Last week was AWARE week, which meant a week full of events, where one of them was a clean-up dive at Ban's House Reef located at Sairee. A total of 31 persons from Ban's went out together to take part in the cleaning event, with a mix of student to divemaster and instructor level. Two dives were conducted at the dive site with a total dive time around 50 minutes. 

Sairee Reef can be considered a problematic site, due to shallow water, which means a lot of debris easily gets stuck in the corals when the tides are shifting. A lot of the debris collected during the dives were predicted coming from dive boats. Since many boats park outside of Sairee Beach during the night when the wind is strong from the east, more debris is prone to end up in the ocean.

A few divers filled up their bags within a few minutes of the dive, only covering a small part of the reef. The most common item collected during the dives were plastic fishing lines, followed by plastic fragments, but there were also surprisingly many items found that usually are rare to find during clean-up dives. Around 15 engine belts were found (guesstimated to come from boats), around the same number of batteries and a few cellphones. 

Together we collected seven filled up black bags with debris, which had an estimated number of 100 kg! A huge thank you to everyone who participated in the clean-up and a special thanks to the divemaster candidates who helped out to sort everything out!