WCW: "I have always had a passion for the ocean"
Today, Carol Ofori celebrates scuba expert Tamara McArthur from Umkomaas, KZN.
As we proceed with celebrating Heritage Month, it is with great pleasure that Carol Ofori shines the spotlight on scuba diving enthusiast Tamara McArthur.
McArthur is the co-owner of ScubaCo and Travel in Aliwal Shoal, Umkomaas, KwaZulu-Natal. She has always been passionate about the ocean and anything involving water, and it was part of her dream to own her own scuba diving company.
Her story clearly shows how dreams come true when you pair passion with hard work.
McArthur learnt how to scuba when she was just twenty years old, and after qualifying as an instructor, she went overseas for what was supposed to be a five-year travel and dive world trip, which turned into a fourteen-year adventure.
106 countries later, she and her fiancé decided to settle in KwaZulu-Natal and opened ScubaCo eight years ago.
"ScubaCo offers bespoke scuba diving trips on Aliwal Shoal and trips out to see the sharks and even swim or scuba with them. I call her the Business class of Scuba Diving. We teach people to scuba dive and offer our guests 1-day experiences, scuba courses and week-long packages."
One of our most important times in the year is the annual Sardine Run where we actually close up shop in KZN and move the entire business down to the Eastern Cape, just south of Coffee Bay and take guests out to watch the world’s largest marine migration. It is simply stunning!
McArthur shared the most beautiful thing, saying she believes she has the perfect life.
In addition to being a qualified instructor/course director, she is also one of the select few divers in South Africa who can train scuba instructors and has joined the 100 Club (having travelled to over 100 countries and all seven continents in the world).
I grew up in Durban and finished school in PMB, after that I did an internship in Sodwana Bay where I learnt to scuba dive and 11 months later I qualified as an instructor. A friend of mine asked me to go to Thailand with her and we packed up and moved with no money. After a Tsunami (26 December 2004) I came home to SA and then packed up after a month and headed to the Caribbean. It was the Tsunami experience that created the mindset that I now have, “Make sure you wake up and be happy every day because you never know what will happen”. My happiness everyday drives many people crazy and they don’t understand it, but this my choice and it WORKS! From there I worked hard and saved and very long story short ended up working on a cruise line.
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