First week with conservation team

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Okay, here's a somewhat serious entry about what sort of stuff I've gotten to participate in since joining the conservation team this week...

Monday: We did a survey of invertebrates (clams, starfish, nudibranchs, etc) that we saw along a 100m line that we laid down. Using the data from the surveys, the guys that run the project can get a good bearing as to how healthy the ecosystem is there. It was a pretty relaxed, easy introduction to the program.

Tuesday: Today we went to work on the BioRock, which without getting too technical, is basically an artificial reef system that helps the coral to grow 3-5x faster than it would otherwise. To do this, we picked up pieces of broken corals from the seabed and attached them to the metal structure with wire. I loved this dive...the fish were fearless and would come right up and nibble on coral's algae as we were attaching it onto the structure.

Tuesday night we met up with some of the teaching volunteers to celebrate a birthday and had a nice little all-night rage session on Sairee beach. And this time I remember everything and didn't lose my room key, so that was nice. Just gotta stay away from the samsong-redbull buckets and everything is fine...

Wednesday: Due to Tuesday night's antics, we had a smaller than usual team with us as we went to work on the giant clam nursery. For this, we just sort of fixed up the cages the clams were in (rearranged the clams, added rubble for them to grow on, etc). Since this dive was in shallow water (4m or so), we were able to stay down for almost 2 hours and enjoy the beautiful colors of the clams' mantles.

Thursday: We did our second survey on the 100m line, this time looking at fish. This was a lot harder to keep track of since the fish are moving around, in and out of your field of vision so it's difficult to keep track of which fish you've countned. And when a school of fish comes by, it's almost straight guess work. Even so, I liked this dive a lot as we were able to do both a deep water survey and a shallow water survey at a different site.

Thursday night we went to see an amazing fire dancer at a local beach bar...apparently this guy was on "Thailand's got Talent" and actually made it pretty far. Really wish I had brought my camera, because it was absolutely amazing sitting right in front on the beach....here's a video of that I'm pretty sure is him

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Friday: Today was an epic day of diving. We started the day with a wreck dive...down to 36m (112ft) deep! At that depth most people (including me) get nitrogen narcosis, which basically just makes you feel drunk. In addition to that, the water was much colder after we passed the thermocline at about 25m. It was the first time I felt like I actually needed the wetsuit I've been wearing the past few weeks. And oh yeah, the visibility that deep was maybe 1m, so I was a bit freaked out once we let go of the line and started to explore. After getting over my nerves/the narcosis, I really enjoyed swimming in/around the wreck. Too bad we had to come up so quickly after making it down that deep.

After coming up from that dive, we did another short dive, just kinda perousing an artificial reef that some other dive school had built. Tonight is the last night for a couple of volunteers, so hopefully it should be a good time

If anybody is intnerested in diving in Thailand/Koh Tao, you should definitely consider doing your diving with New Heaven (http://www.newheavendiveschool.com/). Everyone here is serious about diving, yet knows how to have a good time.

P.S: Posting pics has been a definite problem...not working again today. I'll try again sometime this weekend.

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Comments

[anonymous]

sounds like you are having a good mix of fun and learning. awesome, brother bear :)