Coral Grand Divers Koh Tao has been a 100% Project Aware Centre since 2012, organizing successful reef & beach clean up events and raising awareness for our ocean planet. However, what happened on the 6th of March 2015 was absolutely remarkable.

23 people from all over the world gathered to participate in a Project Aware day here at Coral Grand Divers to clean up parts of Sairee Beach and two dive sites around the beautiful island of Koh Tao.

The morning started with the beach clean up, with Coral Grand as a starting point walking towards the more busy nightlife area at the beach. We were able to collect a lot of different kinds of rubbish, mainly cigarette butts, bottles and a lot of smaller plastic bits mostly used to seal water bottles. The clean up took around 2 hours also covering the beach north of Coral Grand where you would find a few resorts and a rocky area where a lot of rubbish was stuck in between the rocks and roots of trees close to or in the ocean. We managed to collect around 20kgs of garbage of all sorts and even people at other resorts acknowledged our efforts and supplied us with refreshments.

After a lunch break we planned to do two dives: a dive site called Lighthouse, known for its great variety of corals and our house reef Sairee Beach. It is a very shallow dive site with around 9m depth, very close to the main beach and exposed to a lot of debris floating out from the main strip. Therefore, initially our main focus was on Sairee as in previous clean ups we would always find more debris there than anywhere else. We didn’t know yet that this day it would be very different.

The first dive at lighthouse was meant to be a “warm up” dive, still collecting as much as we can. We didn’t know what to expect, as we haven’t been diving there in a long time.

As the briefing was given to the 23 Project Aware participants (more than actual dive students that day) about what was going to happen at Lighthouse, we could already spot a huge pile of debris floating at the surface entangled in one of the snorkeling lines.

At first it seemed like a task too big for us to remove all that debris, so we started to collect as much as we could underwater, which already filled a lot of our debris bags. Obviously this dive site has been exposed to a lot of rubbish pushed into it by the current.

As we progressed through the dive we all ended up around the enormous debris patch and decided to tackle it. It just felt wrong leaving it there and we knew that with the combined efforts of our many committed divers we had a chance to win the battle against the debris. We decided to drag it back to the boat and haul it onboard not knowing what a challenge it would be.

The patch consisted of a lot of entangled ropes, plastic garbage of all kinds, clothes, big bamboo sticks, wooden parts and more. Once we reached the boat it took us around half an hour to lift the pile on the boat needing every single participant and boat crewmember to assist.

After we had managed to bring it on board, we began to separate all the wood from the mass of debris to allow us to cut it down to a more manageable size so that we could put them in large bin bags to bring them back to shore.

It took all members well over an hour but finally we manage to fill 26 large bin bags, which accumulated to over 500 kg of debris!

Not knowing what to expect at the beginning of our day, due to our staff’s and volunteers efforts, we managed to have a huge impact on our local environment by recovering an enormous amount of debris.

This goes to show that small amounts of debris not taken care of can build up to an extend almost to big to handle. All the participants of the clean up and also every other person at Coral Grand Divers learned an important lesson that day: every dive counts and every single person can make a difference.

As Robert Swan once said: The biggest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it. Thank you very much to all our amazing customers and our dedicated staff to make this happen!

Many thanks to Tony Myshlyaev & Sandra Wahrenberger for the amazing pictures taken.