Reef Clean up 2012

Reef Clean up 2012Welcome to the big reef clean up of 2012. Six dive staff came from Khaolak Scuba Adventures to help Sign Scuba, Medsye, Wicked Diving and the Similan Marine Park staff clean up the reef and beaches.

Oops Dustin forgot his Khaolak Scuba Adventures T-shirt will he fit in my spare…….

….. just about J

The head of the marine park Mr Mana himself welcoming everyone to the event and giving us all reef cleaning t-shirts.

The man with the plan, Mr Olan explaining how we are all going to dive Island number one, we are so lucky to be invited to this project and to have such a rare opportunity to see this reef. Thank you Olan for inviting us onto you boat Zcubatech.

Island number one up close and personal, with fabulous rock formations Leanne thinks it looks like a loaf of bread so perhaps we’ll call this dive site “Leanne’s loaf”?

around the corner the dive site seems to welcome us with a smiley face

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It’s a big ocean, Leanne is going to help clean it up.

After the dive we go to the beach on Island one and clean up there. There is actually more trash on the beach (washed up by the tide) than we found on the dive site. Great job Renate!

The park staff have clearly done this before

and an added bonus we got to see the baby turtles, only a few day old and their protected nests.

On day two we checked out East of Eden on Island seven. The decision was taken to close this dive site last season with support from all the dive centres in Khao Lak. East of Eden’s beautiful hard corals and the famous coral “bommie” was very badly affected by the high sea temperatures at the end of the season 2010. Time to check out if it has recovered at all…… The Emperors are out hunting,

and there is a moray eel at the big table coral, is it the famous Emma? This moray looked a bit small but you never know!

Some parts of the coral reef look very healthy

But a lot of this reef is still in very poor shape and clearly needs more time to recover.

A massive thank you to all the organizers of this clean up event. We all feel very privileged to help out and donate our time and energy to a good cause that is so close to our hearts.