Throughout the winter months, a lot of divers choose to stay out of the cool waters of the UK and instead spend their time planning for holidays and adventures for the warmer months. However, a small group of students at Ocean Turtle Diving decided that they wanted to use one of these cooler days to learn about the marine environment and start to learn how they can begin to make a difference to the world around us.

The students, guided by Bettie one of the instructors were set the task of spending the entire day in the classroom to achieve both their Coral Reef Conservation Specialty and their Project AWARE specialty. Bettie’s task was to try and make the day interesting, fun and somewhat entertaining! A tall order when learning about the plight of our oceans.

As a group, the students were brilliant and engaging, throughout every topic, even the more intense subject areas, they were interested and engaging and came out with some really great questions and also wisdom that they had all gained from their personal research into these subject areas prior to the day.

The teaching was constructed using the standard suite of training materials but also the students were shown a range of videos that whilst fun and whimsical (like the coral song) were educational and thought provoking. They were also encouraged on certain topics to work as a group to research the facts and figures for these and the information that they were able to find and the presentations of these were completely brilliant!

Once the day of teaching had been completed, we were joined by a large group of other divers and people with an interest in marine conservation to watch the film A Plastic Ocean. At the end of the showing it was clear to see that everyone that had viewed the film had been deeply affected by its contents and were committed to making changes within their own lives to try and make a difference and improve the world around them.

At Ocean Turtle, we are committed to improving our work with regards to conservation by planning several beach and underwater clean ups through the warmer months and changing our in store policy around the use of plastic bottles and recycling. We know that we can’t fix the problem on our own, but if everyone makes just one or two small changes, we can make a real difference.