Introducing Catherine Edsell, TedX speaker, Adventurer, Conservationist and Global Expedition Leader. Her list of accolades and exotic trips are too long to fully list here, needless to say, Catherine Adventures.

I met Catherine at the first Ocean Advocate conference in Bristol in Feb of 2025 run by herself and Bex Band.

Catherine compered the event and gave one of the first talks I attended. I was impressed and inspired by her life of travel and ocean advocacy which started during university when she went to Greece to work with the Greek Society for the protection of Sea Turtles. After university and a successful career in the performing arts, she set off on another adventure, this time to Costa Rica where she worked as a research assistant with LAST (Latin American Sea Turtles). This led to a 5 year stint of saying YES to every opportunity, landing her a full time post with Operation Wallacea, and additional expeditions with Trekforce and Raleigh International.

After Catherine met her partner, she moved back to the UK and settled down with her two children. She began to feel the familiar feeling of wanderlust and wanted to return to her previous life. So she took her children on her adventures, raising them on far flung beaches whilst she continued her work in ocean conservation.

The reason I love Catherines story so much is that my 20s looked quite different. I was completely career focussed in the traditional way I didn’t travel as much as I had wanted to, but I had a strong desire to see the world. Catherine’s talk was so inspiring, and I knew I wanted to share her story about how you can also get involved with ocean advocacy whilst seeing the world.

We are talking at 9.30 on a Monday morning;

It’s a sunny day and I’m in my office slash studio at the front of the house… sun light is streaming through the café style curtains in the bay window. My end is a little chaotic as we’re having some trees cut back in the garden, but Catherine is a cool, calm presence, the conversation flows easily.

Before we even get into what Catherine does, I wanted to understand what drove her to carve out this type of life for herself and her family.

“It comes it comes from the heart. I didn't do anything from a logical brain. I'm not a businesswoman at all.”

Catherine explains; She grew up in London, one of five siblings and never travelled. It wasn’t until she went to university that the world expanded for her, and how this led to her taking her first trip to Costa Rica, where she worked with leatherback turtles on the beaches there. This is the story that captivated me at the Ocean Advocate summit in Bristol. 25 years ago, or so, the world was not as connected, as it is today with smart phones and instant access to a universe of information. The people of Costa Rica were living in isolation and didn’t have the wider understanding of the issues of conservation.

It seems to have been this very first trip that first lit a spark of inspiration in Catherine. A quiet kind of moment where she experiences a “this is interesting” feeling. I wonder if this feeling is one we get when we move closer to our path. A small “oh?’ moment, where the world seems to shift just a little on its axis, where things make just a little more sense. Almost the feeling I got from having this conversation. a small “oh?”... this is it.

“I love the simplicity of life when it's not complicated.” Catherine expands that she enjoys living without lots of possessions and being digitally free.

“I mean, I strive to do that more and more often, that's why a lot of my expeditions now are digital free, phone free, just because that's a way of life that I actually really enjoyed, being completely immersed in something, when there are no distractions. You're not trying to be anything else other than what you're doing right there in that moment.”

Full presence is a beautiful gift, and one nature is expert at delivering. You cannot take a swim in the sea and be simultaneously connected to your phone. You must switch it off and become fully immersed.

Catherine didn’t study marine biology or conservation, but was a performing arts student, which might explain her ability to delivery such a compelling talk. She shares that she had a year or so of saying yes to every opportunity that came her way.

“That's when I got involved in the Costa Rican Sea Turtle protection. Then I ended up sailing from Panama to the Us, and from there to India. I was working with a humanitarian relief organisation out there. After a perilous accident in the Himalaya I returned home briefly and then got the job with Operation Wallacea, as Forest Operations Manager in a remote jungle in South East Sulawesi, Indonesia where I met my husband.

But for 5 years, , after saying I'd be only going for a year, I didn’t actually go home. So, this whole five years, I was literally going from one job to another. But because of the contacts I'd made and the relationships I'd made and the type of work I was getting into, they were getting more and more involved. And they were quite long projects as well, because I had the time, I could do an expedition for five months, for example. When I had kids, I couldn't do that anymore.”

“So, to be a field scientist, to be a citizen scientist, you don't necessarily need to be a scientist. You just need to be able to follow instructions to be curious and don't mind getting your hands dirty.”

“There were scientists who were conducting research, but they needed volunteers to come and help them collect the data. They were covering everything from studying bats to birds to insects, snakes and amphibians, small mammals, trees, soil, you name it, everything was being studied. So, they needed lots of people to help. And so the way that this operation worked was that students who were doing something related to biology or ecology or zoology, came out for a period of weeks to months in their summer holidays and worked with the scientists.

My job was to coordinate them and the scientists. So, I trained them up in jungle training, getting them used to living in the jungle so they weren't complaining all the time about sleeping in really uncomfortable hammocks and having to make fires and cook their own food and boil all their water, to then actually being useful so that they could help the scientists and collect the data. So, I got involved with lots and lots of different projects, and that seemed the perfect relationship to me, ordinary people coming out to help scientists.

Catherine explains that whilst she was saying yes to all the opportunities that came her way, she became knowledgeable and skilled in many areas of citizen science. She could analyse coral polyps through a microscope, so much so that it was suggested she write a paper.

Following her yes’s set her on her path to become her truest self, and in the process she became highly employable in her exact area of interest. Is this the secret to intuitive business building? In fact, it flies a little in the face of what were taught at school. To get the degree in the right subject to then be able to get the job and start from the bottom up. Actually, how about saying yes to the next opportunity that comes your way and see where you go.

I’m more than a little obsessed.

Five years or so after her adventuring began in earnest, Catherine’s world changed when she found out she was pregnant and moved back to the UK. Catherine’s Ted talk on how this drove her to set up The Matriarch Adventure following the isolation she felt, moved me to tears.

“That's when my world changed quite rapidly into something I didn't really want. I wasn't entirely sure. I mean, I love my family, and I love my wider family. I have a very supportive family, but I suddenly felt very isolated. When you're living in an expedition world, you're living with people all the time. People come and go, but the hub is the same. You're living very simply.”

I sense that there is a vulnerability of judgement here, the same any woman has when she is speaking her truth about her wild desires that seem to conflict with societal norms of child rearing. I have heard many women speak about this in the same way, “I love my family, but I also love to travel/party/work/train.” For women there is a societal and cultural expectation to be mothers first, in a way that men do not experience.

I love my children, but I need my space, my time. Something that is all about me.

What I can see in Catherine’s words is actually a passion or a yearning for the village. In the West, we live in family units which can feel extremely lonely. We all need support and I am not always sure that the family unit provides the best support for each other. We need our sisters and our mothers for support. The children need friends and a gaggle of kids are somehow easier than just one or two siblings. The brothers and uncles to chase and play with the kids when the parents are tired. Since my own children I too have yearned for the village.

In Catherine’s story she decided that she needed to get back into expeditions. She retrained as a dive master and completed a coral reef ecology training course and got into coral conservation. She subsequently became a coral reef ecology trainer.

It seems that Catherine saw in others what she felt herself and wanted to create female only expeditions.

Catherine runs The Matriarch Adventure in Namibia tracking matriarchal groups of elephants.

“I really wanted to take women away somewhere quite extreme, somewhere you can get to relatively quickly, but when you're there, you feel like you've gone a million miles away. Namibia came back into my mind because I’d spent three months walking down the ephemeral river valleys there back in 2002. That was really entrenched in my own soul. And I thought, yeah, this is a really good place.

And I wanted to do it just for women because I I've led lots of mixed expeditions for men and women, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but there didn't seem at that time to be just expeditions for women. It was important for me to carve that out and create that sort of a space.”

At the Ocean Advocate summit, Catherine spoke about these expeditions and talked about a woman who attended who had never even worn flat shoes in her life, let alone taken on a huge wild adventure.

I wonder if these retreats give women permission to be adventurous, maybe for the first time in their lives. Once adventure and risk has been experienced it sticks in your psyche and becomes part of you. You get to push into new corners of confidence and survival. It becomes a part of your own perception of yourself. You involve it in the story of who you are and create new neural pathways. Your soul can say “I am an adventurer”.

The Matriarch Adventure isn’t the only adventure Catherine has run for woman. There’s an experience doing coral reef conservation in Madagascar, the Whale Shark Retreat in Tanzania, there’s one in Mongolia and one in the Peruvian Amazon.

I had the hugest smile on my face during our conversation. There was so much will and adventure and hope and excitement in Catherine’s story. And whilst we didn’t specifically speak about sustainability, it is the quiet underpinning of the way she approaches her life. The driving force behind Vesta Hearth and Home is the fire, the keeping of the flame, the preservation of a spark inside us. It’s clear that Catherine contains a fire and spark and lives her life from the heart. Connection to self is connection to nature and we cannot help but preserve what we identify with. I wonder if Catherine feels her space within nature strongly as she certainly seems to embody nature’s characteristics. Like water in constant flow, rushing over and around obstacles, forging new rivers. Full of life force and constant energy.

She certainly is someone who gives me a lot of faith and hope and excitement.

“I think being able to just say yes to things, being able to follow your dreams and not letting other people put you down is important. I mean, I've never been much for listening to what other people say about me. Like I said, I'm very lucky. I've got a very supportive family. My mum and dad were always completely behind whatever I did. They never criticized me.”

‘A lot of what you create in your life is thought propelled. If you can get away from trying to overthink things and trying to undermine yourself and just really going with, okay, what do I actually really need or want to do, and how can I make it happen? Being in that sort of positive, quick mindset where you don't let the things get in the way too much is very freeing. I think being resourceful, looking at what your assets are, looking at who your friends are, looking at who your family is, and what how people can support you, and how you can support other people is key, you know, where's that give and take?

I think anything that I've done, I've done because I've just decided to do it.

It’s trying to maintain that idea of freedom for me and what does that look like? How can I be the most free, and do the things that I most need to do?’

“How can I be the most free.” It’s a driving force for me too. This urge to stay out of 9 – 5. To build something independent of patriarchal and capitalist structures. To keep my own time. How many other change makers out there are driven by this need for freedom? Is this because capitalism in the main part is so at odds with preservation of nature? So at odds with natural living. That 9-5 working day feeds the money making machine, but does it feed our souls? Can we find a space around this working pattern to dream new things into existence for ourselves, to cultivate the energy to make things happen and try new soul enriching experiences? To find parts of ourselves we didn’t know existed. For Catherine.. she is looking around corners, creating some life for herself and others that didn’t exist before.

I asked Catherine what her opinions were of a future world view.

“I think you can only do what you can do… and every little small thing you do yourself is making a difference. If you get overwhelmed by the enormity of the problems in conservation, it can actually move you to a standstill.

You have to look at just the little things. Everybody who has a will and does something positive is going to make a difference. And it is that collectively that's going to change things because you can't solve all the problems, you just can't deal with all the politics out there at the moment it's just impossible. So, you actually just have to DO.

And whatever you do, you have to make sure that it's a good and positive and wholesome thing. And then that in itself helps reset the balance. “

Effectively, one step at a time, one small act at a time has the power to change the world. There is no huge thing to do. Just a series of small ones.

And my final question to Catherine was what is your blueprint.

“Ultimately, it's love. You know? Like, on a very basic level, it's love of others, love of yourself, love of nature, love of the world and your family.”

It’s clear that there isn’t a cerebral strategy in place. Catherine moves. She takes action. And it’s not always necessarily about anything outside of herself. She seems to truly embody her internal work and is driven by love.

From our conversation I can see that Catherine’s success has been derived from her ability to flow like water from one opportunity to the next. She has trained her mind carefully. She looks for solutions and ways through constantly. She focusses on the next thing and doing her bit.

As we say our goodbyes and hang up, I sit for a while with my precious recording. That small “Oh” feeling. Thinking, what if sharing Catherine’s story encourages just one person to book a trip. To take their place in conservation. To change the trajectory of their life. Nothing Catherine has spoken about is unreachable for any of us. And what of our own unique experiences and skills that we have developed through our lifetime? How can these contribute to change? What is the dream inside you that will not sleep? What does your heart whisper to you when you walk through the wild woods or along windswept beaches? I hope that Catherine inspires you to take action. Just one small step. Just one small area. Start today. Never give up.

You can find out more about Catherine on www.cathadventure.com.

Check out her upcoming expeditions here.

Definitely watch her TedX talk here.

Get yourself to the next Ocean Advocate Summit.

Catherine Edsell : Love as a Driving Force for Adventure and Citizen Science.