outer divers: andre & vignes doing the invertebrate survey
center: julian hyde doing the substrate survey
Over the weekend of the 20th - 21st of April Reef Check Malaysia conducted reef checks on Tioman and Redang islands. Marine Conservation Project's sole volunteer Vignes Balasingam went down to Tioman to help Julian and his team on four reef surveys on Ringgis and Pirate Reef on the 20th and Kador and Batu Malang on the 21st. The survey team consisted of four persons; one to lay the line and do the substrates, a fish counter and two more doing the invertebrates.
On this trip divers from Bali Hai Divers at Penuba on Tioman spotted Manta rays in the distance while diving at Tiger Reef. This is a rare sighting as Tioman isnt too popular with Manta sightings.
Along with that amazing sighting, divers out at Ringgis saw three 5.5 foot long Black Tip Reef Sharks swimming by the outer rim of the reef. Just good luck, Kaj (TDC's instructor) had brought his video camera down for the dive and recorded that spectacular sighting. Harry, a travel diver there made some pictures of the sharks. Here's one from his collection.
Enough on great diving. Next is the update on what some of the Marine Conservation Project members have been doing:
On the 17th of April 2007, Ng Siaw Ling, Edmund Lau and CK attended (and completed) the Reef Check classroom training with Julian Hyde in KL. What was supposed to have been a two-session classroom training was complete in just one session. Mr Hyde was well chuffed! Goes to show that us fellas from Marine Conservation Project arent too shabby!
Siaw Ling and Edmund will be off to Tioman in June to finish up the training and get themselves certified as EcoDivers. CK will be finishing his EcoDiver training upon returning from the Sabah Expedition in August. The poor fella has never done reef checks in the past and was just blown away by the technicalities involved. But the good spirited CK took it in stride and will definitely have a better time understanding things when he goes diving on expedition.
With the training to be completed in June we would have our core team of EcoDivers!
More EcoDiver Training
Marine Conservation will be organising another Reef Check EcoDiver training session in May. Please email marineconservationproject@gmail.com to sign up for it. Dates will be planned out once we get a minimum of three volunteers. For more information on the programme please refer to the postings below.
For those of you planning to getting yourself certified as an Open Water Diver please email me your details and when you are intending to doing this.
Till then, hear soon.
