Hi everyone, my name is Courtney Rayes. It is an honour to introduce myself as the 2014/2015 Australasian Our World-Underwater Scholarship Society Rolex Scholar. This year’s annual meeting in New York was the Scholarship Society’s 40th anniversary, which entailed an action packed few days that flew by. It was a privilege to meet all of the sponsors, hosts and former scholars, and I am so grateful to you all for making this year possible. It was also great to watch Stefan Andrews, Jeff Hester and Chloé Maréchal present their amazing end of year videos.

Also looking forward to this year are my North American and European counterparts, Ana and Elena, both whom are talented young ladies whose journeys’ will be exciting to follow!

After the awesome trip to New York I returned to Auckland, New Zealand, and was invited to speak to a class of seven year olds about the role of sharks in marine ecosystems and their range of exceptional senses. It was great to see so much enthusiasm for the ocean, with several budding marine biologists showing special interest.

Next stop was Tauranga to dive some of the great local sites. I was also lucky enough to get onboard the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) vessel undertaking marine biosecurity surveillance in the Tauranga harbour. This ongoing survey is funded by the Ministry for Primary Industry (MPI) with NIWA divers responsible for identifying species which pose a significant threat to New Zealand, and monitoring those already detected.

Switching from ocean to lake, the following week I joined NIWA for their dive refreshers in Auckland. It was also a good opportunity to try out my Guardian full-face mask. A huge thank you to Ocean Technology Systems (OTS) for providing this equipment, it will be extremely useful for the year ahead. Also a big thank you to the NIWA team who took me onboard, it was great to get insight into the work-life of scientific divers. All of the dive operations were very impressive, only made better by the great bunch of people involved.

Off to Sydney, next update soon!