The kids releasing 3 coral cat sharks which were confiscated from a boat illegally fishing within the conservation area.

October's Rubbish...

The final tallies are in and as expected it's been a record breaking month with over 470kgs of rubbish brought in off the reefs and beaches of Koh Rung Samleom. Thanks to all the volunteers and kids from the village for the hours they've put in! The best thing is that the amounts were falling off towards the end of the month leaving some of us disappointed that we were only bringing in 10 or 15kgs a day. Of course, in reality this is cause for celebration as it means that the clean ups are working!! It won't stop us trying to break this record in November however!!

With a total of 10 volunteers currently on the island, we are not suprised, but still very very happy to report record totals of rubbish collected from the reefs and beaches so far this month.

the excellent weather and with many of our volunteers suffering from a lack of diving due to the monsoon rains, we've been hitting the reefs with larger numbers and so far have a massive 187kgs picked up from the reef so far this month. 76kgs of this come on Monday when the volunteers had a day on the house reef, diving as often as they liked and going where they liked in buddy pairs. In addition, we've been exploring some new sites such as Boatman's Bay where many of the fishing boats anchor and naturally there was a lot of rubbish there too!

But we've not been neglecting the beach and are up to 162kgs from the beach so far. This includes a tyre dropped from a boat which we are hoping will become a welcome addition to the artifical reef in due course. The beach clean ups are often welcomed by the volunteers as a chance to top up their tans and play with the local children who occasionally come out to help. On one day they carried on without us, depositing and extra 5kgs of plastic and fabrics outside the bungalow.