Becoming clean
Teaming up with our diving neighbours to clean our underwater world.
Most of the year in Bali, we are blessed with beautiful sunny days and cloudless nights but for about 4 months of the year this isn’t the case. From December to about March, it's known as Bali's rainy season. During that time we will often get beautiful sunny mornings and even some stunning sunsets peeking through the clouds, however it will usually rain at some point every day. This can be for quite a few hours, including powerful thunderstorms; sometimes, the rain is so heavy it causes flash flooding and pulls a lot of the trash which has gathered up in the mountains out into the sea.
Most of the year in Bali, we are blessed with beautiful sunny days and cloudless nights but for about 4 months of the year this isn’t the case...
This February we had quite a few of these flash floods which sadly deposited a lot of rubbish onto some local dive sites. Something had to be done….
Last week, our friends from up the road at the Bali Dive Resort and Spa in Tulamben set up an event for a underwater clean up. The storms had dumped a lot of rubbish on their house reef and so they put out a call for assistance from the local dive community, and divers came from all over to lend a hand. This particular reef is not a spot where we often dive ourselves, but rubbish affecting our beautiful marine environment is an issue that impacts us all.
Bali Dive Cove was able to kit up four volunteers for the effort - there was owner Kadek, our trusty diver and driver Tapik, plus our trainee divemaster Josh and one of our advanced students. Everyone met up at the resort’s house reef in the morning for a briefing on who was going to be cleaning where, and of course a reminder of standard, safe diving practices. The resort provided everyone with air or nitrox; then we were handed gloves and large mesh bags and off we went!
Everyone paired off into buddy teams of two. The reef is bookended by two small rivers, which is where the rubbish had come from, so about half of us went left and half of us went right. The depths and bottom conditions varied: we found plastic sacks and rags tangled around buoys and mooring lines or embedded in the sandy bottom; in other areas, we were carefully untangling plastic fragments from delicate coral in just a couple of metres of water. Within an hour, most teams had gathered one or two large sacks of rubbish and the reef was starting to look its healthy self again. The colours were all from fish and coral, not plastics!
Those of us who had been working at shallower depths were able to dive twice, bringing out full sacks of rubbish and going down again for another go. By the time we all emerged from the water, we were a little tired but immensely proud: together, we’d cleaned no less than 140kg of trash from the sea!
Together, we’d cleaned no less than 140kg of trash from the sea!
The resort arranged for the waste to be sorted, recycled and disposed of properly, which is not always an easy thing to do in Bali. They then treated all the volunteers to nasi goreng (fried rice) for lunch - a staple of Indonesian life, and satisfying after a big morning in the water!
It’s great to be part of a community that pulls together to protect and look after the beautiful marine environment that we all share.
Good job team. See you again next for the next one - whenever and wherever it’s needed!
