The Editor says: Taiwanese people have drifted too far from the ocean — so far that many have forgotten what the sea truly looks like. Fortunately, the Editor knows a group of wonderfully odd individuals, each with a remarkable story of their own. No matter how different their backgrounds, jobs, or ages — some spanning nearly six decades apart — they all share one unmistakable thing: a love for the sea. The Editor hopes to dig into the stories behind that love, to inspire more people to rediscover the ocean and, in time, fall in love with it. For the first installment of our "Lives Changed by the Sea" series, we'd like to introduce Lin Yu-ping — the trash gardener of Keelung's Wanghaixiang Bay at Chaojing Park.
A Day in the Life of a Keelung Chaojing Diver
On a scorching June afternoon in 2017, beside the famous "Hero's Slope" at the Secret Garden dive site in Keelung's Chaojing Park, a familiar figure rallied three or four sturdy men. Weaving past a line of divers hauling scuba tanks on their backs, they leapt without hesitation into a small rocky cove. That cove, thanks to a typhoon that had blown through just days before, was covered in a slick of floating marine debris — not the large, obvious trash you might expect, but a seemingly endless sea of microplastic fragments and broken Styrofoam pieces, pounding the shoreline in relentless waves. Some of the men wielded nets; others scooped up the plastic particles by hand.
Cleaning up trash at Keelung's Chaojing
That familiar figure shouted to the group: "We dive here every day — why wouldn't we roll up our sleeves and make this place cleaner?" People who know him call him the Trash Gardener of Chaojing Park — Lin Yu-ping.
Those of a certain age will remember that Taiwan's internet cafés once had a golden era. Students weren't buried in their textbooks — they were rushing to the café the moment class let out. It was a time when the internet was booming, and Lin Yu-ping found himself swept up in it: after graduating, he moved into the world of tech and IT, working on system-integration projects for major internet café operators.
How the Sea Found Him
From the age of 24 — fresh out of military service — all the way to 40, Lin Yu-ping lived and breathed technology. Beyond dense technical manuals and cold server racks, life seemed set on a fixed course. But the relentless pace of technological change began to take its toll. Product cycles grew shorter and shorter; a new generation of hardware would barely be in mass production before the next generation was announced, and manufacturers shifted all inventory risk onto system integrators. The internet café industry was already waning as personal computers upgraded rapidly, and the rise of smartphones delivered the final blow. Quietly, the idea of a mid-career change began to take root in Lin Yu-ping's mind.
In 2013, at a friend's invitation and driven by curiosity, Lin Yu-ping went along to learn scuba diving — and what followed was a startling, mind-shaking experience. A typical learning curve involves theory and pool work progressing in an orderly fashion, especially for someone unfamiliar with the water, but Lin Yu-ping's journey was more like a rollercoaster. His first few Open Water ocean dives were a struggle — poor neutral buoyancy, burning through air too fast — yet the weightlessness underwater and the sensation of swimming alongside fish utterly captivated him. After accumulating around 20 dives, however, he hit a new obstacle: his original instructor placed heavy emphasis on a strict mentor-student hierarchy, which eventually forced Lin Yu-ping out of the group.
Finding himself a "dive orphan," he began diving with a few like-minded friends, and that was the moment the LINE group "Divingmate Club" was born. As the group grew and he connected with divers from different training backgrounds — many of whom had their own issues with the mentor-heavy model — he discovered that scuba diving, a field that should be rich with knowledge, was riddled with a severe lack of information transparency. Divers routinely shared stories of being pressured by their instructors to buy gear, being upsold on the Advanced Open Water Diver course right after finishing Open Water, or being scolded for diving with instructors outside their original system. All of this drove Lin Yu-ping to want to build something healthier.
Divingmate Club
Rather than focusing on gear sales or promoting dive trips, Divingmate Club rallied its members around one simple call to action: picking up trash. From three people in 2015, the main group has grown to more than 130 members. Lin Yu-ping's philosophy was straightforward — he didn't want to follow certain instructors' practices, and he wanted to give more people a different way to connect with the ocean. If you want to dive, the club's members will go in the water with you and freely share everything they know about dive conditions and equipment. As for why he eventually decided to become a full-time instructor: during one ocean cleanup event, he was criticised by certain individuals who questioned why someone without an instructor certification was organising activities. That stung him into resolving to earn his instructor qualification. Perhaps it was precisely that stubborn, never-say-die spirit that set him on the path to becoming a trash gardener.
After officially certifying as an SDI (SDI (certification agency)) instructor in 2015, he threw himself into organising dive activities and ocean cleanup events. In the early days, Keelung's Chaojing Park was littered with discarded fishing nets, plastic bottles, and fabric scraps tangled around coral. Despite the site's unusually rich marine life — thanks to the currents and topography — Lin Yu-ping and the Divingmate Club felt this environment deserved far more care. So every time he led a dive, he would remind everyone to bring along an extra mesh bag and pick up any trash they came across. That practice began quietly in 2015 and continued for two years, gradually spreading to the divers around him.
The Rise of Chaojing's Secret Garden
Perhaps because there was less trash, or perhaps because more divers were coming to Chaojing, underwater cameras began revealing the Secret Garden in all its glory. It turned out that just 40 minutes from Taipei, Keelung was hiding a dive site of extraordinary beauty. Thanks too to the support of local active instructors, the Keelung City Government, and the National Museum of Marine Science and Technology, Wanghaixiang Bay — part of Chaojing Park — was designated a protected area in May 2016, with strict enforcement beginning in August of that year. Locals jokingly call it the smallest marine protected area (MPA) in Taiwan, yet the one with the strictest enforcement. And because of that enforcement, in the short few months between the 2016 designation and the end of the dive season in September, divers already witnessed the ocean coming back to life at a remarkable pace. Snappers, moray eels, and sea urchins all returned. That same year, four Giant Groupers measuring a metre in length were discovered beneath the rocks of the Secret Garden — an enormously exciting find in a Taiwanese diving scene that rarely encounters large marine life.
For Lin Yu-ping, whose career had taken an abrupt turn at 40, the ocean had brought him a circle of great friends and what felt like a new sense of purpose. The spark that truly ignited something in him was a fishermen's dispute he witnessed. In September 2016, a review meeting was held for the Wanghaixiang Bay conservation zone, giving local residents and fishermen the chance to speak directly with government officials. That forum gave him a visceral understanding of just how difficult it would be to guide a fishing village through transformation. The government and divers hoped the marine protected area's spillover benefits might ease the depletion of Taiwan's inshore fisheries, but the fishermen — who had fished these waters their entire lives — saw every no-fishing regulation as an unbearable imposition, particularly given the government's inadequate policies and lack of support measures. The meeting ended without resolution, leaving everyone frustrated.
Cuttlefish spawn in Wanghaixiang Bay every April and May, but their value looks very different through the eyes of fishermen and anglers. Photo courtesy of 京太郎.
A Stepping Stone for Taiwan's Fishing Village Transformation
After that meeting, Lin Yu-ping kept thinking: "Maybe these two sides have never really been talking on the same platform." Two parallel lines of conversation will never meet. But if we could get to know each other a little better, maybe we could change something. So in 2017 he made a bold decision — to establish a base of operations. During Chinese New Year that year, a group of Divingmate Club members rolled up their sleeves and, braving the bitter Northeast wind, began renovating what would become the club's home base: Chaojing Sky (潮境天空). By accounts from those who were there, the space was virtually derelict — a leaking roof, a mouldy fridge, a rusted water heater, broken air conditioning — yet with limited funds and boundless enthusiasm, everyone rallied behind a simple shared ideal.
Once the base was up and running, the dive season gradually arrived, and Lin Yu-ping began reaching out to local residents. He actively partnered with them on scuba tank rentals, deliberately sharing the benefits, and also purchased a range of snorkelling gear to lend free of charge to local shops who wanted to try renting it out. His reasoning was simple: if you want local residents to feel the difference, you have to make sure they can earn from ocean tourism.
After a year of patient communication and relationship-building, the future now holds the prospect of local residents going full-time into ocean-related industries — from scuba tank and snorkelling gear rental to intertidal zone guiding — all of it a stepping stone toward a fishing village in transition. The longer-term dream is to train local people to become snorkelling and dive instructors, so the industry can put down roots in the community. Imagine a local dive guide telling visiting divers from far away that, twenty-odd years ago, there were whales in Wanghaixiang Bay. That kind of story would leave a far deeper impression, and make people truly appreciate the importance of marine conservation. Beyond restoring underwater habitats and guiding the industry's transformation, the Divingmate Club also has a dedicated group of volunteers who contribute generously in their own ways — drawing dive maps of Wanghaixiang Bay, creating reminder signs for the conservation zone, designing conservation zone sticker badges — all small efforts adding up to something bigger, in hopes that more people will cherish this hard-won protected area.
Drawing dive maps helps everyone better understand this stretch of ocean
Divingmate Club is still running at a loss today (given Lin Yu-ping's business logic, that may well continue for some time), yet even as this article was being written, he was adding 10 more sets of scuba gear to the inventory. He hopes to collaborate with more freelance instructors in the future — as long as they share similar values around conservation, he's very open to working together and building a comprehensive, safe dive guide system. After all, to nurture a local dive tourism industry, he believes that residents and instructors need to earn fair compensation before sustainable growth becomes possible. The reality, though, has been harsh. Plenty of people poured cold water on him when he started, and some even took to the internet to paint his motives as conspiratorial. For now, the only thing he can do is keep going and never give up — and try his best to support what may be the first fishing village in Taiwan to begin transforming step by step, thanks to the establishment of a marine protected area.
For Lin Yu-ping, diving is the embodiment of a set of principles. Beyond the underwater rules of no fin-kicks to the bottom and no touching coral, every event he organises or dive trip he leads comes with a request: bring your own reusable chopsticks and a water bottle. We come to know the ocean through diving; we come to understand the ocean's current state through diving. Beyond going underwater to collect trash, what matters even more is bringing those values into everyday life. As Lin Yu-ping puts it: "As long as you gather enough positive energy, things will naturally right themselves and a culture will form." When every instructor teaches their students to cherish marine life, those who damage the ecosystem will naturally be called out. When every diver makes a habit of coming ashore with a little trash in hand, it becomes second nature for everyone — and the ocean gets a little cleaner, one dive at a time.
Ocean cleanups bring people together around a shared love for the sea
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