Today, the 8th of June is a global celebration of our oceans around the world. Since 1992 this day has been devoted to the sea and its marine life. It was an unofficial event in the beginning, but in 2008 the United Nation recognised it as an official day for the ocean.
World Ocean Day gives us a good opportunity to take personal and community action to help out the ocean and honour what it give us.
Here, at at Evolution, in Malapascua, we participated in an underwater clean-up, as did many other dive shops. Five staff and Matt, a fun diver, went to a site we expected needed a clean up. After an hour’s dive, more then 14kg of waste was gathered from a small area under water. After the dive we looked through all the trash we collected to see what the main objects were. The diversity fi the items found was surprising; from fishing lines to clothes to shoes and even a stove. Of course , we also found the sadly expected coffee packets, diapers and lots of plastic. With this knowledge, we hope that over time we can prevent such items from entering the ocean, at the source.
Evolution owners Matt and David also took the opportunity to take their kids out for a dive to celebrate World Ocean Day. Everyone enjoyed the lovely corals and fish at the shallow Coral Garden site, and the girls even picked up some garbage themselves. Plus we were able to remove a few Crown of Thorns starfish from eating the coral.
We are very happy to help the ocean the best we can on this day, but we will, as always, keep picking up trash as we go on with our normal dives.
How did you show your love for the ocean today?
