Shane Wilson (Class of 2005) Wild Sea Adventures
Posted on September 30, 2025
Shane Wilson (2005) grew up on a cattle farm in Margate, but for as long as he can remember he wanted to be in the water like his commercial abalone diver dad, Tony. Shane learned to dive at eight, and to freedive around Blackmans Bay’s cliffs at 12 – the same time he learned to spearfish and fillet his catch on the rocks. “Anything you spear, you eat,” he explains. “You only take what you need.” At 18, Shane was a commercial diver, and by 25, running his first abalone mothership, the Tacoma, as the youngest skipper in the fleet.
Now, living in Woodbridge with his fitness studios-operator wife Hannah MacDonald, Shane is also a mooring and maintenance contractor, owns vessels contracted to aquaculture, and takes tourists onto the ocean for nature-watching and freshly caught seafood as founder of Tasmanian Wild Seafood Adventures. He still dives for abalone but also for pleasure, making sure he freedives somewhere extraordinary in the world each year. “I love being underwater,” says Shane, who says his “special” spot is the secluded south-west coast of Tasmania. “The things I’ve seen, like rocks four times the size of a car, turned upside down,” he marvels. “That’s the sheer power of the ocean.”
