Here at Joe’s Gone Diving in Bali we are passionate about
the health of our reefs and our oceans and we do what we can to help keep our
seas safe. In the rainy season large quantities of rubbish is often washed down
from the mountains into the sea where it accumulates into large floating masses
in our local bays and channels where many of our dive sites are located. While
it is upsetting that there is so much debris the advantage is that it tends to
collect in a few specific locations and so makes it easier to remove and
dispose of safely.
As a result we decided to organise a snorkel clean-up. As most
of the debris tends to float on the surface it made more sense to collect it snorkelling
than rather than diving. A snorkelling event also allows a wider variety of
people to actively participate, including non-divers and younger children, and
so raises awareness among a larger group.
Our first event was a trial run consisting mostly of the
staff at our dive centre. We had a lot of fun collecting floating rubbish and
enjoying the marine life at Sanur Channel, a lovely shallow little dive site
with a sandy bottom, small house reef and a disproportionately large amount of
fish that call it their home!
We were able to collect a large amount of debris, mostly
consisting of plastics such as carrier bags and food wrappers. Our buddy teams
had to return to the boat several times to empty their mesh bags!
We collected as much as we could find and on our return to
the shore decided to make the most of our time by doing a quick beach clean-up
to prevent the beach debris from being blown out or washed down into the sea.
We were able to collect and remove large quantities of rubbish from the beach,
including clothing, lighters, lots and lots of plastic carrier bags and the
occasional flip-flop. We found four flip-flops, two lefts and two rights but
unfortunately they were of different sizes so we were unable to make matching
pairs!
All in all our event was a success and we will be running it
again soon and making a regular occurrence of it. We plan to include divers as
well next time as there is a small amount of debris on the bottom of the site
as that is often entangled in the delicate corals and so is difficult to safely
remove on a single breath. Keep an eye on the Joe's Gone Diving Bali website for more information on our next snorkel clean-up and our other activities.
Many thanks to Project Aware for the many tools and
resources it provided to help make this snorkel clean up easy and efficient!
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