By: Bruce Konefe

After months of talking and research we got enough information gathered to make our next exploration trip. We wanted to explore some cave systems in the Northwestern parts of Thailand.

By: Jay Maclean

Photo:Fish 'N Fins

I am in the throes of completing a book on marine ecosystems. It has taken more than a year of my life to distil the knowledge of several hundred scientific articles combined with the results of an exciting new way to model food webs that are the basis of ecosystem functioning, i.e. fish eat fish. It has been a dry exercise, difficult initially to digest the information, difficult to present it in an easily digestible way.

The message is basically that we (fishers, spearfishers) are fishing out the seas, leaving only small inedible fish to look at, a process called fishing down the food web. But last week, it all came to life. I was submerged on a tiny reef area called Ulong Channel in Palau (real name Belau), itself a tiny dot in the massive Pacific Ocean, 1,000 miles southeast of Manila, 4,500 miles west of Hawaii. There I saw the whole food web in action all at once--I could see its importance in the scheme of things.

The Ulong Channel is one of those places where water surges out of the lagoon on the west side of the Palau islands and is spat out along with stray divers into the Philippine Sea, with a few thousand metres of water between scuba tank and seabed.

What is the state of the nearest coral reef to your home? Is it thriving suffering great swathes of bleaching and anchoring damage? Chances are most divers could give you an idea of a reefs health but how accurate would that data be?

" We did not lie to the public when we said that sharks are in trouble, and that the people eating them may be too," stated WildAid President Kraisak Choonhavan.

" We are not singling out shark fin merchants in Thailand," added WildAid Director Steven Galster.

" Thailand is part of a global trade. Many of the fins on the Thai market come from Hong Kong, the main distribution point for shark fin sales internationally. Fins sold out of Hong Kong come from sharks fished all over the world. So the consumer of shark fin soup -whether they are in Bangkok or San Francisco-is part of a global threat to sharks. And that same consumer may be risking his or her own health by ingesting an unpublished ingredient, Galster said."

By Mala and Adi Gehri of ABC DIVERS Koh Samui

Sea grass beds where many treasures await to be discovered

Warm Water Divers
Phuket Where 5 Stars Shine

There's a lot more to Warm Water Divers on Patong Beach than meets the eye. On first impression they appear to be what can only be described as undoubtedly the best-stocked retail outlet on Phuket Island, but there's more. Flexibility is the word here; Warm Water Divers actually promote the full range of scuba diving services.

DOCT Divemaster Program 2002

  DOCT's flagship project of training up local residents began in 2001 when The DOCT was
formed on Phuket with the intention of trying to encourage and welcome the participation of Thai Nationals into the diving industry. They offered to train up any eligible applicant from open water to divemaster at no cost. The actual cash value of the training provided to the successful applicants would amount to thousands of Baht. The initial year saw 22 qualified applicants, 13 of who completed the program to be certified as divemasters. Six graduates gained full time employment in the diving industry with all the expenses being met by the members of the DOCT.