Meet the Crew

Sacha holds the Diploma in Outdoor Recreation (Leadership) and the Diploma in Wilderness Adventure Tourism (NZQA), plus national certificates in sport, recreation and fitness. She is an XPT Performance Breathing® coach, a 200-hour yoga instructor specialising in pranayama, a First Aid Instructor Trainer and an NZQA-registered assessor.

She sits on the WorkSafe control group that defines what “open water” means under New Zealand’s Adventure Activities regulations, and facilitates corporate wellbeing and nervous system resilience programmes.

Before she taught a single breath-hold, Sacha built a career below the surface: commercial underwater construction in the Wellington and Christchurch harbours, UN and AusAID infrastructure projects across the Pacific — including training locals in Nauru to maintain their own underwater structures — and research diving with NIWA and DOC, with expeditions to the Kermadec Islands. She has captained vessels and run superyacht operations across 45 countries.

For around ten years she was lead trainer for the Mountains to Sea Conservation Trust’s snorkel instructors in their national lead roles, and she has delivered marine education in schools for more than a decade. Every year she takes hundreds of tamariki and rangatahi through confined and open-water sessions — and some of those rangatahi, from Kerikeri High and Bay of Islands College, now work alongside her, training as instructors themselves.

She started the school in 2019, and it became Freedive Aotearoa in 2020 — the country’s first dedicated freediving school, and now an SSI Instructor Training Centre. Tiny but mighty.

An avid surfer and a well-travelled diver, Sacha has spent her life chasing clear water around the world. She’s a mother of three girls, and home is the Bay of Islands.

Her clients have been her greatest teachers. Surgeons, CEOs, athletes, teenagers, mums. Put them in the water and the same thing shows up every time: incredible capability, and a nervous system that’s forgotten how to come down.

Zoe grew up in the Bay of Islands with the ocean on her doorstep. She discovered freediving just over a year ago, fell in love with the calm it brings, and now teaches it with Freedive Aotearoa as an SSI Freediving Instructor — with dives from the Philippines to Thailand behind her.

Zoe runs community operations at the Recovery Studio, so she's often the first face you'll see when you come in. When she's not in the water, she's training or snowboarding.

Kayla is a qualified marine ecologist, a certified breathwork instructor, a self-taught artist and a freediver. She's originally from Kentucky in the United States, moved to New Zealand in 2019, and has called the Bay of Islands home ever since.

She specialises in the human connection with the moana, designing community-based conservation projects that help people learn about their local ecosystems and restore them. She currently works as a programme leader for Wildlands Studies, an environmental field studies programme for university students.

Kayla co-created the Ocean Mind Project, a Bay of Islands beach clean and ocean education initiative that runs monthly beach cleans in partnership with Northland Waste and Bay Beach Clean. Since arriving in Aotearoa she has worked with a range of organisations and built marine education programmes right across Northland.

Kayla is a certified SSI Assistant Freediving Instructor and Mermaid Instructor for the Freedive Aotearoa team. You may also know some of her work around the Bay — she painted the Wheke on the side of the Freedive studio, along with other artworks around Paihia.

If you've been to one of her summer breathwork sessions at the studio, you'll already know her love for the breath. Her classes bring together modern science and older breathing traditions, for every level of experience, in groups or one-on-one.