The CoralGarden has grown with TWO more flowers. We planted 2 flowers at the same time. And it was the first time an artificial reef was assembled under water by freedivers. Both scuba and freediving teams had great fun and came up with big smiles on their faces after the flowers were planted…..
The local action group Get Involved Koh Tao every month organizes an EcoDay and is active to persuade bars to stop using plastic straws and plastic cups. On EcoDay many divers, freedivers and tourists from different diveschools come together to get a morning full of education with presentations and documentaries. In the afternoon the group is split up to do a beach clean-up, a reef clean-up and join building or assembling the new artificial reef under water.
We know the drill of building a flower underwater with divers, but freediving is quiet a bit different. Bringing parts of structures down with freedivers has been done before. And now is the next challenge, assembling the flower. A pair of two freedivers take a deep breath, go down and assemble a piece of the flower. When you “run out of air”, you go up and do your recovery breath. On the surface your buddy keeps an eye out for your safety. Then the next pair goes down and assembles the next leaf, etcetera. Sometimes it takes longer to put a piece in the flower, so when you can’t hold your breath any longer you have to leave it for the next team. It is great fun to work on the flower as a team. Great for the team spirit as well!
All the freedivers had to go down many times. When they came back on the boat, they were really exhausted. But I will never forget the smiles on their faces!
Thanks to Blue Immersion for their involvement creating a few flowers on our workplace and assembling the flower under water. Big thanks to Ocean Candy for the beautiful video!
Thank you for all (divers and freedivers) who participated in this amazing achievement! It was great to have one big boat full of dive enthusiasts sharing this experience with different dive methods. Wonderful to see we all share the same passion!
And of course thanks to our local partners on Koh Tao and the sponsors and donators from all over the world. Thank you to all who make this possible!
Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see the video of planting the flower.