Excerpt: Travel Log, Malaysia
Day 10: Pom Pom Island
We settled into PPI routine. Wake up around 7–7:30am and have breakfast. Then we would jump on the dive boats with our crew and do two morning dives. On the second dive today we saw a massive barracuda, the highlight of my dive experience to this point. We got extremely close and I got great photos and video. We also saw several Green Sea turtles and and Hawksbill turtles. They are amazing creatures of the sea and we certainly should do everything we can to conserve these animals. We also did an afternoon dive and this would be our routine for the next day or so. Fletcher, from Tropical Research Conservation Centre, came over tonight to give us a talk on the ongoing conservation efforts of the Green Sea turtles and Hawksbills. I retired to my room after the talk.
Interlude: TRACC
TRACC was a conservation group based on the island. They had two main goals: 1. Track the turtles that nest on the island 2. Devise creative methods for regrowing coral around the island. Unfortunately most of the coral around the island had been badly damaged. It was literally blown up by local fishermen in an effort to more effectively catch more fish. An efficient, yet terribly destructive method. This has been a theme of our trip to Malaysia. The group itself seems a bit dubious at best. There doesn’t seem to be any actual scientists here. There are about five staff members and the rest are volunteers that stay roughly a month at a time. As we were leaving a group of Chinese volunteers showed up. The staff were no very excited. It seems the last time a group of Chinese volunteers arrived it hadn’t gone well. Elaboration was not forthcoming. The organization seems to be led by a guy called Johnny. He seems to be a replacement of some kind, a person who knows the daughter of a guy called Steve, who appears to be the person who underwrites this whole operation. Like I said, dubious.
Day 11: Pom Pom Island
We woke up and fell into our routine, breakfast, two morning dives, lunch and an afternoon dive. Between dives the previous day we had walked over the the TRACC headquarter, and I use that term loosely, to help build some artificial reefs. The process was interesting. They are trying all kinds of creative methods for reef building. They have bags of dry concrete mix. Simply add sand and water to the mix and pour the mixture into the molds. While the concrete is still wet, stick bottles or sticks into the concrete and let the mixture dry. The mixture was not ready/dry enough to be placed on the bottom today. It would have to wait. We completed our final dive on Pom Pom Island’s northern tip. We dove here in order to survey the area where our artificial reefs would be placed and to see previous examples of what our work would become. This was our final night on the island. Dinner this evening consisted of barbecue. Fish, chicken, and beef smoked over a grill of open wood coals. A fine meal.
