Beauty and the Bleach

Work had been hard on us the last couple of weeks and we were raring to get out on a liveaboard to Kuantan Wreck and Tioman. After plans were finalized, Renggis was the first dive site to start our weekend as it offered a shallow reef at slack tide, good for check out, and the reef is always busy!

On descent to 4m on the North shore, a glaring white brain coral was the first to catch my attention, followed by large white patches of acropora coral, which covers most of the reef around Renggis. I figured it was shallow and temperatures cause slight bleaching up here.

As we greeted a broadclub cuttlefish, some blue trevally and a tusked wrasse moving around the northern reef, more coral bleaching was observed down the fringing reef to 12m where it hit the sand bottom.

To our horror, the once bustling reef is now covered with dying or diseased coral from the north all the way to the patches of staghorns in the south. Water temperature hovered at 30deg celsius. Resident Hawksbill and Green Turtles laid lethargically in their favourite holes by the patch reef but the Blacktip Sharks were nowhere to be seen, especially when they were supposed to be on their usual morning run.

This was a worrying start to a weekend of awakening to the plight of our water world. The next dive at Chebeh confirmed more bleaching even to corals at 24m. Giant clams were diseased and corals were dead or dying. More were found at Labas though the corals sheltered amongst the boulders were thriving.

When threats occur concurrently, we must do all we can to minimize our impact on the marine environment as divers but more so not forgetting to reduce our footprint wherever we visit as eco-tourists.

There is always hope in protecting what we have now so we can leave a place better than we found it for future generations. It doesn't have to be a world changing event but instead small things we do or don't do has a cumulative and positive effect just from a boat carrying 20 divers.

A few comments made on one of my fb photo albums mentioned how nice the reef was and yes, experiencing the hidden beauty of nature underwater is what we have the privilege of as divers and it is in our interest to tell as many people about it.

My photos are testament to nature braving the bleaching but they also face other threats constantly.

Some simple things we can all do to help is to first, know your local environment. You can do this in a number of ways, like keeping a useful log of your dives, taking photos or videos of what you see and reading about the location you are diving at. Reading about the dive location and the dive sites before visiting them gets you excited about diving there and generates your interests in the history of the wreck or biodiversity of the reef. Getting to know the local culture helps if you intend to share your knowledge
on conservation with the people there. Photo or video journals are a lively way to log your dive memories although collecting simple but useful data as part of your dive logs can go a long way with getting you familiar with the site whilst aiding in a monitoring program like the ones for Sea Turtles and Coral Health.

Next, understand what these animals need to survive. Take a dive professional who knows the sites and is interested in marine animals with you to gain experience on how to interact with sensitive marine life and approach the animals. Continuing your diver education through courses like the Underwater Naturalist or National Geographic Diver Specialties are great ways to get insight to what you need to understand about different marine eco-systems.

Lastly, adopt simple eco-tourism practices whenever you travel. Before your trip, tune-up your buoyancy with clinics conducted in a pool and definitely do a scuba review if you have been absent from diving for 6 months or longer. Conserving water and not littering into the sea are things you can also do. Then choose an operator who is committed to responsible business practices and to marine conservation. These operators provide proper dive briefings and use mooring lines.

I'm glad to see that MV DiveRace spends the extra effort to tie a mooring at each site they visit rather than drop an anchor. Another liveaboard was seen doing this at one of the sites.

As a PADI Course Director, seeing the influence I have on instructors coming out of my courses is motivation enough for me to carry on doing what I do. If I can set one instructor at a time on the right path to appreciating the marine environment and being a good ambassador of our seas and oceans then hopefully there can be a greater rippling effect.

For this very reason I encourage those of you who are of the same mind to move ahead with your training as a Divemaster, an Instructor or a Staff Instructor to help make a difference not just as a dive leader but one who has the ability to open hearts and minds to the hidden beauty of God's creation and to uphold our obligation to protect it.

Stephen
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