The Diving Stunt on March 16th 2009
Being one of the two candidates from The Netherlands, you sure have to take some action to get the media attention focused on you. In the beginning the attention was all about The Best Job in the World.
Now, I thought, it’s time to show them WHO I AM.
I very much enjoy brainstorming with my friends for some “craziness with a cause” and the cause this time was me in urgent need to experience my first dive, EVER!
So I decided to be open about that and show the world that even in water of six degrees – and an air temperature not that much higher – I would be doing fine waving at the cameras outside of the diving tank, yeah sorry to disappoint but I wasn’t going to jump in a canal!

20,000 litres of water in a main square of Amsterdam is not any easy thing to organize but the Amsterdam City Council helped me get the idea afloat by giving an “exceptional permission”. Plus I had to make sure my votes weren’t going to sink so I got Vodafone to sponsor this event and they delivered a nice tent with some laptops so passers by where able to vote for me on islandreefjob.com. To cut a long story short, I arranged it all by myself and after all it went incredibly fast because the only thing I had to arrange and fill in were the “exceptional cause/ hurry up-papers” of the companies making this stunt possible.

My family came all the way from the south to see “what is she up to this time” as well as some cheering friends who were so kind to take photos and shoot “the action moment”
Most people take an underwater camera on their first dive, I didn’t need one since I had half of Holland’s media filming me. After a brief bit of instruction from the helpful guy from Scuba Center Amsterdam I took the plunge and tried to imagine it was the blue 25 ºC waters of the Great Barrier Reef and not some freezing brownish water under the grey skies of Amsterdam.

At the end I had a lovely day having my family for a sunny late lunch in Amsterdam and at night watching television seeing my funny looking, snorkeled face through the windows in blurry-looking tap water waving through the portal windows. The next few days, friends sent me articles about it, (I even made it on a Japanese news site!) so I could make a nice compilation of the media attention so far.

Lucky me Tourism Queensland was very charmed by this action and who knows what my next stunt might be…?

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