer that even if such events cannot be avoided, then their impact and their extent can be minimised. There is much scope both for conservation and regeneration in the South Pacific, in the form of action to aid both the reef, and those whose very existence is so intertwined with the living ocean. I hope to return to the South Pacific some time in the near future and help work with local people to solve global problems locally.