Fearless and Against the Wind: Lin Music, the Sharp-Eyed Dive Guide and Instructor

The Editor says: "Lives Changed by the Ocean — Special Feature" This time we invited Lin Music, widely known as the sharp-eyed dive guide. But did you know that before becoming an instructor, she was a quiet, reserved pastry chef who was too shy to interact with people? What kind of transformation turned her into the lively, sharp-eyed dive guide she is today? Follow the Editor's interview to learn the fascinating story of another ocean-obsessed soul!

Those born in Taiwan's Generation Y — coming of age in the post-baby-boom era — have gradually been labelled the "strawberry generation" by many. They try to prove their generation is different, yet most find their inner worlds suppressed by economic hardship and the relentless pace of city life, swept along in the urban crowd and slowly losing their sense of self.

Diving Opens the Door to a Life as a Dive Guide

Lin Music attended a general business-information program in vocational high school — no prestigious academic background or family connections to speak of. After graduating from junior high, she was pushed into working as an apprentice at a pastry and bread shop while continuing her studies. During the first two or three years of her apprenticeship, her constant companions were endless stacks of pots, pans, and baking trays to scrub by hand — the stubborn, slightly scorched flour and ingredients baked onto those trays being her first real workout for her hands.

Twelve years as an apprentice and then a pastry chef — not a short stretch in the span of a life. The work suited Lin Music's reserved nature perfectly: she could hide away in the kitchen's small world and give it her all, with no need to face customers or explain things to them. Yet deep down, there was a knot she simply couldn't untie.

In 2014, she heard that a friend had gone to Orchid Island on a work-for-certification program and earned a dive certification. That news planted a seed. At the time, her mental image of diving came straight from Discovery Channel — foreign special forces units riding underwater scooters with rebreathers strapped to their backs. But after seeing her friend's photos and reading her account, it was as if that knot in her heart suddenly came undone.

She realised that throughout those 12 years in the pastry kitchen, she had always felt she was meant for more than that tiny room. There had to be a different life worth exploring — she just hadn't found a goal worth chasing. When her friend told her about the unique wonders of diving and the possibility of travelling abroad for it, she finally summoned the courage to take on the challenge.

And she acted on it immediately. One Friday, she saw a work-for-certification vacancy reposted by an Orchid Island dive shop. By Saturday she had handed in her resignation at the pastry shop. On Sunday she flew to Orchid Island alone to begin her work-for-certification journey.

In just three months on Orchid Island, Lin Music made dive buddies from all walks of life, earned her first dive certification (Open Water), and knew after just a few dives that she had genuinely fallen in love with the sport. Underwater, she didn't have to talk to anyone, and she could encounter strange, wonderful creatures that had no equivalent on land. She decided then and there to pursue a career as a professional dive instructor.

In 2015, Music chose to head to Kenting to complete her dive instructor certification. But in the period before earning her instructor qualification — during the Advanced Diver and Rescue Diver stages — she was essentially doing odd jobs around the dive shop and earning very little, while still having to repay her certification fees in instalments. At her tightest, she had just NT$16 left in her wallet. She is deeply grateful to the dive shop owner at the time, who allowed her to pay off her instructor course fees and expensive equipment costs in instalments, and equally grateful to the friends who reached out when she was at rock bottom and made sure she had a meal to get through the day.

A Fateful Encounter with Nudibranchs in Kenting

Within a single year in Kenting, Lin Music not only obtained her instructor certification at an impressive pace, she also clocked over 1,000 tank dives — rapidly accumulating experience while thoroughly exploring the underwater world of Kenting. And that same stubborn, never-give-up spirit showed itself again. Shortly after earning her instructor rating, she started hearing about a remarkable creature living beneath Kenting's waters: the nudibranch. She had spotted one or two during her early dives, but their tiny size had never really grabbed her attention — until the day she happened upon the Kalinga ornata, nicknamed the "Fire Kirin," and it completely lit up her inner world.

She pored through every nudibranch field guide in the shop, and the more she studied, the more she discovered: Kenting was home to a remarkable variety of nudibranch species. She also began adding prolific underwater photographers to her Facebook friends list, and through them she learned that the masters of the craft liked to go night diving in Kenting to hunt for nudibranchs. So began her quest to track down these nudibranch-hunting wizards — little did she know this chapter would become one of the most memorable of her entire diving career.

At first, unfamiliar with the terrain and with no night diving experience, Lin Music went around asking every instructor in Kenting whether she could tag along on a night dive. She asked the instructors at her own shop, instructors at other shops, and even freediving instructors — and was turned down by all of them. Undeterred, she simply chose to go around their schedules, heading out alone for night dives at dawn and dusk every single day (Editor's note: this is not recommended practice — please don't try this at home). Beyond mastering the terrain, the psychological pressure alone was a formidable test of nerve — and on top of a working day that already included at least four dives, adding two more was a serious physical burden as well. But dive by dive, she gradually extended her range and depth, learned to manage the risks of night diving, and discovered that Kenting after dark is a treasure trove just waiting to be explored.

In the beginning, Lin Music didn't know much about photo editing — she simply uploaded whatever nudibranch shots she had taken straight to Facebook. As the variety of species she found grew and grew, she quietly caused a small sensation in Kenting's diving community. The very instructors who had refused to take her night diving began reaching out to invite her along, hoping her searching skills would lead them to rarely seen nudibranch species. This unusual mutual arrangement gave Lin Music the chance to quickly explore other dive sites around Kenting and rack up even more experience.

The extraordinary "eagle-eye" search ability that Lin Music became known for is closely tied to her self-directed exploration in Kenting. As she grew more comfortable with the local dive sites, she began joining freediving instructors on nudibranch hunts. Because freedivers tether a float buoy and dive vertically from a fixed point, she — carrying her scuba gear beside them — couldn't stray far for safety reasons, and was often confined to a single reef. That constraint turned out to be a revelation: she discovered that to find macro subjects, all you really need to do is work one single rock thoroughly, and you'll be amazed at what turns up. Because she found so many different creatures in one place, she came to know the habits of each species intimately — which meant that when guiding divers in the future, she could locate creatures quickly and share them with her guests.

Of all her nudibranch-hunting adventures in Kenting in 2015, two stand out as the most unforgettable. The first: because she frequently dived alongside freedivers — who have no air supply to worry about — and because she herself uses air remarkably slowly, she once spent 90 minutes underwater at Wanlitong searching for a rare, dream-find nudibranch. On the long fin-kick back to shore, she was happily chatting with the freediving instructor about the shots they'd just taken and admiring the stars above — completely unaware that back at the shop, the staff had already been worried enough to call the Coast Guard (Editor's note: they had been out for four hours; a typical scuba dive lasts about 45 minutes). When they finally waded ashore, they found the sea wall packed with people wielding flashlights and thought for a moment they'd stumbled into some kind of special festival. She couldn't help but burst out laughing.

Taiwan's First-Ever Night Diving Fine

The second experience was far more frustrating. Abroad, night diving is a highly specialised activity, and because it allows divers to observe species and behaviours — mating, feeding, and more — that simply don't appear during the day, many award-winning underwater photography competition entries are taken on night dives. On one occasion, Lin Music surfaced from a dive only to find the Coast Guard waiting on the shore — and issued what is believed to be the first night diving fine ever written in Taiwan. After investigating, she discovered that the Kenting National Park Management Office had a regulation requiring prior application for night diving, yet no corresponding application unit could be found among any of the relevant government bodies. It was a Kafkaesque loop that eventually petered out after a string of meetings involving dive operators, local elected representatives, and the Management Office — never fully resolved.

The incident laid bare the inadequacy of Taiwan's marine recreational activity regulations and the bureaucratic mindset of the agencies responsible for them. Lin Music, who has dived extensively overseas and witnessed firsthand how seriously other countries take dive tourism, couldn't help but feel a pang of frustration at how far ahead those governments are compared to Taiwan's.

As Lin Music's nudibranch photos on Facebook grew ever more impressive, more and more divers began requesting her by name, even handing her a wish list of specific nudibranch species they hoped to see on a given dive. Whether she was leading dives at the macro paradise site 82-5k on the Northeast Coast or stationed out at Penghu, divers kept requesting her personally — and for Lin Music, that kind of recognition meant everything as a form of self-validation.

Through guiding dives, Lin Music has had the chance to meet corporate executives, world-class underwater photographers, and more — encounters she could never have imagined back in her days as a pastry apprentice surrounded by flour. The woman she is now is no longer that quiet young apprentice hunched over a worktop in a tiny bakery kitchen; she has become a professional macro dive guide who can hold her own in any situation.

Looking ahead, Lin Music hopes to set a new benchmark for the dive guiding profession in Taiwan. Because dive guides here are mostly tied to shops, and shops — naturally focused on maximising revenue — tend to pressure their guides to keep dives as short as possible to maximise client turnover, there is an inherent conflict with Lin Music's vision of running photography-focused dive trips (Editor's note: a standard tank lasts around 45 minutes, but a photography dive can run up to 90 minutes). Her goal is to build her own reputation from the ground up, drawing inspiration from the specialist sharp-eyed dive guides she has encountered abroad, and to offer one-on-one photography guiding services — a clearly differentiated alternative to the group dive trips run by conventional shops.

Beyond personal achievement, Lin Music also wants to give something back to Taiwan's ocean. When foreign professional underwater photographers or dive groups reach out hoping she can guide them, she says yes whenever her schedule allows — and charges only enough to cover her transport and diving costs, because she firmly believes that the more people who dive in Taiwan's waters, the greater the chance that their cameras will show the world the beauty of this ocean.

The road Lin Music has walked to become a dive instructor has been harder than most. Beyond the financial strain, her refusal to back down has inevitably ruffled some feathers along the way, making an already rocky path even more so. But her message to young people still standing at life's crossroads is this: try opening your heart and experiencing something completely different. You never know whether the next field you step into might just be the one that sets your passion alight — just as diving did for Lin Music.

Related links:

• Lin Music's Facebook
• Music Lin 林音樂 — I Am a Dive Instructor
• What Does It Really Mean to Be a Dive Guide? We've All Had It Wrong