Our World – Underwater Scholarship Society in Australasia

Last Wednesday I set off for my next big adventure to South East Asia and Micronesia. After an uneventful flight from Sydney to Phuket, I jumped in a taxi and made my way to Patong beach and Scubacat, the dive company owned and operated by Sarah Kench. I arrived to a very warm welcome by Sarah who gave me the run down on what I was in for over the next few days. I got in touch with Sarah from a list of dive outlets supplied to me by PADI Asia Pacific, when Sarah heard about the scholarship and my three days free in Phuket , said she had the perfect opportunity for me.

Scubacat annually runs a Reef Check diver program, in which children from the Concordia International School in Shanghai (CISS), come to Phuket and undertake their Reef Check Eco Diver Course. Some of the kids on board this year have come the year before, with a few being veterans having attended the course three years running. The majority of them however where not only new to the reef check program, but to diving altogether. The children were undertaking their PADI Open Water and Advanced Open Water in conjunction with the Reef Check course during their stay.

The whole MV Scubacat team. Left to Right: Terry , Stuart , Noah , Kelsa , Joel , myself, Andrew , Paul s, Anthony , Jane , Katie , Dana , Jennifer , Andy , Michelle , Quincy , and Lauren l. The photo was taken by our chef.

It is the perfect program for getting the young kids of 12-16 years enthusiastic about conservation and protection of the underwater ecosystem. Throughout the course the children are put through a peak performance buoyancy course to hone their hovering and manoeuvring skills when navigating fragile coral reefs, undertake lectures on fish, invertebrate, and coral disease identification, and learn about other harmful impacts to coral reefs. They learn about sampling substrates, running and sampling transects lines, and undertake a minimum of 25 dives all within the short space of 8 days. Not only this they record all the data that they collect underwater according to the globally standardised Reef Check methodology, which is then entered into a Reef Check database.

Sarah had organised for me to stay in a local hotel right behind the store on my first night in Phuket. The next day I awoke for the 7:30am pick up to the day boat that was to take me to the live aboard MV Scubacat moored in a bay off Koh Racha Yai Island.

Aboard the day boat I sat and chatted to the excited divers, swapping stories of the best dives and creatures that we had seen. After a two hour ride I was picked up in a little inflatable and welcomed onto my floating home for the next 3 days. Joel Klammer and Paul Adams are both teachers at CISS and certified Reef Check instructors. Along with the CISS teachers Terry Umphenour and Jennifer Zimbrick, as well as Stuart Robinson of Scubacat, and all the kids on board, my home away from home was a busy place indeed.

My room during my stay. Everyone was nice and gave me the biggest bed.

After throwing my bags down I was quickly donning my scuba gear and plunged into the very warm 30 degree water with the teachers and kids. Over the three days I dived with the group, filming as much as I could and observing them collect data. I have to say they all preformed fantastically.

Paul jumping in off the back of the boat

The dive team descends!

Koh Racha Yai has some splendid reefs and has been a very popular dive site for many years. This year sadly has been a very warm year and has stayed around the 30° – 31° mark for the past 6 weeks. This has caused massive bleaching to occur across the reefs.  I would estimate it at around 90-95%. With my video or camera in hand, dive after dive, I was shocked at the level of bleaching that I was seeing before me. I can only describe it as gliding over snow capped peaks.  It was a surreal experience. Huge Porites sp. colonies blanched a ghostly white would appear like beacons in the distance, fields of Acropora sp. totally bleached would lie below me, it was so sad to see.

Photo courtesy of Paul Adams.

One of the larger bleached colonies. At least we have the kids keen to help find a solution to events such as this!

However the reef was still alive with small hidden critters if you looked closely, the two night dives that I did were great fun. I always feel like I am hovering above the surface of the moon as I swim along the ocean bottom in a sphere of light with only darkness surrounding me. Morays, decorator crabs, octopus, lionfish, and turtles were just some of the sightings over my 3 days there.

My time aboard the MV Scubacat with CISS flew by all too quickly; with 10 dives in 2 ½ days I spent the majority of my time underwater! When I wasn’t under the surface I was eating the delicious food made for us by the two lovely Thai cooks on board, learning more and more about the course and how it got underway from Terry, Joel, Paul, and Stuart, or watching the squid boats light up the horizon at night. I had a truly fantastic time. A special thanks to Sarah for all your help and generosity, Stuart, and the whole Scubacat team, Joel, Paul, Terry, and Jennifer, and all the kids from CISS onboard for hosting me and showing great time. Over the three days I learned so much and gained some important insights into the state of coral reefs. It was a trip I would readily do again! Thanks so much.

One of the squid boats with it’s hanging high powered light bulbs to bring the squid to the lines it hangs.

The teachers from CISS and myslef. From left to right: Joel, myself, Paul, Jennifer, and Terry

So I am back from my time diving aboard Scubacat with the kids from Concordia. After arriving back on dry land I met up with Sarah who was responsible for making the trip possible. Over a drink she told me more about the Reef Check program, diving around Phuket, and amazing stories of the people of Patong beach and events that happened on the 2004 tsunami that hit and caused so much devastation. It was amazing to hear that even in the face of loosing everything stories of laughter, generosity, and kindness emerged. The thai people really are amazing and I do love visiting here, I have already encountered so many individuals that go out of their way to help me out for just a few baht, earning an honest living and with smile on their face. It makes me certainly want to come back.

Just one of the many shop fronts that look more at home 50 years ago than the present day

The very next day I was straight into the 2nd Asia Pacific Coral Reef Symposium. A conference that in it’s second year has grown greatly and this year had 450 attendees from all around Asia and the world.  There were a a few familiar faces at the conference but not many, but it was a fantastic opportunity to meet many of my peers and some big names in the study of coral reefs. I had a great time whilst I was there and learned a lot about the science that is taking place in the Asia/Indo Pacific region, which is an area of particular interest to me.

One of the dancers at the Symposium banquet, traditional thai dances and live music as we ate was great entertainment. As the night moved a keyboardest came out and played all the 90’s classics. I felt like I was at my 4th form disco again!

Other than that I have been zipping back and forward from my backpackers to the conference on the back of motorbikes, darting between traffic and sliding around corners in the rain. Lets just say at 7:30am when this is your mode of transport, who needs coffee. Sampling the local delecacies and getting a small taste of real thai town without the masquerade cast over the culture like many of the tourist hubs. Wandering the streets have been good to experiment with my camera, there is so much character as you wander the roads of Phuket city, one can find any number of open workshops, food stalls, and local food markets to keep you entertained for hours.

Flying through the streets on the back of a scooter. It’s the quickest, cheapest, and most exciting way to travel.

A guardian at temple nearby accommodation

A concrete mixer sidling the footpath

I am off to Pulau Weh, a small island just off the Northern tip of Sumatra, Indonesia tomorrow. I am spending 5 days with Lumba Lumba divers to experience the amazing diving at this remote diving opperation before heading up to Guam to meet up with 2008 Australasian scholar Steve Lindfield. I’ll let you know how it goes!

Till then

Will

I was very generously sponsored by PADI to undertake some of their courses, including my PADI Drysuit, Wreck, Deep, and Underwater Navigation diver courses. I went to PADI Asia Pacific with Jayne to meet with Danny Dwyer who is manager of marketing and business development,  and Mike Holme who is Director of training and quality management and also in charge of the Project Aware division. It was great to have a meet and greet and discuss some potential for projects with Project Aware later in my scholarship. I hope to be undertaking some work with them for a few weeks later in my scholarship.

Danny Dwyer, myself, and Mike Holme

I went down Plunge Diving at Chowder Bay, Sydney to undertake my PADI Drysuit course. Peter Szyszka and the team at Plunge Diving are truly fantastic, incredibly thorough with all their divers and go above and beyond with the running and teaching of their courses. Upon meeting Peter, he quickly had me in my brand new Waterproof Draco Drysuit,  putting me  through the paces for my PADI Drysuit diver. I undertook nearly a dozen dives with my drysuit, getting to feel really comfortable in it, honing by buoyancy, and clocking up the hours. The drysuit preformed amazingly and now I feel ready to tackle the cold waters of the world!

Peter Szyszka and myself just outside the Plunge Diving shop

Next up came my PADI Deep diver which was a very exciting course. I just jumped on this one last weekend. The first day diving was down in Chowder bay at around 18m. Undertaking drills with no masks, out of air scenarios with full ascents. It was a great opportunity to brush up on my skills. Unfortunately the boat dives scheduled for the next day were cancelled due to the wild weather that Sydney has been experiencing lately, and I am shooting off on the next leg of my journey around Asia and Micronesia! so I will have to complete the rest of the course at a later date. Instead I went for a dive to Shelly Beach, it is a great little dive spot and I got to have a close look at a giant cuttlefish and ornate wobbegong, both very interesting animals.

At Plunge Diving they really put you to the test and if your not doing it well enough, you do it again till you do, or don’t pass the course. I think the professionalism that they display is fantastic, as all too often dive operations are churning out divers all too quickly, that are not sufficient at undertaking the skills required to be a safe and confident diver. Which in turn leads to accidents occurring.

I would like to thank Peter, Ronnie, Henry, Martin, Marcin, and the rest of the team at Plunge Diving for all the help with the courses and the generosity for all the dives they hosted me on.

I’m off to Phuket on Wednesday for the 2nd Asia Pacific Coral Reef Symposium, I’m going to be presenting my masters work there, and like many conferences will be a fantastic opportunity to meet some fellow colleagues. I’ll let you know how it goes!

I have just come back from the beautifully secluded Lord Howe Island. Located 720km North-East-East off the coast of Sydney. I have been staying and working with Taz Douglas and Lauren Gatherer the amazing husband and wife team who run the diving operation  at Prodive Lord Howe. The diving here is fantastic! Lord Howe has a huge choice of  80 dive sites around the island coupled with the Admiralty Islands located just north of Lord Howe. You really are spoiled for choice.

The catfish around the island stick together in tight balls. It makes for a really interesting display. They slide, dive, and slither as if they are trying to get somewhere before one another. More often than not they just go in circles…

Lord Howe Island is really interesting as it has an array of over 500 species of fish, both temperate and tropical species, it makes it unique in the diversity that one can see on a single dive. There are also plenty of hard corals, morays, reef fish, turtles, rays, sharks, and dolphins. Heading out to the Admiralties means soft corals corals cover the ocean floor as you drift past in the current, making for two highly diverse seascapes to explore. I had the chance to get out and dive the Admiralties, giving me the perfect chance to try out my new TUSA W1 wetsuit and give the Light and Motion housing a spin underwater. Huge kingfish, Japanese Boar fish, Galapagos sharks, a beautiful decorator crab with a black coral mowhawk, and huge green jobfish were just some of the visitors we had during our dives. It really is a beautiful place. We were fortunate enough to dive North Rock off the Admiralties, the deepest dive you can undertake at Lord Howe Island and it made for a truly spectacular dive. During my stay I also had a chance to help out Taz with putting Nathan Bridge, a divemaster in training working at the shop, through some of his rescue procedures. I always love going back over exercises on previous courses, refreshing my memory, and refining my skills. Throughout all my courses I found that the Rescue course and the component within the divemaster course was the most beneficial for me. It really does make you more confident, and feel secure that if something does go wrong you will be able to deal with the situation. I think it should be a must for all divers.

Richard Morgan who was diving with us at Prodive and I went out for a snorkel off Ned’s beach. This was taken just beyond the reef break.

There is some really interesting work being undertaken with the continued monitoring and running of the marine park that has been implemented around Lord Howe Island. Lauren and Sallyann Gudge (who is a ranger for the Lord Howe Island marine park under the marine parks authority NSW) have been working on raising the awareness of the feeding of the fish down at Ned’s beach on the North-eastern side of the Island. For a number of years tourists have been going down to Ned’s beach and feeding the fish, it makes for an interesting display with 5ft kingfish circling around your feet in 40cm of water. However it can potentially have negative effects on fish health, including creating dependency and ill health. I thought it was fantastic that Lauren and Sallyann were lobbying to get this practice stopped as even though it is good for tourism, it can have a negative effect on the environment and the natural processes that occur.

The stingray around the island are great to watch silently gliding across the sand just beyond the reef.

This little guy was only about 1cm. I followed him around on my stomach across most of Middle beach. This was the best shot I could get. I looked up once I had to much sand down my pants to move, to see a bunch of tourists looking at me with quizzical expressions.

Happy to be diving

A juvenile zebra lionfish only about 10cm. He was nestled down in the grooves of a Montipora sp. coral colony. A Lord Howe Island moray was right down at my feed while I took the picture.

Ready to dive in my TUSA gear. This dive was on the Northern side of LHI. The Admiralty Island as our back drop on our right, the steep cliffs and caves of LHI on our right. Couldn’t ask for more.

My time on Lord Howe Island disappeared all too quickly and I definitely hope to return, sooner rather than later! Thank you so much to everyone on Lord Howe Island, everyone I met was so kind, generous, and friendly. A special thanks to Taz and Loz for hosting me, they are your go to people for diving on the island and really know their stuff, Nathan, Richard Morgan and Colin Miles (who dove with us at Prodive for my entire stay), I had a fantastic time.

I went on a day exhibition to Sydney Aquarium with Jayne and met with Richard Vevers who is managing a soon to be coming exhibition on sharks. Jayne had been asked to come and photograph some juvenile species for the exhibit. The coming exhibition looks fantastic, really informative, interactive, and entertaining. Getting the message out that sharks aren’t the black eyed monsters that they are portrayed as in hollywood films and worldwide media.

Jayne taking macro shots of the juvenile sharks for the coming exhibition.

Jayne and I then played tourist and had a look around the aquarium.  It was great to see all the families there with the young kids getting so excited about all the little sea critters. I went to Sydney Aquarium when I was 5 years old and thought it was the greatest thing ever, reminiscing brought a smile to my face.

Dugong!

I don’t always agree with aquariums, especially with some of the larger animals they have can often seemed terribly trapped, however they certainly have their place. I think they’re great at disseminating the message of conservation to the younger generation, which is ideal as they are our future marine biologists, politicians, and activists!

A grey nurse shark coasts over head.

The scholarship year kicked off with a bang, thrown into a whirlwind of big buildings, and amazingly generous people whilst battling a serious case of jetlag! It’s been a surreal time over these past few weeks. The weekend in New York proved to be a time in which many of my dreams have begun to manifest into reality. I have the occasional moment where I have to pinch myself just to reaffirm I’m awake.

The journey all started when I flew from Wellington to Sydney to meet up with Sue Crowe who is the executive director of Tabata Australia. I arrived at the Tabata warehouse to have a short but informative tour . Sue and I then proceeded to try out every conceivable piece of equipment made by both TUSA and Waterproof, both sub companies of Tabata. It was an extremely exciting afternoon that ended up stretching into the evening as I sweated and struggled into a multitude of dry-suits, wetsuits, and polypropylenes as the other warehouse workers left for the day. I want to take an opportunity to thank Tabata, Sue, and the whole Tabata team for providing me with a full set of fantastic dive gear. I can’t wait to put it all to the test!

What followed was a massive twenty-eight hour journey from Sydney to New York. When I arrived it was needless to say I was in awe of the city. I was a hazard as I wandered down the various streets with my head looking straight up and my jaw somewhere near my knees. What followed was a non-stop five days for the annual awards ceremony for the Our World-Underwater Scholarship Society (OW-USS), where I met the OW-USS family for the first time. The whole experience blew me away, everyone was so kind and displayed endless generosity. I was introduced to dozens of people involved within the scholarship society, all of whom had warm words of congratulations and many offering fantastic opportunities for me this year. I also to meet my international counterparts Josh Stuart (the 2010 North American scholar) and Ingrid Rushfeldt Krüger (the 2010 European scholar), as well as the 2009 scholars Matt Carter (Australasia), Filip Wolski (Europe) and Myfanwy Rowlands (North America) who were to be passing on the role as OW-USS scholar to Josh, Ingrid, and I.

The main event of the weekend was the formal presentations and dinner at the Explorers club, of which all new scholars are given memberships. Here George Wozencraft the OW-USS President, and Elvin Leech the Chairman of the board and vice-president of European operations made introductions and welcomed us to the scholarship family with medals. We were then presented with our Rolex Submariner watches by John Flaherty of Rolex. I can say that it is an incredible honour to be bestowed with one of the Rolex timepieces, and it is something that I will wear proudly for the rest of my life. We were also presented with t-shirts and caps from DAN, a brand new Cobra 3 dive computer from Suunto, and a tech-diving computer from VR3 technologies. Also we recieved an amazing underwater camera setup from Olympus, a brand new underwater video housing from light and motion, clothing and drysuit undergarments from Fourth Element.  Josh, Ingrid, and I were also given specially made plaques with an article written about our winning of the scholarship which has been published in Sportdiving USA, and our scholarship flags that we are to carry with us throughout our journey. The experience was unforgettable.. After the official business was done we all went to celebrate at a local pub for a few drinks.  All in all an absolutely fantastic long weekend. A huge thank you to everyone involved who made the weekend possible.

After New York I flew back to Sydney to begin some diving courses with the team at Plunge Diving, which is where I am now. I look forward to keeping you updated on how everything goes.

Will Arlidge