Some of you know that Canukdownunder has been gracing the shores of
southern Thailand for the past month. C-downunder is settling in little
by little, but hasn't spent as much time in the water as she'd like.

So in the spirit of making merit (the Buddhist term for doing good deeds)
as well as doing a bit of nitrogen loading, the two of us decided to
participate in the scuba portion of the beach cleanup at Patong Beach
yesterday.

In the morning we met at our sponsoring dive shop and piled into a
pickup for the ride to the beach where we put our gear together,
received cutting tools, collection bags and gloves, and set off in
longtail boats in teams of four to pick up rubbish and debris from the
seabed.

We did a whole series of dives ranging in length from two (!) minutes
(we had a heavy anchor thing to bring up) to 65 minutes (our third of
four dives) at depths of two to twelve meters or so. Our aim was to
collect fishing nets, plastics, metal, and whatever else we found. In
all, volunteers collected over 2,000 kilos of debris throughout
the activity.

Our first two dives (20 minutes and 2 minutes) took place at a site
where the visibility was about 30 cm. We descended about 1 m apart but
immediately lost one another and had to surface. Then we each held one
end of the collector bag so that we wouldn't get separated.

Our next two dives (65 minutes and 20 minutes) were done at a fairly
clean site that was also quite beautiful. We managed to pick up a pretty
good number of nets, and we also had the delight of seeing some wonderful
marine life while we were at it: napoleon wrasse, reef octopus, cuttlefish,
oriental sweetlips, lobsters, many angelfish, butterflyfish and other
typical reef dwellers. What a great dive!

It was fun, and I just want to say "Thanks Canuk, for diving with me!"