This week, our whole team – from dive guide trainee to assistant manager – got together for an underwater clean-up of our house reef. Amed’s house reef might initially look like a sandy slope, but look closer and you can spot many amazing creatures like the longhorn cowfish or the flying gurnard.
To help preserve this habitat and enjoy taking our divers on a clean, easily accessible dive site, we joined up with Waterman’s Week and organised our first underwater clean-up in Amed. And it was good timing, too. After a few days of high waves we found plenty of rubbish had been washed up and five of use collected more than 15 kilos of trash which is now being recycled through local organisation Peduli Alam.
As a traditional fishing and salt-making community, people in Amed have long been making a living from the sea and clean-up initiatives have really taken off since the Trash Hero organisation started regular beach clean events. This means that all of Amed’s 13 main beaches are regularly cleaned by volunteers, not only making a difference to the beaches, but also preventing a lot of rubbish from getting into the sea in the first place.
But the week has not all been about trash – our resident techies braved some challenging conditions to teach no less than four technical diving courses from the shore as well as the boat. And whilst it might have been rather ‘interesting on the surface, as soon as they descended they encountered perfectly calm seas – which is often the case. What was to be explored? The deeper sides of the USAT Liberty as a ‘warm-up’ deco dive followed by the reefs of Batu Niti and Jemeluk drop-off to 45 meters.