January
2nd
New Year, New Star – Big Eco Day
With the start of the New Year & with 2008 being the International Year of the Reef, Eco Koh Tao along with Crystal Dive Resort took to the waters of Sairee Beach on Koh Tao for some environmentally focused diving, education & fun.
Led by MSDT Nathan Cook, 25 eco-friendly divers took to the nearby waters on a windy afternoon and brought up an impressive array of materials from the deep blue, the most interesting being a set of scales which we may have used to weigh the garbage if they still worked.
Participants undertook some Coralwatch surveys and were given an introduction into the Reef Check Eco-Monitoring program. While the weather was less than ideal the divers were enthusiastic and happy to see that there are conservation efforts being undertaken to preserve the fragile reef ecosystems around Koh Tao.
Coralwatch(coralwatch.org) is a reef monitoring program conducted in conjunction with the University of Queensland and Project Aware. Reef Check (reefcheck.org) is an independent eco-monitoring program based out of California, USA to monitor the worldwide health of coral reef ecosystems.
For more information on either of these programs see www.ecokohtao.com
Participants: Nathan Cook, Gannon Murphy, Donal O'Brien, Nick Prest, Eveline van den Heuvel, Blaise Bratter, Emma, Evy Johansen, Reem Ramadan, Matt Dillon, Ryan Thrussell, Gert Vliegen, Sam Watts, Eva Colliander, Tom Martyn, Matt Beard, Cindy Vincent, Virginie Decharneux, Thomas Marbach, Luise Bohme, Justin Gosling, Steve Susswein, Tim Jones, and Staffan Halth.