September 15, 2019

The event I was looking forward to since a few months, WORLD CLEANING UP DAY and at the same time the start of PADI’s AWARE week

I was asked to organize an activity for that date a few days before and I was very keen on doing so.  

I knew it wasn’t going to be hard to find people that would participate and printed out a little information bulletin the day before.  As I was talking to people about it, I was happy to see their reactions and enthusiasm. Getting some meshbags was easy peasy Japanese and on the morning of the 15th I was very satisfied to see that a whole schoolclass was doing a beachcleanup. This was a great way to start the active part of the day.

During the day we provided the fundivers with meshbags and at 4pm so they could cleanup while diving and we joined in the front with the divers.

As there is an IDC going on at this moment here at TwoFish Divers Amed, I had some help of the course director and of course the instructor candidates were happy to get in the ocean after several days of classroom and poolsessions. Poor them. At least I get to go in the ocean as a Divemaster Trainee 🙂 We provided each buddyteam with a meshbag and of we went.

The goal was to clean our housereef and the depthlimit was set to 18 meters. I buddied up with Rianne, a divemaster who is working for a Dutch Dive Touroperator.  

The rubbish was easy to spot and consisted actually mostly of Balinese ritual artifacts. Off Course there were som plastic packagings and some nylon bags (the type of 25 kilos rice bags)  Before picking up whatsoever, we had to check for any marine life living in or around it.

And so it went…  During the dive we saw some critters as well and by the time we surfaced, everybody was already out of the water. Oops, we passed our estimated divetime and missed the groupfoto but I was very happy to see 6 big bags of rubbish waiting to be collected.  

Thank you everybody for giving a hand with it, including my girlfriend who motivated some local children to clean up the beach and the surroundings of the divecenter in Amed.

Hopefully, to be continued/repeated…

Thank you Two Fish Amed and Dennis Vandermeersch for the photos underwater.