As part of Dive Academy’s strong commitment to the international Project Aware programme we teamed up with one of our local schools BSA (British School of Alicante) to do a beach clean up at San Gabriel beach near Alicante.

With around 30 students and staff taking part we headed off to the beach with bin bags, gloves and our trusty Mercedes van ‘Baby Blue’ to take away the rubbish. As an added incentive Dive Academy offered two prizes for students- 1) A Try Dive worth €60 for the student who collected the most rubbish and 2) A Dive Academy t-shirt for the most unusual object found?!

After 2 hours of hard slog we collected a combined amount of 32 bags of rubbish which we then split into reclycling and non recyclable bags before a photo and some well earned lunch. Some of the stranger objects we found were; a mattress, car bumber, teddy bear, trousers, a dead rat and a fur coat! But the winner of the most unusual object had to be Julia Lopez who trudged up the beach with a cash register! As all the students worked equally hard it was decided that the winner of the try dive was to be pulled out of a hat (which was also found on the beach!) back at school.

Everybody who took part did a fantastic job and hopefully came away with a better understanding of marine awareness. Well done!

http://www.diveacademy-santapola.com/beach-clean-up-feb-2012/