Ava Thompson, 25

Hi! I’m Ava, I’m twenty-five, and I’m a marine biologist, which means I get paid to stare at the ocean and occasionally get splashed by things with tentacles. I work as a research assistant at UBC, and most days you’ll find me either in a lab in the Earth Sciences building or out on a boat in Howe Sound, pretending I’m not cold.

I grew up in Victoria, on Vancouver Island, in a house about a ten-minute walk from the water. My dad is a ferry captain with BC Ferries, and my mom is a librarian, so I basically inherited a love of the sea from one parent and a love of quietly reading about it from the other. Some of my earliest memories are of standing on the deck of my dad’s ferry, watching the Gulf Islands slide past, and asking him approximately four thousand questions about whales. He never once told me to stop asking. I have a younger brother, Sam, who went the sensible route and became a software developer, and he still sends me memes about fish whenever I post fieldwork photos, which is constantly.

I did my undergrad in marine biology at UVic and then came to UBC for my master’s, studying the recovery of glass sponge reefs in Howe Sound, which are these ancient, fragile, absolutely mind-blowing underwater structures that most people have never heard of. I could talk about sponges for an hour, and honestly I have, to the great regret of several dinner parties. But here’s the thing, once you’ve seen footage of a reef that’s nine thousand years old, glowing on a monitor in a dark lab at 2am, regular small talk just feels a bit flat.

Fieldwork is my favorite part of the job. We go out on a small research vessel a few times a month, and there’s nothing like that moment when the hydrophone picks up orca calls and the whole boat goes silent. Last summer we had a humpback surface maybe thirty meters off the bow, close enough that I could smell its breath, which sounds gross and was actually magical. I also volunteer with the Vancouver Aquarium’s marine mammal rescue program, helping with seal pup releases at the beach, and I cried the first time I watched a rehabilitated pup swim off. The staff pretended not to notice.

When I’m not working, I’m on or near the water anyway. I kayak out of Deep Cove at least twice a month, usually at sunrise when the mist is still on the water and the seals follow the kayak out of pure curiosity. I’ve done the Broken Group Islands trip twice, camping on tiny islands and falling asleep to the sound of waves, and it remains the most peaceful I’ve ever felt. And Tofino, oh, Tofino. I try to get out to the west coast of the island three or four times a year, for storm watching in the winter and surfing, badly, in the summer. There’s a little taco stand in Tofino that I dream about. You know the one.

I’m also a big reader, mostly natural history and the occasional very nerdy science memoir, and I do beach cleanups with a group from Kits Beach whenever I can. I live in a basement suite in Kitsilano with approximately four hundred houseplants and one very judgmental cat named Kelp. My friends say I’m the calm one in the group, the person who stays steady in a crisis, which I think comes from spending so much time watching tides. Everything comes back, eventually.

What I’m looking for: someone curious and kind, who gets excited about the world instead of bored by it. You don’t need to know anything about marine biology, but you do need to be the kind of person who’ll stand on a beach at sunset and actually look at it, you know? I want a partner for slow mornings, for road trips up the Sea to Sky with the windows down, for trying that weird restaurant in Steveston without checking the reviews first. Someone who’ll kayak beside me in the fog and not complain about the cold, or at least complain in a funny way. I’m gentle, I’m loyal, and I will absolutely make you watch whale documentaries. Consider yourself warned, lovingly.