How Blue Wave is bringing Santa Elena to the sea

When 11-year-old Bianca Pozo first came to the sea, she regarded it with a good deal of respect and no small amount of fear. Growing up along the coast of Santa Elena in Ecuador, Bianca always had the ocean at her doorstep - but it was still an unfamiliar place that didn’t feel like hers. Then she joined Blue Wave's open water school in Ayangue, where she learnt swimming, technique, discipline, the camaraderie of training, and what steady commitment looks like week after week. It’s added up, her mother Yuli says, to a girl who now not only loves the ocean, but has also found a new sense of self-confidence.

Bianca's wariness isn't unusual along this stretch of coastline - Bea Almonacil, oceanographer and the founder of Blue Wave, shared with us that plenty of people grow up alongside the water in Santa Elena but never learn to swim.

“This is the first issue we have to address,” Bea says, “if we want to encourage people to love and protect the ocean.”

Closing that gap is part of why Blue Wave was started.

An idea that became a family

The club was founded in 2018, with a handful of local friends coming together. It has since grown into something its members describe less as a club and more as a family - an ocean family, bound together by the belief that the surest way to protect the sea is to help people experience it.

Blue Wave does that through ocean connection workshops, educational activities and sport. Threaded through all of it is a promise about access - that from childhood, with full safety measures in place and without any need to already know how to swim, anyone can come to discover the marine life around them. The aim is for people to arrive at the sea through respect and admiration, rather than ignorance and fear.

At the open water school in Ayangue, children and teenagers train as athletes and, along the way, come to know the ocean differently.

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“It's been deeply rewarding working with the children. I feel like I'm living out one of my dreams. Of course, it’s challenging - every training session brings a new challenge, but I feel motivated.  The school is my new ocean family, and supporting the children and teenagers through their processes and their development as athletes makes me very happy,” says Manuel Rodríguez, an instructor at Blue Wave’s open water school in Ayangue.

The magic of Santa Elena

Most of Blue Wave's work unfolds inside two of Santa Elena's marine protected areas.

The first, the Puntilla de Santa Elena Reserve, occupies the most prominent headland in the country, out in Salinas Canton, and has been protected since 2008.

It packs a surprising range of ecosystems into one point of land: dry forest with its own resident owls, a beach where sea turtles nest, and a colony of sea lions that has held the same stretch of coast for more than ten years. It's also one of the finest places in Ecuador to watch whales from dry land, which is part of why it draws so many visitors in Salinas. In 2026, Blue Wave ran ocean connection workshops there with the reserve's park rangers.

The second, the El Pelado Marine Reserve, protected since 2012, is where the club heads out onto the water. Boats leave the community of Ayangue for a rocky reef thick with life - sea urchins, starfish, corals of several kinds, reef fish, sea turtles, eagle rays.

There's a sunken Christ statue resting at nine or ten metres and a shipwreck deeper still at seventeen or eighteen, both of which pull divers below; up on the island, seabirds and sea lions take the sun. It's here that Blue Wave brings its groups to snorkel and practice freediving, and, in season, to watch whales pass by boat.

Blue Wave and OCEAN FOR ALL Alliance (OFAA)

The OCEAN FOR ALL Alliance is a network more than a programme - organisations across borders, each working to bring their own community closer to the sea. What holds it together is a single idea: that the ocean, and everything there is to know and feel about belonging to it, should be within reach of everyone.

Blue Wave is a group looking after its own coast from the inside, teaching its own neighbours to know the water they live beside. When we asked Blue Wave what the alliance has come to mean to them, their answer was unfussy and warm: “A big blue family - somewhere to connect, to share, and to figure out together how to draw more people toward the ocean!”

Follow their work

You can follow Blue Wave on Instagram at @bluewave.ec and on LinkedIn. We're proud to have them in the OCEAN FOR ALL Alliance.

OCEAN FOR ALL Alliance is part of the I AM WATER Foundation and is proudly funded by the Oceans Finance Company.