Our-World Underwater Scholarship

The Our World-Underwater Scholarship Society is a non-profit, educational organisation whose mission is to promote educational activities associated with the underwater world. It has offered scholarships for over 35 years. owuscholarship.org

WHIRLWIND START TO THE SCHOLARSHIP YEAR

Photographs by Ahmet Magdy and Tord Karlsen

Arzucan started her Scholarship year with the

most-ambitious adventure she has embarked on to date - to join Captain Andreas B Heide onboard his sailing vessel Barba for the circumnavigation of Svalbard as part of Barba’s Arctic Sense Expedition - a 3,000 nautical mile investigative journey.

While navigating the vessel through ice all the way to the polar circle North in search of blue whales, she supported the collection of vital acoustic and ID data on the species in uncharted waters. Highlights of the voyage included coming face to face with polar bears, changing camera traps for Dr Tom Hart from the University of Oxford, meeting sailing legend Skip Novak and his vessel Vinson of Antarctica and, most importantly, diving under ice. Equipped with her Fourth Element Argonaut Suit and Scholarship flag, diving into the frigid waters at 80 degrees North off a small sailboat and in the company of the Captain was nothing short of a dream come true for her. Arzucan’s Scholarship year was briefly paused as she returned to university and swapped her polar field equipment for books while finishing her MSc thesis about the impacts of human disturbance on whalesharks in the Maldives. After submission, she was invited to Egypt by Red Sea Diving Safari, where she spent three weeks honing her underwater photography skills on the beautiful house reef of Marsa Shagra with Sarah O’Gorman and under the guidance of ocean photographer Saeed Rashid. She then added sidemount diving and selfreliant diving at Marsa Nakari to her new skill-set and excitedly put the ability to manage different equipment configurations as well as all her underwater camera gear provided by Reef Photo and Video, Nauticam and Light and Motion, to the test. Her time in Egypt ended with an expedition to waters of the Deep South of Egypt led by the Red Sea’s shark expert, Ahmed Mamdouh from Deco Divers. Continuously striving to ‘skill up’ further, she returned to the UK for two months of cold-water diving between October and December. Her first stop was Cromhall Quarry for the HSE Commercial Diver course, focused on scientific and media diving. Directed by Neil Brock from Bristol Channel Diving, she spent two weeks learning the ins and outs of diving for work. The course covered everything from UK legislation to the use of full-face masks and communications underwater, as well as the challenge to construct scaffolding in low visibility. It also included a visit to the Diving Diseases Research Centre and a decompression chamber dive to 40m depth under supervision of world-leading hyperbaric medics. With her eyes set on running her own specialised media and science operations in remote corners of the world in the future, this opportunity was a vital step for her career as a diver and expedition leader. You can read more about Arzu’s diving experiences and the opportunities enabled by the OWUSS EU Rolex Scholarship on www.owusseurope.org and get to know her on www.arzucan-askin.com