25 September, PADI Project Aware Clean-up Day

Yesterday was PADI Project Aware Clean-up Day, and since we tend to keep our island tidy at all times, we helped the Enuk Island Community with the cleaning of their island. Current guests Nicola, Megan, Elly & Uschi all volunteerd to dive and clean the channel between the two islands that make up Enuk Island.

Many thanks go to Steve Wannell from Scubapro-Uwatec for donating mask & snorkel sets, to the guys & girls from Dive Adventures and to Hutch from Surf Travel Company for donating other prizes such as pencils, books, water colours, balls and stacks more.

Here are some photos from a fun morning:

The kids are off to collect the rubbish

Rubbish from the other side of the island arrives
by dugout canoe

 

Time for sorting and separating!

 

The dive team arrives back at the collection point
from cleaning the channel



 

While we wait for the kids to return with the rubbish,
Dietmar takes a picture of this great school project:
Re-forestation of mangrove trees just outside the school!

 

The prize table, with the kids waiting for the weighing
to begin to find out who has collected the most



First of the mark for measuring her collection is little
Jenny (in front, pulling her blue/white striped top UP)



One, two, three, many!  While Dietmar and the head
teacher work out who has won in which category......

 

... the kids line up for bisquits......

 

.... and ice-cold cordial



The piles are getting smaller and smaller each year!
It seems that our efforts are paying off, which is
fantastic news!



Group photo after a fun-filled and successful morning





















 















15 September, Lissenung Beach

We have had three seahorses living just off the beach for some time now. At first, there were only two little ones and we first spotted them approx. the same time as we saw the juvenile Brown Sweetlip. These two have grown a fair bit, and now there is a third one, this one much smaller than the other two. Our reef is a real fish nursery, or kindergarden. So many juveniles, it's awesome! It goes to show that our looking after the reef is really paying of. It also shows that more protected reef areas are needed.

Common Seahorse Hippocampus taeniopterus ??

Albatross Passage 7 September 2010

Cat & Dan, the dive managers at Walindi Plantation Resort, are visiting us at the moment, and Dietmar went out diving with them yesterday. We have had a fair bit of rain, which is very unusual at this time of the year, so the visibility was not very good. This doesn't bother Dietmar, who loves to stick his head into the reef anyway, looking for small stuff, and yesterday, he was not disappointed.

Ovulide Shell on soft coral

This little Ovulide shell looks so much like its host coral that it is hard to spot. Dietmar has e-mailed his friend Dr. Felix Lorenz, top expert in Ovulides and Cowries, and according to him, it's a Diminovula stigma (Cate, 1978).








Leafy Scorpionfish



This Leafy  Scorpionfish lives at Danny's Bommie, next  to Albatross Passage. We used to have one of those weird-looking fish there, but hadn't seen it for a while. Peni spotted this one about 2 weeks ago, and was very chuffed with himself.

One can be forgiven for not realising that this is an animal. The decorator crabs are really very clever. They blend into their surroundings by sticking stuff on their shells that looks just like the habitat they live in. I once saw a little piece of seagrass walking at Ral Island, which was a decorator crab trying to pretend to be part of a patch of greenery. Ingenious!!

 

Decorator Crab - looks like something from another planet?