Stevie Boyle

To share a love for adventure in the natural world and ensure the survival of our last remaining wild places.

We’ve been scrambling ridges, riding waves and getting close to the wild for years. We love it and decided to give it a name: Ocean Vertical.

An Adventure company based in Scotland on the rugged coast of East Lothian, 25 miles east of Edinburgh, we are a passionate team of adventurers specializing in paddle boarding, surfing, coasteering, climbing and mountaineering locally and across Scotland.

Over the past years we’ve spent time on boards in the ocean, exploring, climbing, and mountaineering. These are the places we love and share a calling to. We’ve spent hours in the ocean and on the cliff face and snowfields sharing stories, beliefs and concerns. We recognize with clarity that a love for our oceans and beautiful wild places demands active participation in the fight to save them. Care and respect for the natural environment is the only future and it’s the starting point for all our decisions and actions. This is born out of need as well as belief and passion; if we lose our local environments, wildlife, and human cultures, we will have no future in the short-term, much less the long-term.

Start with the simplest and most impactful – a reusable water bottle. Take a reusable coffee cup with you when you’re out and about – did you know disposable coffee cups are lined with plastic and aren’t recyclable?

I’ve now been working in Adventure Education for over 20 years. A qualified instructor, coach and guide in multiple disciplines, I’m in the Ocean or in the Mountains most of my working days.

The outdoors has always been a part of who I am. I was fascinated by ecology from a very young age (even if I didn’t understand the term until I was an adult). For years I’ve heard the message that the planet is being destroyed and humanity had to do something about it. I had no idea what more I could personally do, I was already working outdoors and in outdoor education and thought that that would be enough. I needed to do more, but what?

In the end it was the following quote from Aldo Leopold that changed the way I work

“we can only be ethical in relation to something we can see, understand, feel, love or otherwise have faith in” 

It made me realize that I could do more about the choices I made and in the way that I worked. I needed to help people understand and form a relationship with their environment. Only by fostering a deeper connection with these wild places could people find the desire to protect and preserve them. These interactions with wildlife and the landscape have a profound effect on us! it’s hugely beneficial to both our physical and our mental health. 

I also started to understand that the equipment I chose to use had an environmental and social impact elsewhere in the world. I started looking for companies that made good ethical equipment and also equipment with environmentally positive credentials. Having these types of conversations and having a way to contribute locally give everyone opportunity to help and makes people realise that they can make real positive contributions to saving the planet. 

Real individual efforts force the change needed. We need the planet more than it needs us.