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Dive for Earth 2008 - Mermaids Dive Pattaya Thailand

Launched in the United States on 22 April 1970 , Earth Day has been raising environmental awareness on a global scale. Since the 30th anniversary of Earth Day in 2000, Project AWARE has helped divers put aquatic issues on the Earth Day map.

For the past 8 years the Coral Reef Alliance in association with Project AWARE have promoted and coordinated “Dive In” activities to coincide with this global environmental awareness day. 2007 was the last year that the Coral Reef Alliance were involved but, Project AWARE, as part of their mission to promote marine conservation, and in particular highlight the problems faced by the underwater environment are continuing to promote Dive for Earth activities.

Mermaids have been a Project Aware Dive Centre for quite a period already.

Due to the Songkran holiday, a great Dive master course and unfavourable conditions, Mermaids’ Dive for Earth was carried out at Koh Keung Badaan on the 17^th of April this year. This site has been the target of previous Mermaids clean-ups, the last one being November 2007. This is often the site for the annual Mermaids treasure hunt also. The bay area is often frequented by local fishing boats, a result of which is discarded nets and lines, amongst other debris, which get caught up on the coral and pose a potential threat to the marine life.

In total there were 21 participants who were divided into 6 teams. After the dive brief each team set off on their mission to collect as much rubbish as possible, armed with mesh bags and slates to record what they found. Below is an account of the day from Rik Reed, one of our newer dive interns who was taking part in his first clean-up event.

“Where do I start? We started our day as normal at the dive centre to load up all our normal dive gear plus additional equipment required for the cleanup. I am new to diving and never gave preparation a second thought. We arrived at our cleanup/dive site, got geared up into our teams & jumped straight in armed with mesh bags, lift bags, rope, slates, cameras, knives and scissors.

Within thirty seconds of starting our dive I was picking up glass bottles, jars and tin cans. As the dive progressed I became aware of the devastation rubbish can have on aquatic life. There are some things we could not pick up like a bottle that was a new home to an octopus. There was all manner of rubbish, the team I was in picked up three abandoned fish traps. We had to cut away lots of electrical cable from some beautiful coral. It amazed me some of the stuff that is just thrown over board without a second thought of the impact of such actions."

Although we collected a lot of debris from the site, in particular bottles and fishing materials, there was far less than expected and on previous clean-ups given the number of months since we lasted carried out a clean-up on this island and how many fishing boats have been there in that time. Some things had to be left where they were because they were either providing homes for certain marine creatures or had too much growth on them and are so forming new marine habitats.

As always, a huge thank you to everyone who took part, and hope to see some if not all of you on the next one. Pictures below open in a new window - pop up.