Sian, originally from Forest of Dean, England is a coral reef specialist and marketing manager for grassroots NGO Gili Eco Trust based in Indonesia.
A lifelong obsession with the ocean and all its inhabitants took her to try a scuba dive in Greece for her 12th birthday and she has rarely surfaced for air since.
Studying Physical Geography and Geology at Swansea University (simply because it’s the UK’s closest uni to the beach!) took her to complete her thesis research in the warm Honduran waters of Utila (Where she met me, Paul Fulbrook).
It was easy to decide that Welsh waters had become too cold and her exploration through the tropics and SE Asia began.
She completed her Dive Master course during a marine internship in 2011 protecting turtles in Pulau Perhentian, Malaysia and instantly fell in love with arduous fieldwork inside a grassroots NGO.
She then moved to Indonesia to learn more about coral reef restoration techniques to raise awareness and alarm about the state of ocean and coral reef health.
Here, she became a PADI OWSI instructor, collected a massive, 3,500 dives and found her calling on the tiny island of Gili Trawangan, teaching coral restoration and citizen science courses to recreational divers, setting up a clean beach movement and tree planting organization and engaging with anyone, literally anyone who would share her love of sea turtles, beach debris and the ocean.
She is currently building an ethical turtle hatchery to protect endangered turtle nests from poachers, beach erosion and unsustainable tourism you can find out more about it here.
Connecting (again!) with me on my recent trip to Gili T, over many Bintangs on the beach I convinced her to share some of her expertise and experience here on this website.
