Georgia makes a career out of what once was terrifying

by Ann Packer

Georgia Ryan has always been terrified of the ocean.

The winner of this year’s Eastbourne Freemasons’ Scholarship didn’t even like swimming “on top of the water”, and says she was very bad at snorkelling. But having chosen Marine Biology for her Master of Science degree, she found she could train as a scientific diver alongside her degree studies – which might just give her an edge employment-wise in the future.

So Georgia is now scuba diving, as part of her Masters project based in Wellington Harbour where she’s carrying out a conservation value assessment of marine life – and loving it, although she says the visibility in the harbour waters is quite bad.

Over the summer she took part in a project in Doubtful Sound to look at the impact of marine heat waves, working alongside Te Herenga Waka supervisor, Professor James Bell and his other postgraduate researchers.

“Fiordland was so amazing,” she says, “in spite of the insane number of sandflies. I really hope to go back there.”

Not bad for someone who hadn’t even been thinking along the lines of marine biology while doing her undergraduate degree.

“I took one marine class just for fun,” says the former St Oran’s College student, who moved to Eastbourne with her parents in 2017. “And I fell in love with it.”

It’s not the first thing this adventurous student has tried and enjoyed – she holds a Diploma in Dance from the Australian Conservatoire of Ballet in Melbourne, rowed with the Petone Women’s Club eight in 2020 (a bronze at the Nationals and gold at the North Island champs) and has spent time with Eastbourne’s MIRO volunteers, helping restore native forests on and around Cameron Ridge at Pencarrow.

Unfortunately, there’s just not time to do everything, and three weekends per month on a data collection project for NIWA, interviewing recreational fishers around Wellington harbour (surprisingly non-confrontational) occupies most of her spare time at the moment.

In the future she’d like to do something in the underwater biosecurity field – pest removal, perhaps. “I want to get all the skills I can and

Ryan. see what I can do then.”

We’ll keep you posted.