Another great 'turn-out' for our 3rd 'Dive Against Debris' event this recent Tuesday August 1st!
With 12 volunteers participating, cruising between depths of 3-30 metres, it was a challenge to find very much underwater debris...which is great news! We're fairly confident that with every month our Tulamben community see the effort to maintain a healthy marine environment, there's a conscious effort others are making to support this shared goal. It's also possible that because July was a fairly dry month not as much debris was washed into the ocean. Either way we were happy to see our adopted dive site looking better and better. We're wondering whether that's why we've noticed hawksbill turtles visiting the shipwreck more and more frequently this past week during our guided fun dives too!

A team of 3 certified divers, under the direct supervision of an SSI instructor from our dive centre partner Dive Concepts Tulamben, 'grazed' the shallower depths of the USAT Liberty Shipwreck. Dive Concepts sent a recent SSI Divemaster graduate to supervise two of our students taking the PADI Advanced course. Since they had already completed their Deep Adventure dive we had them take the 15-20 meter range of the dive site. Our dedicated in-house PADI IDC Instructor Liz formed a buddy team with PADI Open Water Diver Michael from Australia. A visiting PADI Divemaster, Adam, supervised 2 PADI Advanced divers to a maximum depth of 30 meters. He also brought his camera to record things on the dive. This time our in house PADI instructor and event leader Max was unable to dive this time, so he gave the briefing, made the buddy teams, and then stayed on the beach for the dive teams to return to help record the survey results.
With all these divers searching the sea floor, there wasn't much underwater debris to be collected - with a ceramic tile contributing to the majority of the total 3kg weight. The divers had a nice dive but were a little disappointed with their lack of "bounty". We told them that it was actually a good thing, and they helped out anyway just confirming that our adopted dive site was mostly debris free.

Already we are looking forward to the next and fourth event, and hopefully we can report even less debris next time!