Q&A with Blue Horizon Diving, pt II

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.

Mark demonstrating his hand signals

Holly snorkelling with inland jellies

Holly is at her happiest underwater

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A (HW): This is something I became a part of by chance, appearing in one of the videos in the middle of last year. It turned out to be a lot of fun being part of the videos and I slowly became a permanent part of the channel. As an instructor couple, Mark and I love to showcase the diving around the world, with a specific focus on Bermuda as a lesser-known dive location. Originally I was just on camera and did none of the background work, the filming and editing, though as the channel progresses I’m learning how to edit the videos and make further content to keep the channel interesting. Alongside conveying the diving in Bermuda, we do showcase the life of a dive instructor and plan to make skill demonstration videos in the future, helping out divers looking to further their knowledge or non divers wanting to start. What’s really cool about the channel is that it’s also a way to save our memories and look back at the incredible opportunities we’ve has and different locations we’ve been able to explore.

So really, how it all started for me was when the dive staff didn’t know what to do with me in 2020. I had been helping at the east end location in 2019 but with fewer customers and only one location open in 2020, they didn’t need quite so many hands. What they did was tell me that I could come diving whenever I pleased and be a spare set of eyes on the back of whichever group I was assigned to that given day. This almost always turned out to be Mark’s group, hence my initial diving into the channel, starting with the episode ‘Narcosis is back’.

Holly has grown up with diving in her blood Mark and Holly, the perfect buddy team

Q: What is your most-memorable diving experience?

A (MW): I am not as lucky to have been to the Galapagos like Holly. But the first diving with a whaleshark in the Red Sea has to be right up there. We were diving a dive site called Fiddle Garden and within ten minutes of the dive, the Divemaster signals ‘shark’. I remember thinking this will be another reef shark or oceanic whiteteip, not expecting to turn around and see a bus-sized fish right next to me. I was in awe of this 12-13-metre fully grown whaleshark. This dive always sticks with me as your first whaleshark is unforgettable.

Another incredible diving memory would be at Fish Factory in the Maldives. This dive site was spectacular with the abundance of marine life. Holly and I hovered at the back of the group and were just watching this one pink whiptail ray cruising along. Unknowing to us this ray was the lead ray in a fever. Before we knew it we had 21 stingrays swimming inches above our head. It was insane and we were lucky enough to catch that moment on camera. You can check it out on our YouTube channel, the video is called ‘most insane scuba dive at Fish Factory’. You can see we were absolutely mind blown!

A (HW): Waiting at 5m for three minutes can often be the most boring part of dive, especially if there is nothing to see. This particular dive in the Galapagos, the safety stop very quickly became the best part of the dive, the day and the whole trip. Over the three minutes we had an enormous pregnant whaleshark cruise by for a viewing of the little tiny divers in the water, we had a pod of dolphins not just swimming by us but interacting with us, playing with our bubbles and doing tricks in the water. Behind the dolphins

was one of the Galapagos’ famous schools of hammerhead sharks, which were on almost every dive but never got boring, and to finish off the three minutes, we had a curious Galapagos shark hanging around. I was actually upset to hear my computer beep at end of the safety stop, knowing I had to go up and get back on the boat. From this day forward, anytime anyone asks me about the Galapagos, this is the story I tell first, some people say if I didn’t get it on video then it didn’t happen, which makes it so much better that I got each and every one of these interactions on video and can look back on them whenever I please.

Q: On the flipside, what is your worst diving memory?

A (MW): My worst diving memory has always stayed with me since it happened in May 2009. During a staff dive trip to the Falls of Lora in Oban, Scotland, a simple mistake resulted in a very interesting dive. The Falls of Lora is meant to be dived at slack water, which still provides a nice drift dive. Unfortunately, the organizer of the trip read the tide tables wrong. We dived the Falls at incoming high tide, resulting in a wicked drift dive with down currents. I remember seeing the kelp bent fully over at the shoreline under the bridge, thinking this seems a bit quick.

When we dropped under the surface, I was ripped down to 22m in seconds, bursting my left eardrum and perforating my right. The pressure squeeze on my drysuit made my back look like I had been whipped a thousand times - the drysuit squeeze had burst multiple blood capillaries in my back. I was holding onto a rock in 7mm Waterproof mitts with two divers on my other hand. Both slipped off as the water pounded my mask and regulators, fighting to keep them both on me. I slipped further down the rock, ripping through my 7mm gloves and off the rock to depth. In this moment I thought ‘this really could be it’. I fully inflated my BCD to try to ascend (I know you shouldn’t) but still kept going down into the darkness. I then fully inflated my drysuit but was still going down. I was ready to drop my weights when I got caught in an upwards current like a washing machine. I dumped all my air in my BCD and drysuit as fast as I could, controlling my ascent. I managed to get in an eddy between two rocks. Composing myself, checking my air and current situation. I started to make my ascent slowly, wondering where my dive buddies were and did an extended safety stop. I came up to carnage of every diver having been separated - everyone in the group was a dive professional being PADI, BSAC and SSI instructors.

Everyone made it out safely, thankfully and it was a huge learning curve. After six weeks I was given the all clear to dive again once my ears healed, just in time for my trip to Egypt. These are the dives I find make you a better diver as you clearly made the correct decisions in a difficult situation or learn what decisions would be better next time if the unexpected happens again.

A (HW): Though the majority of my diving memories are very cool and happy, there are a few which stand out among the crowd as not being great. At all. One of these was right after a dive with marine iguanas; we were in the area and there were not many more dive sites to explore. We had the option to either do another marine iguana dive or to go on a search for mola molas, and it was a unanimous decision to go and find mola molas. After backrolling in and descending down, I started to get a bit confused.

Holly and Mark love a good wreck dive Holly taking the boat roster on a Kids Sea Camp trip

The water we had jumped into was a deep dark green, one that you weren’t even able to see your dive buddy through. At about 5m, it was pitch black and we all turned our lights on. While descending we went at a 45-degree angle down, that aspect mixed with the total darkness made both my dive buddy and myself firmly believe we were in a cave. The next five minutes we didn’t do much, hooked into a rock with an absolutely ripping current and waited for a mola mola.

Apparently the group saw one, though with the number of bubbles around me at the time, I did not see anything. Everything was really hectic, with people all over the place and noise everywhere. We got the sound signal from our Divemaster to unhook and start our ascent. The current increased on the way up and we were briefed that if this happened we should grab a rock (not a coral!) on the wall and wait for further instruction. My brother had a camera in one hand and a reef hook in the other hand, and instinctively let go of his camera to grab an area of the wall.

Once he noticed, he went to reach for the camera and grabbed my mask off my face in the process, which ended somewhere in the water column and not on my face. Now with no mask, a ripping current and blurry vision, I made my way, with my buddy towards the surface, getting separated from the rest of the group. Everything remained safe it wasn’t all that bad, just a bit hectic but when the Divemaster asked if we wanted to go and look for mola molas again, we all decided the marine iguanas would be the best way to end the day.

Holly is a natural with younger students Holly loves bringing kids into diving

Over the next six months, we will be travelling all over the Caribbean for Kids Sea Camp hosting weeks in Roatan, Dominica, Bonaire and Cayman

Islands, to name a few

Q: What does the future hold for Blue Horizon Diving?

A (MW): 2022 is going to be a big year for Blue Horizon Diving. We have left Bermuda after five incredible years for the next adventures. Over the next six months, we will be travelling all over the Caribbean for Kids Sea Camp hosting weeks in Roatan, Dominica, Bonaire and Cayman Islands, to name a few. In July we will be relocating to Australia to work as dive instructors and hopefully develop a PADI Instructor Development Programme at one of the dive centres there.

For the YouTube channel we hope to continue growing the channel and improve the quality for our amazing subscribers to join in on our adventures. To also dive around the world with our subscribers and supporters. But most importantly showcase the amazing underwater world to others and hopefully see new scuba divers, freedivers or snorkellers take up the sport to explore this amazing blue world we have!

A (HW): I don’t have much to add on that expect for a personal aspect. In 2022 I hope to actually be helpful for Blue Horizon Diving, from the editing and planning aspect. I have a few video series I will be planning and editing to help take the work load off of Mark just a little bit! I know were both very excited to do lots of travel this year and hope you will all come along for the crazy journey with us. n