Today was a good day!

I can say that. Not because there were 26 of us, not because we had an entire boat to ourselves and not even because it was yet another sunny day in Utila. Today was a good day because our Dive Against Debris yielded less debris than we actually anticipated. That's a win for the Bay Islands and its reefs!

Since 26 volounteers showed up at 7am to dive with us, we expected to bring up a lot of debris from off the reef. The interesting twist was that, even though we picked what thought from experience was one of the usually worse dive sites, there wasn't all that much to pick up. 26 divers in no less than 7 teams! And all we found was 34 pounds of waste on a 60 minute dive that spanned 3 entire dive buoys.

The Culprits

The things we did find, however, were rather small, shreded and -unfortunately- rather hard to remove from the reef.

• - By a landslide, plastic bags is the winner
• - Close second place goes to plastic bottles and bottle caps
• - Plastic wrappings comes at a third place

Interestingly (or not?) there is a large overlap between what our beach cleanup from two months ago yielded: plastic bottles and bottle caps.

The Good News

The goof news is that while we docked, and made our inventory of debris we brought back, our weekly shipment cam in. Next to a whole bunch of new wetsuits, fins, regulator parts and PADI materials, there were several large boxes that contained a nice little surprise...

In conclusion of our last Beach Cleanup, we decided to start the fight against plastic bottles and bottle caps and decided to offer our divers cheap BPA-free, recycled and recyclable drinking bottles. When it comes to conservation, actions often speak louder than words and here they are: our very own Bay Islands College of Diving reusable drinking bottles. Stay tuned for the next blog post so we can tell you all about it :)