The 13th August 2013 was a very good and special day for Phuket’s divers. In fact, in honor of her Majesty Queen Sirikit’s 81st birthday, divers community and volunteers met to cleanup our reefs and beaches.

GO ECO PHUKET is a non-governmental organization recognized by the Thaï government, that takes place every year, this year in August. This year, more than eleven diving companies and 1500 divers and non divers were present to clean up and help to protect the oldest most productive ecosystems on earth. Moreover, a lot of volunteers came, included divers of other countries who were in holidays, Thai people and students and schoolchildren from educational establishments of the island. Everybody was ready to begin this cleaning day at 7:00 am under the sun at Chalong Pier for a small briefing, TV interview and thanks for all those involved in this action.
After that, every diving teams and beach cleaners went to the beautiful Racha Yai, Racha Noi or Coarl Island to begin their job…
Our Scuba Cat Team took about 1.5 hours to go to Racha Yai with MV Scuba Fun, and about 22 people on board, included 10 volunteers.

Our destination once we arrived were the Bay’s 2 and 4 for the day.

Scuba Cat were given the responsibility for putting down 2 new mooring lines at Bay 2, the owner Sarah Kench, has donated the use of 2 1000 tonne anchors for the lines to be attached to, this will enable more mooring opportunities for the dive and snorkel boats visiting the island. Once the equipment  was on the divers went for the dives to try to make the reef of Phuket one on the top diving destination in Thaïland and in the world !!

After approximately two fifty dives each and many efforts, Scuba Fun and his team have collected bottles, clothes, old dead fish for analyses, metalics and plastics debris, ropes, ans fishing nets.
To close the day on the way back, all dive boats stood in line to celebrate this good and productive day and take pictures before going back to the pier to sort and weigh all the collected debris from the day.

We would like to thank our sponsor for the day All About Scuba Diving, the crew and volunteers who donated their time to help in this underwater clean up.

Summary of the day : 4 356 kilos of debris collected in total !

GO ECO PHUKET, it’s doing what you like, while participating in the environmental protection !

On the beautiful SUNday of the 16th of December the Scuba Cat team had a great day with Go-Eco Phuket with a dive site cleanup at Paradise Reef.
“Scuba Diving for Cleaning” was in the sequence of events during the “Environmental Day”- the second day of Phuket Carnival at Patong 2012. Together with the beach cleanup by local inhabitants, rubbish-recycling was also competed by the school children, “Scuba Diving for Cleaning” involved scuba divers in Phuket.

On the morning of the event, 12 divers consisting of recently certified dive instructors from our last IDC, tour guides, fun divers from our previous trips and Quang- our marketing intern attended the kick-off on the beach.

There were also a total of 70 volunteer divers from Royal Thai Navy, Go-Eco Phuket, and other dive centers in Phuket.
There was a welcome speech and a chance to meet the other divers during photograph sessions before the start of the event at 9:30am.
The long tail boats arranged by the Thai government took us to our half day boat MV Scuba sport, which was waiting to take the group to the local house reef at Paradise beach.

Gary- our tour guide- briefly introduced the boat, the dive site and the program of the day which included the 2 underwater clean up dives.

Thank to our divers, we have collected more than 10kgs of fishing lines and fishing lures, lot of fish nets, many bottles and cans, plastic trashes, shoes, batteries and many wooden lantern frames which were probably released from Loi Krathong Festival few week ago.

We returned to the beach at 1PM where the closing ceremony for the event took place with music, dancing and magic acts. Everyone involved in the event received a Scuba Cat wristband from us, a lovely medal and an honoured certificate from the Thai government.

At the end of the day the collected rubbish was weighed and the divers collected a total of 250kgs of debris. Moreover, it was great to know that this was the first time Patong organized the beach and diving cleanup with a major involvement of government and entrepreneurs in the region. Congratulation to Thai nation for their timely awareness of the ocean protection and environmental educations for kids!!!
Scuba Cat felt honoured for participating in the event, as did our volunteers. Many of them shared that they had enjoyed the event with ScubaCat and would like to come back for future events we are arranging.

We would like to thank all volunteers for the willingness and kindness and look forward to see you at our brand-new “We Belong To The Sea” in February and April 2013.