About
I have surfed, sailed, dived, and fished across several coastlines, and at one point or another made a home on three of them, because I could not bear to be far from any of them for long.
I am a writer and a visual designer. I founded a studio called Monday Friday where I work as a brand stylist and identity architect, building the visual and verbal worlds of brands I believe in, from a small island home in Mauritius that faces the western reef. The work pays for the slow work, for the time it takes to sit with a place properly and to write it all down. Most of what I love is on the other side of an inbox.
The sea places I keep returning to are the mostly unknown ones, like the reefs in Mauritius that I check most mornings, the magnificent Cornish coastline I camped along and surfed. Sandbars that build themselves overnight in lagoons no one visits. Saint Brandon, four hundred and seventy kilometres from anywhere, where I spent three weeks in 2023 trying to understand a place that has, against the odds, remained largely intact. The places I write about here are the ones that have asked something of me. Firstly, to look more carefully, to come back, and secondly to bear witness to what is already being lost or what may yet be saved.
I am a qualified skipper, but not a marine biologist or a campaigner. I am a person who has spent a lot of time near water and has learned that paying attention is itself a form of care. Most of what is good in conservation begins with someone seeing something and doing what they can, in their capacity.
We Love The Sea is the public expression of that practice. My essays here are written slowly, illustrated with my own photographs, and supported, where the work calls for it by limited objects connected to specific journeys. The site funds nothing but its own existence. The work it points to such as the Saint Brandon Conservation Trust, the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation, Surfers Against Sewage, and others, is done by people far more qualified than me. I link to them generously and try not to get in their way.
A longer book is in writing.
Editorial & Commissioned Work
If you would like to be in touch — for editorial commissions, place writing, long-form journalism, or design and brand work — write to me at river@welovethesea.co
I am available to be sent to places. I take a small number of commissions a year, for editors, publications, and brands who want a particular kind of attention paid to a particular place. Travel writing in the conventional sense is not what I do. My work is written from inside a place rather than across the surface of it.
~River Nelson / 2026
Editorial & Commissioned Work
If you would like to be in touch — for editorial commissions, place writing, long-form journalism, or design and brand work — write to me at river@welovethesea.co
I am available to be sent to places. I take a small number of commissions a year, for editors, publications, and brands who want a particular kind of attention paid to a particular place. Travel writing in the conventional sense is not what I do. My work is written from inside a place rather than across the surface of it, paired with original research and field notes from the ground.
A note on this site
The pages here are observational, not authoritative. Where I have drawn on the scientific record and research, I have cited it. Where I have written from my own watching, I have said so. For the formal conservation work being done at Saint Brandon — and there is good work being done — please visit the Saint Brandon Conservation Trust.
We Love The Sea | Founded in 2023. Based on the small Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. A project by River Nelson
© We Love The Sea 2026 | rivernelson.co