About the film
Water People Expedition co-founders Tim and Mitch on their previous boat set out to learn to live from the sea with the hope to increase their self-sufficiency and lower their environmental footprint.
"Living nomadically on a sailboat we must figure out a food solution at each place we visit. Best case scenario we're at a lush island with local farmers selling their produce in markets or on the street. The reality is that these options aren't always there or within our reach, and we're often forced to buy food that has been wrapped in plastic and shipped hundreds or thousands of miles.
We're surrounded by fish and coastal treats all the time so it felt logical to take things into our own hands and explore what's available on our doorstep. The thing is, we didn't have the knowledge of what to eat, the skills of how to collect it, or any sort of understanding what might be ethical or sustainable choices.
What followed was a journey across 3000+ nautical miles — learning skills and knowledge from fisherman, freedivers and scientists. In remote locations we learned to freedive, how to forage underwater, to make considerations about our ecological footprint, and how we can make ethical choices in moments when we find ourselves back in civilisation."
Cast
Diving Deeper
Seafood choice guides for buying fish
There's so many species and so many variables that we highly recommend using one of these websites/apps or something similar. Most of them offer a regularly updated traffic light system that grades the choices available in terms of their sustainability or environmental impacts. Find one that matches your region for the best and most relevant results. Examples include: Seafood Watch (USA), Good Fish Guide (UK), and GoodFish (Australia). You can also look out for the MSC and ASC labels on the packaging.
Fishing gear and techniques
We would consider the perfect fishing or foraging equipment to make catching dinner efficient and to not affect a non-target species or the habitat. Living on a boat we found The Cruiser's Handbook of Fishing to give the most comprehensive explanations on gear and technique. In the Bahamas we preferred using a polespear compared to a hawaiian sling and would highly recommend Headhunter polespears which gave us instant results after a lot of failures with other gear!
The book Underwater Foraging by Ian Donald was a great starting point for us with sustainable marine foraging and we encourage you to get familiar with ethical target options where you will be fishing. Sport Fish of the Atlantic was an good ID book that helped us. When you're succesful with your catch we loved the beautiful sustainable recipes book Good Catch by Valentine Thomas.
The environmental impacts of our food choices
and ways to take action
Deforestation, habitat loss, biodiversity loss, greenhouse gas emissions, packaging, pollution, water usage... eating mass-produced food most often carries an environmental cost. The Foodprint website does an excellent job of explaining it in bitesize chunks.
The book Food in a Planetary Emergency, summarised well in an article by the University of Sydney, explains the urgency needed and outlines some changes we can make. Things like switching to flexitarianism, reducing food waste, being mindful of packaging as well as things we're learning to do such as supporting ethical brands and small local producers.
Freedive deeper, longer and safer
Unless you've done some studying or training, the chances are that your freediving technique is wrong or perhaps even highly dangerous.
We would recommend doing a course and we had a great experience with Blue Element Freediving in Dominica thanks to Jimmy Jeans.
Our other contributor Will Trubridge offers online training that looks awesome as well as courses with Vertical Blue at Dean's Blue Hole in The Bahamas.
Seafood as a resource for humanity
Seafood has sustained coastal communities throughout human history and it's role as a key resource continues for about 3 billion people today according to the FAO. Small-scale, low-tech artisanal fishing still supports hundreds of millions of people, particularly in tropical developing countries. Of course advances in technology and globalisation made seafood more accessible and in demand around the world, and this rampant industrialised extraction has threatened some species and ecosystems through overfishing, bycatch, and destructive methods. The science of fisheries management and the push for regulations has been progressively catching up and with changes being implemented many fisheries are now considered sustainable. Check out this article from the University of Washington or the great initiative Fedbyblue and the Blue Food Assessment.
Regenerative ocean farms are also a very exciting development like we saw in the film with Chris Ludford. They are sustainable and ecosystem-friendly aquaculture systems designed to restore marine habitats, sequester carbon, and promote biodiversity while producing seafood. Also check out Greenwave for one of the leading examples. We'd love to eat more oysters, mussels and scallops from these kind of operations!
Thanks
To make the film happen we needed support, and the Lighthouse Foundation stepped in to help make it possible together with our Patreon supporters at the time and a couple of private donors. The Lighthouse Foundation supports integrated and long-term approaches in the relationship between humans and the marine environment within the context of sustainable development.
Get Involved
Adventure with the rest of the crew on the new boat, help document key stories, bring your ideas to the table.
And your crew contribution helps cover the running costs of the expedition which is the platform for the Protect campaign.
We need to raise funds to support the important storytelling we're undertaking for the Protect initiative. Researching and organising shoots, travelling to locations, buying hard drives and equipment, video editing — a donation goes a long way to help.
100% of profit from the shop goes to our Protect campaign to help create original multimedia storytelling to advocate for the protection of marine and coastal environments.
Wearing a Water People t-shirt or cap helps spread the word and helps make a success of the initiative.
Become a title sponsor, partner or gear provider.
Or get involved as a Foundation, Charity or grant provider.
Or collab as an individual. Perhaps you're a water athlete? Conservationist? Influencer? Scientist?
