Blog & Vlog
The Ocean Roamer — Stern To, No Fenders
A new chapter · An independent course
There comes a time when you know your destination. You have plotted your course…
And at the end of this voyage of discovery, you finally need to bring your ship in: Stern To, No Fenders style.
Welcome back!
If you’ve followed my work before, I’m sorry I’ve been less present since those fateful days in April 2023. With the help of my friends, I’ve taken time to heal, grow and plot a better, more decisive course.
01 / Beyond the feed
An independent course
We’ve shared a lot over the years. Conversations, projects, discoveries, disagreements. Dive Professionals grew through that exchange, through people bringing their experience and giving their time. Some of those connections became friendships. Some became work. The conviction that we could achieve more together eventually became the IADP.
But keeping those conversations alive has become harder. Years of moderating, repeating the same arguments and watching worthwhile contributions disappear beneath the next distraction take their toll. Algorithms change. People drift away. Reaching a community you helped build becomes something you’re expected to pay for.
I’ve been active on social media from the beginning. I’ve also had websites for my activities since 1998. This is familiar ground, and it feels like time to give it the attention it deserves again.
The internet still offers room to explore, read, question and connect. We’ve allowed an increasingly narrow layer of platforms to stand between us, deciding what deserves our attention. Too often, visibility rewards vanity and performance while careful work struggles to be seen.
I have no ambition to become an influencer. To be honest, I despise most of them. There is work to do and something worth sharing.
A home for the work
Here, my stories can take the space they need. Photographs can sit alongside the stories they belong to rather than vanish through a feed. A report can sit beside its sources, ready for anyone who wants to look further. And something written years ago can still be found tomorrow. It is time to lift the veil from the internet, shed vanity and replace it with real change.
Much of it comes from being there in person. The rest requires research, listening and the patience to follow a subject beyond its headline. That is how I want this new home for TheOceanRoamer to earn its reputation.
The voice may be unruly at times.
But I take the work seriously.
Over the years, my course has moved towards education, cooperation and the practical work of looking after the marine world. It hasn’t always been an easy direction to hold. Idealism meets plenty of resistance once it starts asking something of people.
Still, there are projects worth pursuing and stories worth telling. This site brings them together and gives us a way to keep in touch directly.
02 / A promise to keep
Khartoum Siege
Twelve episodes · A firsthand account
Khartoum Siege will unfold in twelve episodes: my account of being caught in the war in Sudan, of living through the siege and eventually escaping. It will also be a story about the people around me—the friendships, the decisions and what it meant to depend on one another as the world we knew came apart.
Some of it will be difficult to revisit and difficult to tell. I want to give it the time and care it deserves.
My reason for telling it goes far beyond money. I owe it to people with whom I have lived and worked, across different periods, for almost a decade of my life. Some of those friendships go back twenty years. Others, twenty-five or more.
They are my tribe,
my brothers and sisters.
The Sudan I know is full of people whose generosity, humility and unconditional friendship bear little resemblance to the country so often reduced to violence and suffering in the headlines. They have shown me a love and a sense of belonging I have found nowhere else. I also know I would be welcomed back at any time. That is a standing you earn.
I have also watched the country being torn apart. I have witnessed firsthand moments in its history that will always stay with me, and seen how little attention the world gives to the lives of ordinary Sudanese people.
Sudan deserves to be heard. Its people deserve the same concern and urgency we owe people enduring war anywhere.
I cannot repay friendship like that with silence. The proud, respectful, soft-spoken people of Sudan deserve more. What I can do is tell the part I lived, remember the people who stood beside me, and help others see the people behind the headlines.
I owe that to my brothers and sisters in Sudan.
This story will be told.
Explore the Khartoum Siege series → · My years working in Sudan →
03 / Stories ahead
Above and below the surface
There will also be stories above and below the surface: journeys, encounters, food, discoveries and tribulations—some funny, some dramatic, and a few I can finally laugh about. I’ll share what I’ve learned, questions worth asking and glimpses of the work taking shape. Alongside films and photographs, there will be quieter writing and the occasional poem. Enough, I hope, to learn something, laugh together and sometimes feel a lump in the throat.
Venezuela will be part of the story too: life here, what I’m learning and the work taking shape. Subscribe for free to follow it from the inside, including opportunities to get involved as they develop. We’ll explore what social entrepreneurship means in practice—how an idea becomes useful work, who it brings together and what it takes to get started.
04 / Keep in touch
Come back aboard
Subscribe to our regular updates. Read, question, share something with a friend who might appreciate it. Help those connections find their way beyond the feed.
If you would like to help sustain the work, become a supporter or make a donation to the International Association of Dive Professionals. Supporter contributions go to IADP to support Op Caribe, the project I’m currently working on in the Caribbean.
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