To summarize my second week in Lembeh: it was very busy, tons of fun, in some times very disgusting (but rewarding) and I learned a lot.

The week started off with a beach clean up. When we came up from a dive on the house reef that morning, a truckload of rubbish had washed up on the beach. So during our service interval we organised a spontaneous beach clean up. In the afternoon we sorted everything (this was obviously the disgusting part) and collected data to send to Project Aware. We collected 53 kilo’s of trash, mainly consisting of plastic drinking cups (approx. 1000) and food wrappers. We did also find a yellow plastic rooster, a toy truck, 3 diapers and other weird stuff.

The beach looked very clean (very rewarding) only to find it dirty again 2 days later, when I organised the second clean up, which brought forward 35 kilo’s of trash. And we did a third beach clean up three days later, when we collected 26 kilo’s.

It’s nice to think we saved at least 3 animals doing this (that’s also the rewarding part).

Then for the busy part:  Apart from the regular things like taking the tanks to the dive boats, filling up the tubs with fresh water for cleaning camera’s on board, making sure that there is a first aid kit and spare equipment on board and welcoming back the guest from their dives, I (most of the time accompanied with Imi)

– did another skills circuit.
– assisted in a discover scuba diving program (our gardner James went out diving for the first time and he was a natural) and guided the additional dive.
– swam 400 meters in under 10 minutes.
– performed the skindiving skills (swimming 15 meters under water is not that difficult!)
– completed the search and recovery scenario
– completed my emergency assistance plan
– mapped out a piece of the house reef (great fun and I learned a lot)
– attended an oxygen workshop
– uploaded all clean up data to the Project Aware website
– conducted a dive briefing at the resort
– watched how a free flowing regulator can be repaired
– cleaned out and refilled the first aid kits
– made sure all booties and regulators had a numbered tag again when it had fallen off.
– moved rooms (I’ve got my own bathroom now!)

And I even had a day off in which I went fun diving and took a great picture of a painted frogfish. On that day I also had the best night dive ever, in which we saw: Spiny devilfish, bobbit worm, swimming crab, blue ringed octopus, zebra batfish, flamboyant cuttlefish, reef squid, 1000nds of razorfish and many many more.

Looking forward to everything that next week will bring.