Every year, the 8th of June is World Ocean Day, when we all do a bit extra to give back to the ocean and the aquatic life living beneath the surface.
In Malapascua this year, 9 dive shops got together doing an underwater clean up. We therefore decided to share the sites out between us so not everyone shows up at the same area.
Today we went to Pipefish Bay. With 6 buddy teams we could very efficiently cover the whole dive site in one hour. After one hour all our volunteers came back and sorted out the trash. Today we collected 22 kg of it! The majority of the collection was, no surprise, plastic, rubber parts and loads of diapers.
In the afternoon when the tide was the lowest we then went for a land clean up. We cleaned the ally going inland towards Evolution, the beach in front of Evolution and the area just next to the resort. The area next to the resort is small fishing village and building area for boats, and therefore very prone to trash. In total on land we collected 39 kg of trash!
It was a great success, and we managed to collect a LOT of trash this year. With help from other dive shops on the island we managed to cover big and important areas of Malapascua, both underwater and on land.
As we owe our beautiful island cleanups more than once a year, we will continue to contribute to a clean ocean by doing cleanups as regularly as possible. or the past few years, our goal has been to do cleanups at least once a month – hopefully this will lead to clean dive sites around Malapascua and eventually we don’t have to do this at all.
Thanks to our amazing staff but also to our guests volunteers: Mike, Douglas, Carel, Theo, Ludvig and Terese.