During four days from May 8th to May 11th a team of experienced divers from all over the world gather in Awei Pila Resort in the Mergui Archipelago – South Myanmar with a difficult but important goal – Remove Ghost Fish Gear from the reefs around the resort.

Lead by Anuar Abdullah – Founder of Ocean Quest Global originally from Malaysia but being travelling the world to protect and rehabilitate reefs -  the team of divers from Sweden, Thailand, Malaysia, Belgium, Brazil, Lithuania, Romania, Denmark & Myanmar performed eight dives in three different dive sites to remove lost fishing nets which were covering huge parts of the reef

Lost fish nets or Ghost Fishing Gear continue to kill underwater marine life and suffocate corals even after being lost at sea from fishing vessels, covering vast areas of one reef the net must be manually removed with scissors by experienced divers. A team of 9 divers can spend over one hour on the bottom at depths such as 25 meters to remove only one net.

During this action put together by Burma Boating and Awei Pila Resort both entities owned by Memories operating in the Mergui Archipelago and serious about their role on taking care about the environment in the region, managed to remove over 300 kilos of net from the bottom of the ocean.

Awei Pila Resort - in house Marine Biologist – Marcelo Guimaraes from Brazil who was guiding then team of divers to the dive sites says: “In 2009 the United Nations published an article estimating in 640,000 tonnes of ghost gear was littering the world’s oceans, most of the nets are made of nylon (plastic) and will not biodegrade for the next 600 years, they are silent killers of our ocean marine life and we divers must do something about it”