By BBC
Growing up in Fiji, a nation spanning hundreds of Pacific islands, means growing up with the call of the ocean in your blood — even when you’re far from the sea.
Free diver Neelam Ratan spent her childhood on a sugarcane farm, swimming in rivers, but her first experience of snorkelling was transformative.
“I was 14 years old, and I went with a couple of my friends,” she recalls. “It was so beautiful. It was perfect. It was like coming home.” Surfers know Fiji for world-class waves such as Cloudbreak, but there’s magic below the surface, too – from watching cleaner fish grooming giant manta rays to the thrill of scuba diving with bull sharks.
Marine conservationist Jone Waitati spent seven years teaching diving in the cold, dark lakes, rivers and quarries around Frankfurt, Germany. When he returned home and dove into the ocean, he wept. “It was so beautiful, such vibrant colours, I was crying underwater,” he says. “All these creatures like dolphins, manta rays, whales — you can’t see these things on land.”
On a single breath of air….
Ratan, whose ancestors arrived in Fiji from India five generations ago, spent six years travelling the Pacific on a sailboat, scuba diving and modelling for her husband, an underwater photographer. Gradually, she realised that the noise of the bubbles from her tank disturbed marine life. “The animals actually came closer to me and reacted better to my presence underwater if I didn’t have a tank, if I didn’t make any noise,” she says.
Today, Ratan free dives — descending up to 60m (197 feet) below the surface, depths that usually only technical divers can reach using tanks. Ratan and her husband run Liquidstate Freediving in Savusavu, Vanua Levu to bring the joy and serenity they find in the ocean to a broader audience.
Ratan’s students include yogis wanting to expand their breathwork and meditation, surfers who hope to survive long hold-downs in Fiji’s epic swells, and many who’d just like to see more of the ocean. Freediving demands an intense state of relaxation, which enables practitioners to overcome, or rather defer, the symptoms of air hunger.
Ratan can hold her breath for about six minutes. “When you have the urge to breathe, you have mental symptoms first, then physical, then contractions,” she explains. “If you’re able to relax [your] mind and body, you can push the urge to breathe further and further away.”
Freediving lets her observe reef ecosystems up close. “You hear the fish making noises and interacting: One fish will click out a warning and the other fish [will] hide,” she says. “You can see and hear them nibbling on coral. You really hear what’s going on.”
Freediving also enables rare and magical encounters with larger, oceanic marine life. Last year, Ratan and her husband were spearfishing when a giant hammerhead shark emerged from the blue; on another occasion, she came across a mother humpback whale tending to her calf. Yet key to her experience of freediving is the happiness the ocean can bring. “I had one student who contacted me and was very anxious about freediving, so I suggested we do a small one-day session to see how it goes,” Ratan recalls. “She did really well, and when she went back to her accommodation she cried. She was a breast cancer survivor who came to find herself and she thought she could never do something like that.”
Shark gods and sperm whale teeth
Waitati runs a dive centre, Dive Academy Fiji, as well as a resort, seaweed farm and his own sea salt brand in Vanua Levu, Fiji’s second largest island. An iTaukei, from Fiji’s indigenous community, he grew up in a world that centres the ocean through deities including the protective shark god, Dakuwaqa, and practices such as tabu, a ritual fishing ban that’s related to the English word” taboo“.
Waitati’s work is firmly anchored in iTaukei traditions and community — when he established his dive resort, he brought the traditional gift of a sperm whale’s tooth to the village elders. And he has a passion for preserving the ocean, so future generations can continue to enjoy it. His dive centre offers scholarships to locals so they can profit from an industry often dominated by foreigners — as well as evangelise reef protection to their communities.
Fiji’s reefs face many challenges, not least careless snorkellers and divers who can shatter coral colonies that took decades to grow with a single fin flick. “When I began diving, I started to love the reefs and the fish because they’re so beautiful — and then I saw them dying before my eyes,” Waitati says. “You see them die, and you cannot heal them. You can’t cure them. You can’t even hug them when they’re dying.”
His solution? To protect and regrow an area of reef that’s 1,400m (1,530 yards) long. First, he worked with local community leaders to make the reef tabu, creating the Fijian equivalent of a no-take zone. Then, he started actively repairing and regrowing damaged coral by reattaching broken branches, created three coral nurseries and rescued 35 giant clams, each of which he named. Already, locals can see the benefits as the fish population increases in the bay around the protected reef — meaning richer fishing for all. And travellers can participate, too. “We have a coral farming programme which tourists can join,” Waitati says. “They get a coral farm briefing and then we take them out to the reef to help for an hour.” The money travellers pay goes back to the community, Waitati says, helping to fund the community hall, local school and local rugby club.
The joy that Ratan and Waitati take in their work is distinctively Fijian and deeply infectious. “I love the beautiful reef, showing beautiful creatures to the divers,” Waitati says. “They all come out smiling and happy, and that makes me happy, makes me love the ocean more. My reputation comes from this ocean, and I want to protect it. I want to give back to the ocean for making me so happy.”
