The Dive Against Debris Team September 2014

International Clean Up Weekend 2014

The third weekend in September marks the annual global movement to Clean Up The World. It’s funny how living on a small island makes your world shrink and your love of the immediate surroundings grow. At B&J Diving Centre, our office is the South China Sea and our playgrounds are the reefs and wrecks around Tioman Island. We are passionate about our dive sites; we want to keep them clean and healthy for all the divers of future generations to come.

It often feels like a losing battle. The people who use our beautiful dive sites are sometimes not as environmentally likeminded. We constantly find fishing nets and line (Tioman is a Marine Park – fishing is supposed to be illegal), plastic bags, Styrofoam food containers, drinks bottles and cans in the water from inconsiderate fishermen, snorkelers and divers.

Our instructors, dive masters, students and customers are constantly on the lookout for debris that should not be on our reefs and in our oceans, and there is rarely a dive where we come up empty handed of some form of trash we found during our fifty minute stint under the waves.

We call for help every September during Project AWARE’s month of action, where divers hit the water all around the world to remove debris and report their findings.

On the 20th and 21st of September, B&J plus nearly 30 volunteers targeted four local dive sites that we knew were in need of help.

Sepoi Island is unfortunately a popular site for (illegal) fishing. A huge drift net has been smothering the reef at 15m for a few months. B&J, along with other local dive centres and authorities like Cintai Tioman, Reef Check Malaysia and Marine Parks have been visiting the site whenever the chance arose to try and accomplish the huge task of removing the net. On Saturday, our volunteers removed 5kg of net and 13kg of lead weight in just 50 minutes under water. A tricky task that required excellent buoyancy skills as the net was entangled around a great deal of staghorn coral. Thanks to the hard work or all the volunteers over the weekend and the last few weeks, the net is now completely removed.

Fishing net entangled in staghorn coral
Fishing drift net caught on the staghorn coral of Sepoi Island
Cutting the net away from the coral
Diver carefully cutting the net from the reef
Collecting the removed net
Buddies collecting the removed net
Fishing net before sorting
Fishing net before sorting
Sorted and reported - Debris from Sepoi
After sorting 5kg monofilament net 13kg lead weight
Weighing the net
Weighing the net

Our other sites Chebeh Island, Last Frontier and Soyak Island are pretty clean, but we still managed to pull a few bags of trash out including light bulbs, aluminium cans, plastic bags and bottles and fishing lures.

Not only did we have 5 teams of divers removing trash, we also had a specialist team injecting Crown of Thorns Starfish to help control this overpopulated species that is destroying our reefs. Chebeh Island has been the worst hit in recent months. 6 divers injected a staggering 63 COTs in an area no bigger than a football pitch!

Diver injecting coral destroying Crown Of Thorns Starfish
Diver injecting coral destroying Crown Of Thorns Starfish

Of course, the cleanup operation doesn’t stop underwater. During our surface intervals we landed on two beaches – Long Bay on Coral Island and Monkey Bay on Tioman. We were amazed by the amount of trash we bagged and the range of rubbish we came across. Everything from the usual plastic bags and food containers to broken legs from children’s toys, chemical filled jerry cans and tractor tyres! In all we removed over 20 bin bags of rubbish, with more time and a bigger boat we could have took more!

Instructor Riccardo and his big tyre
Instructor Riccardo and his big tyre

We will continue to battle this problem of debris in our oceans. Every day we Dive Against Debris and encourage others to do the same. With continued effort and actions of organisations like Project AWARE, everyone – not just divers – will change their perception of the ocean and learn to protect it.

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