JEDDAH, 8 September 2007 — The annual cleanup and assessment of the marine environment off Jeddah’s coastline sponsored by Desert Sea Divers netted several hundred kilos of assorted rubbish. For the first time, the environmental awareness-raising event was operated as a joint venture with the Jeddah-based Regional Organization for the Conservation of the Environment of the Red Sea and Aden (PERSGA). Some 40 dedicated divers volunteered their services with three dives each.
Hans Sjoholm, who led the dive teams organized on three boats by Abubaker Panchikal of Desert Sea Divers at their Obhur marina, said at the pre-trip briefing that the day’s cleanup was simply a continuation of the drive to clean and preserve the marine environment.
“It started in Sweden some 45 years ago and since then has spread worldwide, thanks to divers, the environmental lobby and dive organizations such as PADI,” Sjoholm told the team of about 40 divers in the operation.
In 2006 the Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI) logged over half a million divers involved in their cleanup dives. Sjoholm noted that interest in the Kingdom in the cleanup exercise brought expatriate divers from across the country for the day and that the multinational mix of divers reflected the worldwide need for marine preservation.
As part of the drive to raise public awareness, International Coral Reef Initiative has designated 2008 as the International Year of the Reef.
PADI’s International Cleanup Day falls this year on Sept. 14, but with the advent of Ramadan, local divers elected to bring it forward a week or so for religious and safety reasons. Diving, and especially underwater work, tends to cause raised levels of dehydration and failure to address this can cause problems for the divers.
Mohammed Kotb, coordinator of Biodiversity and MPA Program at PERSGA, praised the efforts of the divers and said that the day’s exercise would provide valuable data to analyze exactly what sort of garbage was fouling the reefs and provide the foundation of a long-term database. He also announced the impending installation of diving buoys on 15 of the most popular dive sites off Jeddah.
“They will become operational in the next week or so and by allowing the dive charter boats to tie up to the buoys rather than drop anchor on the living reefs, we will make a noticeable contribution to preservation,” he said.
Earlier attempts at providing buoys have met with failure, as itinerant fishermen were wont to steal them. Measures have been taken with the new buoys to prevent this.
Sjoholm said that efforts to prevent the dumping of garbage on the reef should be redoubled and become a regular feature of coastal environment protection. “The effects of dumping plastics in particular,” he said. “They degrade extremely slowly and accumulate on the reef and seabed.”
He said the average nylon monofilament line takes 600 years to degrade and a plastic water bottle about 450 years. “Apart from that, turtles and large marine mammals mistake the translucent bottles for jellyfish and eat them, with fatal results.”
At the late afternoon debriefing after a total of 120 dives, the group made a rough analysis of the day’s work. “We feel on initial assessment that the garbage levels are no worse than last year,” said Sjoholm, “though the outer walls of the reefs are seriously affected by webs of monofilament fishing line.”
He said a better view of the state of the reefs would be available after the data collected by the teams had been analyzed.
