How it all started

The great American author John Steinbeck once wrote “One who was born by the ocean or has associated with it cannot ever be quite content away from it for very long”.

I was born on a Mediterranean island of Malta on a cold January night of 1969, the same week Led Zepplin were touring in New York. The sea was always part of my life. As a child, I used to long for the summer holidays when I will spend hours every day playing at beach. Snorkeling was my favorite moment where I could only listen to the sea and observe the small creatures below dancing with the currents and playing hide and seek in their habitat. As I grew older, this took a different dimension where it was mainly the place where to hang out with other teens but I always had those moments where I will simply disappear and enjoy the sounds of the sea. Later on in life I got into sailing and here I’ve broadened my knowledge about the sea. I learnt how it behaves. That it has different faces. Its strength. Its fragility. Its being.

As I grew older, I passed through marriage, that was short lived, parenthood which turned out to be an amazing experience and also climbed various corporate ladders. Through the years, the sea was always there not far away from me and whenever I had the occasion to sail or participate in a race, I took it. Like many others, I have my dreams where one would say “maybe one day I....”. And like many others, such dreams remained a “maybe”. 

Years passed by and for various reasons and some excuses, I procrastinated. Parenthood duties, relationships, career, loving the comfort zone....all delayed my dream and almost gave up on it. It became only a fantasy and accepted it as is. However I’ve had various wake-up calls. Unfortunately I’ve lost friends and colleagues as they moved on to a new dimension and such passings shook me up and made me think about life and how I was living.

 I always wanted to experience new things and almost always managed to do so. Life is too short to keep doing the same things over and over.  If I wanted to compose music, I did. I wanted to author theatre scripts, I did and produced them in a theater. I wanted to go hitch hike in a foreign country, I did in 2011 in Morocco. I love art so I did oil paintings, did some stone sculptures and even exhibited my works and sold my art. Lately I struck off another from my bucket list; cross a country with a motorbike with my best mates. But the sea, was always something too big for me to handle. However in 2017, I did my first move where I finally got my RYA sailing skipper license which I have been procrastinating for decades. At the same time I’ve put my property on the market without even knowing what to do next. Like this, my thoughts had less restrictions and roamed freely though various ideas of what to do next. I kept hearing this voice in my head telling me “life is too short to spend it behind a desk”.

I loved what I did and the company I worked for but I needed to do more. More satisfying and more in line with my passions. In May 2018, I had an appendicitis attack and found myself in an operating theatre at the hospital. While recovering the surgery at the hospital, my 27 year old son Kurt was next to me and told me “Dad, when are you going to let go of your past and start doing things you always wanted to do? What is keeping you? Look around you”. In the same ward, there was a guy a few years older than me who had numerous pipes coming out of his body after a very complex surgery. He could not move or talk. We humans are very fragile and we forget we are. One day you are enjoying the company of your friends and family and the next day you are on a hospital bed. Kurt’s words kept resonating in my head and started researching ocean related projects that I could join. 

I will soon turn 50 and I decided that it was time for me to give back. Within a few days from my operation, I enrolled to volunteer in an ocean conservation project in Mexico where I will assist researchers collecting underwater data while I will continue training to become a scuba diver instructor. This adventure shall start in January 2019, the same month I turn 50, and shall last for 7 months. I do not know what will happen after these 7 months, maybe I go back to the office or may be not. Maybe I move on to another ocean project or maybe not. I don’t know and do not want to think about it. I will see where the waves will take me.

My mission is to connect people to the ocean by demonstrating its beauty and how dependent we are on its state of being. I will share my experience on this website and give my little contribution to create more awareness about the importance of having healthy oceans.

This is my ocean road and I hope it will be an inspiration for you to live your dream. 

Jose’ Micallef

October 2018