BLUE HORIZON DIVING
MARK WYNNE AND HOLLY WAKELY (PART TWO) We chat to Mark Wynne and Holly Wakely about their growing YouTube Channel, their mostmemorable diving moments – and dives they’d rather forget! Photographs courtesy of Mark Wynne, Holly Wakely and Margo Peyton/Kids Sea Camp
Q: How did your globe-trotting YouTube Channel come into being? A (MW): Surprisingly, it never was the intention to turn out to be what it is today. After travelling for a year around the world in 2016, I was back in Glasgow wondering what to do next. I started Blue Horizon Diving (BHD) as a freelance dive school and partnered with Scubapro as an education partner. Only three to four months into the venture, BHD was really taking off but life through a curve ball at me. Before I knew it I was on a plane to Bermuda to start working in the offshore finance sector on a three-year contract. I didn’t want the brand we were building to just disappear as I always intended to return back to Glasgow. When I arrived in Bermuda I also started working for Dive Bermuda on the weekends as an instructor. The owner of Dive Bermuda, Mark Diel, allowed me to carry my GoPro or Paralenz on dives I was guiding to film. I started to put clips together of the dive sites to put on YouTube. Fast forward a few years and we are in lockdown. I was bored in Bermuda’s first lockdown watching different YouTube channels and noticing different travel vlog styles. I started searching scuba diving channels and didn’t really see a scuba diving travel channel. It made me think, is there a niche here for us scuba divers? I bumped into Teddy Gosling, of the famous Gosling’s Rum family at Horseshoe Bay Beach one afternoon. Teddy and I started talking and he recommended we needed to take our viewers on a journey from start to finish in vlog style episodes. Make the viewer feel that they are there exploring with you too, instead of random diving clips put together. We started this new style with our first episode at Church Bay in Bermuda. You can see my hands and voice shaking as this felt so unnatural being in front of the camera, it still does. We didn’t know how to edit or film or really do anything to be honest. We just went out with an idea and learnt along the way. It was a huge learning curve for us. Before we knew it our channel had grown from 100 subscribers and few hundred views a month to 1,500 subscribers and 8,000 views a month from all over the world, and continues to grow. We do everything in our videos from film, produce, edit and try to promote at all our own expenses and costs. But we are okay with that as the YouTube channel is fun for us and allows us to meet and speak to amazing people from all over the world. Plus we get to share our love for the ocean to thousands around the world. When Holly joined the channel the adventure became exciting and added a new dimension, which I can’t thank her enough for. Holly has been unreal and I’m lucky to have her next to me on this adventure.
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Mark demonstrating his hand signals
Holly snorkelling with inland jellies Holly is at her happiest underwater
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