Whale Sharks

Category: Community work | Date: Aug 16 2008 | By: whalesharks

Diving The Crab is one of the leading dive operators here in Diani. You can check out their website www.divingthecrab.com for some super diving information and packages.

Daniel the manager has been working tirelessly with the local fishermen in an attempt to get them to release turtles that get caught in their nets. For each turtle that they release the fishermen are given a small reward to encourage better fishing practices. Whenever the fishermen have to cut their nets the arrangement is that they bring their nets plus entangled turtle to Danny for him to deal with. The fishermen bring the turtle to the Diving The Crab dive base in their dug out canoes.

Danny and his team will carefully remove the net and release the turtle back into the ocean.

Without Danny’s intervention these turtles would have drowned to death in the nets. It is so important to stop the use of the nets, in particular the habit the fishermen have of putting them on our coral reefs. I cannot begin to tell you how damaging these nets are to our marine life. I have described the huge problems they cause in earlier entries to this blog.

Together with dive operators like Diving The Crab we hope to encourage the fishermen to stop using the nets altogether. The initiative that Danny has started is a fantastic way to getting to know the fishermen and although our aim is get them to stop this method of fishing, having them bring the turtles to us is a good start. They also realise that they can release the turtle themselves so sometimes they don’t need to bring the turtles ashore and will just let Danny know that they have released a turtle. So far they have released 7 turtles which is brilliant. They are now more aware and educated thanks to Diving The Crab’s intervention.

We hope to get everyone in our community to work together to save our turtles.

These turtles pictured say a BIG THANK YOU to everyone at Diving The Crab!!

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