Since our last blog, Simon has taught a ‘Self Reliant’ which means you can dive on your own after the course with a little pony tank, a Marine Resource Management 5 day course and a few days have been spent on repairing his drone and working on the Crystal website with Carsten, so there’s been no rest for him.

I’ve been working with the DMT’s collecting coral eating snails called ‘Drupella’s, organising dive site clean ups, transplanting corals for ‘Adopt A Coral’ and I’ve also helped a couple of the DMT’s make structures for our in-house artificial reef, Junk yard after being inspired by Simons MRM student Han Song’s panda.

So Earth Day rubbish has been weighed and the money counted. It was amazing to see the Koh Tao community come together in this quest to cleanup the island and to raise the much needed funds for Chads ongoing treatment.

The community of Koh Tao raised a monumental – 712,080 THB !!!!This is made up from 278 divers on the cleanup dive, 2,688 raffle tickets, food and drinks raised 73,450 THB

Donations, including money raised for heads being shaved totaled 45,320 THB and the games raised 9,810 THBA huge amount of rubbish was collected on the land cleanup, this was not weighed but the island is looking beautiful and clean and that is what is important.The rubbish collected on the underwater cleanup totalled 1,254 kg of which Crystal/Eco Koh Tao collected 149.05kg

So a massive achievement for the environment, for the community and of course for Chad funding.

On another note, Simon finally received his Birthday package from Rosie …it only took a few months to get here, but it was worth the wait 😀

The last few weeks have been pretty full on helping with the ‘Earth Day 2016’ getting the Koh Tao community to join in a day of fund raising and conservation all in the name of a great conservationist, a friend member of the Koh Tao community Chad Scott.Chad has worked on a huge variety of conservation projects on Koh Tao, both on land and underwater. He has given the community of Koh Tao so much and it will be an honor to be able to give back by helping raise funds for his much needed hospital treatments which his medical insurance didn’t cover.Chad was very unfortunate not only to contract Leukemia that has changed and threatened his life but when his insurance company informed him that they would not cover Leukemia, he was put in a position of having to rely on help from others. This is not an easy thing to do for anyone.  So hence the fundraiser.

More than 40 dive centers joined in with the island-wide clean-up, with 20 of these donating the use of their dive boat!    Each boat did 2 cleanup dives and a record all of the rubbish collected was taken and given to the PADI Project AWARE Dive For Debris program.

In the evening, everyone ventured down to he Hacienda and Koh Tao Leisure Park who hosted the evenings activities with variety of food stalls,  fairground games and ending with a top prize raffle with ‘Bundles’ of amazing prizes.