Although the annual “Earth Day” was held on April 22nd, 2009, our resort started the activities one day earlier, on April 21st, 2009. The first project was the transplantation of 340 coral fragments from our Coral Nursery to one of our most frequent used dive sites at Hin Klang. A team of ten divers from Thailand, Germany, France and England went first to our Nursery to pick up 6 trays of coral fragments that were planted there one year ago.
Once the fragments were brought back to our boat we rushed to Hin Klang where we had prepared 29 iron bars two days earlier. These iron bars are used as coral substrate. Each of the iron bars can hold 12 coral fragments. Our team went down to a depth at around 8 meter to attach the staghorn coral pieces with cable ties to the iron bars. The job was done within one hour. The same team went down again to our Coral Nursery at Loh Bagao to clean the floating nursery for the next day.
This is the second time we have transplanted coral fragments to a dive site around Phi Phi Island. This time we have chosen a dive site where we dive almost every day so that we can control and monitor the growth of the fragments on a regular base. Another point of choosing this particular dive site is that we would like to involve our guests more in the Coral Rehabilitation Project in order to raise more awareness of the declining amount of coral reefs around the world.
On the actual “Earth Day” on April 22nd, our resort organized 5 different environmental events on land and under water. We started the day with a new cycle of our Coral Rehabilitation Project. Our boat “The Island Explorer” went out in the morning with a total of 17 divers and 15 non-divers, coming from Thailand, Germany, Switzerland, Canada, England, The Netherlands and The United States.
Our destination was our house reef at Loh Bagao where we first collected 600 new coral fragments from healthy donor coral. Back on boat, these fragments were attached to already prepared trays. Each tray is holding 60 fragments. All our non-divers, mainly hotel trainees from the Thamasat University, Bangkok were doing a really good job of preparing the fragile coral and putting the pieces into the tray of mesh.
All divers went down after one hour to finally install the ten trays at our floating nursery. Here they have to grow for at least a year before we will transplant them to another site around the beautiful islands of Phi Phi, probably on “Earth Day” 2010.
After a delicious and spicy lunch the second under water activity took place at three different dive sites on the east coast of Phi Phi Don – Pak Nam Bay, Rantee Bay and Loh Mudee. These are dive and snorkel spots that we will use in the coming low season frequently because of the western monsoon. Equipped with nets, knives and pliers buddy teams went down to do a reef clean up. Approximately 100 kg of garbage such as plastic bags, plastic bottles, glass bottles, aluminum cans and fishing nets were removed from the sites.
