Kraken rises from the deep!

Welcome to Kraken's first ever blog post! Kraken Dive Team was set up in 2019 with the mission to get more young people diving and raise awareness of the plight of our amazing oceans and educate as many people as they can about changes that people can make to their everyday lives to help.

I decided to to set up Kraken Dive Team because I wanted to make a difference. I've been a SCUBA diver since 2013 and have always done my best to be environmentally friendly, but after Blue Planet 2 came out and I watched with horror, it brought tears to my eyes (the walrus and her calf trying to find a place to rest was the real kicker for me). I wasn't doing enough to help or make a difference and I knew I had to do more! Watching how humans are really trashing the planet started to get me thinking about what I could do to make a difference.

As a diver, I have had the honor of seeing some of the most beautiful sights underwater, and thought that SCUBA would be an amazing way to get more people interested in fighting for our oceans and seeing these sights first hand for themselves. However, diving can be a difficult sport to access. its notorious expensive and not always young person friendly, That's where the idea of Kraken came from. Having worked my way up to instructor with my partner Rob, I knew we could do something to make a small difference. Rob and I had the time and skills needed to do something, and so Kraken dive Team was born.

We started to investigate how we could get more young people diving and giving us the platform to teach and educate those young people how amazing our oceans are and what changes they could make to help. After a lot of digging and research, we decided a Scout Active Support Unit was the best way to go.

After spending 2018 working out the best way to set things up, the real work started in 2019. We started sourcing SCUBA kit, filling our living room with BCD's, fins and wetsuits (our poor dog Ellie really wasn't sure what all this weird and wonderful black kit invading our house was!). We got set up as a Scout Active Support Unit, started fundraising and reaching out for support and looking for events to run SCUBA sessions at. We recruited an amazing group of volunteers, who have helped us with everything from our lovely website, designing our kraking artwork (see what I did there), creating ingenious solutions to logistical issues and helping us reach out to the local and SCUBA community, Kraken rose up from the depths, from a thought and desire to help make a difference. A heartfelt thanks to all the wonderful people that have got on board and supported us to get to this point. We wouldn't be here without you!!

We are still new and small, but we are working really hard every day to achieve our mission, Kraken has really taken over our lives. I never truly understood how much work was going to be involved setting up an organisation from scratch, and chose possibly the most ridiculous time to do this, working full time and trying to finish off a Master's degree all at the same time! But as Antoine Griezmann said with hard work and determination, you can achieve anything'.

We are eating, sleeping and breathing everything Kraken as we continue to grow and develop and start to engage young people in SCUBA and ocean conservation. We are determined to make a difference! I hope that you can join and follow us on our journey to achieve our mission and that we will inspire you to make some small, or big, changes to help protect our planet.

Kraken is coming to get you!