Patong beach and underwater clean up with Scuba Cat diving and Go Eco Phuket
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.
Scubacat Community