After last month’s great Project Aware Clean up event we decided to initiate an event of a different kind.“Take only pictures – leave only bubbles” is an often-quoted phrase in diving, emphasising the importance of not taking any souvenirs from the ocean and to keep it clean by not leaving any debris. While we at Coral Grand Divers follow this approach every day, we thought it was time to take it a step further: give something back.

There are more than 50 dive schools on Koh Tao and every one of them offers daily trips to the beautiful dive sites on Koh Tao. Luckily, it is prohibited to throw anchors on our coral reefs and all dive sites have mooring lines installed for the boats to use. Their maintenance is the responsibility of the whole Koh Tao diving community but unfortunately the importance of the mooring lines is often ignored.

With the help of Chad Scott from Save Koh Tao we organised a mooring line workshop for our staff and all customers that wanted to participate. The day started off with an extremely informative presentation by Chad, talking about the different laws and rules that are in place to protect the fragile marine ecosystem around Koh Tao. Then all participants were introduced to the basics of installing a mooring line: choosing the best location, which ropes to use and of course how to tie them properly with the correct knots. The theory was then set in practice with some knot-tying exercises on the beach.

After this very informative morning everyone was really excited to make use of the newly gained knowledge and head out to replace a missing mooring line on one of our most popular dive sites: the HTMS Sattakut Wreck.

Everyone was appointed to a team with a different role. One team was assigned to tie the rope onto the already existing concrete block near the HTMS Sattakut while another team was responsible to tie a prepared buoy onto the other end of the mooring line at the surface. A third team has been sent off to have a look at the other buoy lines to determine if they could be moved to a more suitable location. We succeeded to set up the whole buoy line and were more than happy to see that boats already started to use it. 

The second dive side we planned to attach a mooring line was Red Rock which needed a second line for boats to attach to. Once again we assigned teams to the different jobs, however we were not able to find a suitable location at the bottom to attach the line to without damaging any aquatic live so we decided to abort the dive.

All in all this day has been a great success to us here at Coral Grand Divers, for the local dive community and Project Aware as 23 people now are able to support us by maintaining old and setting up new buoy lines around Koh Tao.

Another great Project Aware Day at Coral Grand Divers and we are looking forward to have another event at the beginning of May. Join us and become a part of our Coral Grand family!