By Anushka Yadav, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Pointer Waterloo native Neha Acharya-Patel was just 15 when her father took her deep underwater for the first time at a dive park in Gulliver\u2019s Lake, near Hamilton. \u201cIt was disgusting and it was so cold\u2026someone had just thrown toilets and refrigerators into it,\u201d Neha tells The Pointer, laughing at the memory. \u201cIt was horrible. And then I didn’t dive again.\u201d That changed in 2013, when she moved to British Columbia to pursue an undergraduate degree in marine biology. There, she trained in scientific diving and fell in love with the deep, cold waters of the Pacific Northwest. \u201cThere was no going back,\u201d she says. Neha had found her calling and would go on to log more than a thousand scientific dives… <\/p>\n
By Anushka Yadav, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Pointer Waterloo native Neha Acharya-Patel was just 15 when her father took her deep underwater for the first time at a dive park in Gulliver\u2019s Lake, near Hamilton. \u201cIt was disgusting and it was so cold\u2026someone had just thrown toilets and refrigerators into it,\u201d Neha tells The Pointer, laughing at the memory. \u201cIt was horrible. And then I didn’t dive again.\u201d That changed in 2013, when she moved to British Columbia to pursue an undergraduate degree in marine biology. There, she trained in scientific diving and fell in love with the deep, cold waters of the Pacific Northwest. \u201cThere was no going back,\u201d she says. Neha had found her calling and would go on to log more than a thousand scientific dives... <\/p>\n