What an amazing AWARE week! At Camel Dive Club & Hotel, we have been very busy divers indeed with many events that we designed to raise awareness, educate and tidy up the seas and oceans.

AWARE Week 2018 kicked off with the launch of our AWARE Photo Competition, which we created to inspire divers that were not necessarily with us in Sharm el Sheikh, to clean up their local coastline and send us the pictures. The lucky winner got to choose one of the following water related prizes: a 3 day/ 6 dives diving package, a PADI Project AWARE Specialty, a PADI Bubblemaker Course or a 3 day snorkel package with Camel Dive Club.

We also used the beginning of AWARE Week to launch our infomercial on our social media channels on how YOU CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE as well as offering PADI AWARE Specialties’ at a special discounted rate for the whole of AWARE week.

Tuesday saw our onsite Camel Bar hosting an Eco Talk on “Plastics Impact” by our resident marine biologist, Dr Chiara Gambini. Over eighty members of the local diving community in Sharm el Sheikh, as well as our own staff and guests attended the talk which was followed by an extremely tasty all you can eat Pasta Buffet. We were privileged to have PADI’s Egypt Regional Manager, Ahmed Sayed there too where he used the opportunity to tell the audience a little about Project AWARE and its origins as well as officially launch our AWARE Week raffle.

Our AWARE Week Raffle, which featured prizes kindly donated by PADI, Project AWARE, Maison de la Mer and Camel Bar, raised over Euro 80.00, which is all being donated to Project Aware.

Wednesday was Camel’s Dive Against Debris day, which saw divers from all Camel Dive Club’s boats join together and collect rubbish from the sea bed. We were slightly disheartened when we realized that we only collected 9 kg, but when you think that most of the debris was plastic and fishing line – 9kg is actually far too much.

On Friday, our weekly Divers’ Night at Camel Bar turned into a SPECIAL EDITION Brazilian Divers’ Night featuring a local Latin choreographer, Maria Mota. Latin tunes and divers from the UK, Egypt, Brazil, Germany, Kuwait, Italy and Switzerland as well as PADI Ambassadiver, Luca Hales who assisted in drawing the raffle and handing out prizes to raise funds for Project AWARE on our crunchy peanut covered floor.

Camel Dive Club’s desire for AWARE Week was to provide the local Sharm el Sheikh and international dive communities in addition to non-divers with ways that they can protect world ocean health. Doing so by directly removing debris from the seas and oceans, using alternatives to single use plastic or by making a financial donation to Project AWARE. That everyone can be part of the solution NOW.

Protecting the oceans and seas is immensely important to the whole team at Camel Dive Club & Hotel as we believe that we are uniquely placed to inform, educate and practice reef conservation and environmental awareness.