All work and a little bit of play

During our fifth week in Trincomalee, we made two trips to a local high school to continue our work with the Ocean Stars trust! During the first visit we introduced the team and had a group of students design logos to be used for future expeditions, while in the second session the students constructed oceanic food webs before being shown what detrimental effects plastics can have on these complicated webs. We were very impressed with the understanding displayed by the students, and we have been very lucky to have been able to work with such a bright group of young people. We’re really grateful for Ocean stars trust and their regional representative Janabdeen for helping us and providing transport and guidance.

This week has also been full of celebrations in Sri Lanka as two of our team leaders have had their birthdays! So happy birthday to Rosie and Lily, while you have gotten older neither of you look a day over forty! The team also joined with our friends at the Poseidon Dive Centre for PADI women’s day to promote women within the SCUBA diving community, this was a great time for everyone to relax a little at a beach BBQ hosted by the dive centre where we had some of the best Sri Lankan Food yet and learnt a few new dance moves.

In addition to our continued scientific dives team members have begun our beach clean programme in Trincomalee and the surrounding area, this will see us clean 20,000m2 of beach at 10 different beaches in total. So far a wide range of human waste has been collected the bulk of which has been plastic in different forms, from fishing nets and rope to bottles, plastic bags and even shoes. Plastic is a big part of our work in Trincomalee and their removal aswell as the study of their distribution have been a major focus for us this year.