On 26th May 2011, 21 enthusiastic volunteers from Mermaids Dive Center began their journey to South Rock at Koh Rinn located in the Pattaya Far Islands. The mission was to remove not only a large fishing net that covered the coral on one of our most beautiful dive sites in the area but to remove any underwater trash we came across.

After the dive briefing, we split into 5 teams with each person assigned a task of either cutting, lift bag duties or collecting trash. Armed with our faithful clean up equipment, we were all soon in the water ready to start the clean up.

The goal of our first dive was to locate the net and collect any other rubbish found on the way. 2 of the five teams found the net and started working to remove it from the reef. Fortunately the net was in shallow water (4-7m), so we had plenty of bottom time to work on it but it was going to take 2 dives to remove it all. During the lunch break we worked out the strategy for the second dive.

On the second dive all 5 teams concentrated on the net recovery. Each team was allocated 5 different points of the net and started cutting through their section which resulted in everyone meeting in the middle of the net. All 5 teams lifted the whole net up to the surface with lift bags and then up on the boat.

We successfully removed 290kg of trash and the net itself came in at a weight of 280kg. Marine life freed from the net included living crabs, starfish and smaller fishes.

Thank you to all the volunteers involved in this project who all felt a great sense of satisfaction and my fellow co-organizer Louise Capewell, MSDT for participating in another successful Mermaids Dive Center clean up.