Bottom Dwellers

Bottom Dwellers offers freediving instruction and charter spearfishing/freediving services based out of Victoria, British Columbia. I’m a homegrown Vancouver Islander, born and raised on the southern tip of Vancouver Island in the Pacific Northwest off of mainland British Columbia, Canada. Vancouver Island is world renowned for the beauty of its raw wilderness and nature. Being surrounded by this throughout their lives ends up leading most Vancouver Islanders to an outdoorsy life.

I grew up on a lake and would spend most summers visiting family, playing in the ocean on the northern tip of Saltspring Island (a large Gulf Island just off of Vancouver Island). I’ve always been quite the mammalian from all the water sports and island/lake adventuring I was lucky enough to experience at a young age. My love for the outdoors and the underwater world is deeply rooted from my life growing up on Vancouver Island. It's through these roots that my life guided me to where i am at now with my passion and love for freediving and freedive spearfishing.

In 2013, I was introduced to freedive spearfishing through friends. My love for the aquatic world and my passion for being a hunter-gatherer since a young age, thanks to my uncle, fuelled the beginnings of a new addiction. Being able to selectively harvest your own catch, by your own means, and utilizing the resources Vancouver Island provides was something I had always found infinitely rewarding. To couple this passion with the sport of freediving which had always been a love interest is what truly sparked the drive and pursuit of becoming a safer and more skilled freediver. 

 The addiction to being below the surface grew deeper and deeper and I began to pursue my training and certifications with Performance Freediving International. I have always done my homework and research and in this case I kept finding a common thread through it all. What I found was how important proper training and instruction is to becoming what would be deemed as a good freediver. A good freediver is someone who freedives safely and skillfully, following proper safety protocol, within their limits and in a controlled and calculated environment.

Since that day in 2013 I have now gone through my Intermediate Freediver, Advanced Freediver, Assistant Instructor, Safety Supervisor, PFI Freediver Instructor and PFI Intermediate Freediver Instructor Certifications with Performance Freediving International. With completion of these certifications I slowly began to make preparations to take my current level of freediving training to the cold waters of Vancouver Island and share it with the young and growing community stirring in the shallows. Along with working as a Red Seal carpenter and builder for my small construction company, I took it upon myself to create what is now Bottom Dwellers Freediving.

With the growth of Bottom Dwellers and the local freediving and spearfishing communities, Bottom Dwellers has since its commencement, developed and designed sustainable & ethical-harvesting focused freedive-spearfishing and freedive-harvesting programs. These courses were developed to instruct, guide and influence the local freedive-spearfishing community as it grows to take the sustainability of our local marine ecosystem into our own hands as ethical harvesters and lead through stewardship and positive representation.

Bottom Dwellers was created from the love and passion that I, my friends and my family members have for the ocean. Bottom Dwellers aims to share this love and passion for the aquatic life that we are privileged to live by providing the proper education and training needed to become a 'good' freediver and/or an ethical sustainable harvester... a Bottom Dweller.