Category: 2017-2018 (Personal learning – event)

On this particular trip, lasting from November 16-19, LMRT is focusing on practicing marine survey and substrate identification ability assessment. As usual, on the way to Koh Seh island, we review what we’ve learned and read our books. There, all our dive were focused on transect survey practice. For the first dive, we had to do everything by ourselves to practice our transect survey. Laying the transect line was one of our main problems. I could feel myself floating on the surface all the time when holding on to the safety marker buoy (SMB) while laying the transect line. After that dive, my dive instructors figure that I need more weight to help me descend into the water. They also learned that they need to teach us one skill at a time, then teach us to combine the skills together to learn a more difficult skill like marine surveying. For the next dives, we only need to swim with neutral buoyancy and record everything we see there. Though things we had to do were reduced I still had a lot of troubles. I felt very uncomfortable swimming with my new weight; which made it hard for me to control my buoyancy. I felt the need to move my legs all the time to keep my neutral buoyancy, which made me swim very fast; it was too fast for the survey. I couldn’t write everything I saw when I finished the survey. I continued to have the similar problem every day while trying to adjust to my new weight until my last dive of this trip, where I got used it.

Beside the dives, I took the substrate identification test and got involved in projects with people at MCC (Marine Conservation Cambodia). MCC is an organization that is working protecting the marine life. With MCC’s people, I did a beach cleanup around the island with my dive team, consisting of three other students. In less than an hour, we collected about 28 kilograms of trash, which later was used by the other dive team to stuff into plastic bottles that had been collected in order to make eco blocks. I was also involved in a dolphin survey where I had to use a binocular to search across the sea in a zig-zag pattern, standing up high on the hill. Unfortunately, we did not spot a single dolphin that day, in fact, MCC had not seen any dolphin in two weeks. Even though my expectation was to see a dolphin, I felt very happy to search for them. 

Overall, the whole trip was a very good experience. I felt like I was already a part of protecting the ocean through picking up the trash and learning to do an underwater survey.

On the 26th of October, LMRT (Liger Marine Research Team) went back to Koh Seh to practice our SCUBA diving skills as well as taking a test to see how well we identify fish species and learning more about marine surveying. On the second day of being there, our dive instructor planned us a dive where we had to practice our navigation skills underwater. Unfortunately, the visibility was very bad, so we weren’t able to do much.Later that morning, we reviewed for our fish identification test and took it in the afternoon. I felt very nervous when the test started. At first, I did very bad, so the mentor gives me more tips to identify the species which look very similar. For, I second try, I score much better, this time I passed the test. It felt like the most rewarding thing ever especially when we got to dive with the bioluminescence after the test. I swam in the water and release all my tension from the test there while moving my limb around to see the beautiful glitter of the night. The experience made me feel like I had seen underwater firework celebrating the success of passing the test.

Later this trip, we attempt to practice our navigation skills again.We had two dive buddies team dive together, one team lead first and take down the note of the direction they are traveling in, then they would the note our team and the next team had to lead back to the starting point. When my team got the dive slate, we couldn’t understand the writing, so we just use our instinct and the nature around us to find our way back. It turned out that we didn’t get to the starting point, the boat, but we were very close. We just had to swim around 50 meters to get to the boat. On this trip, we also practice surveying with transect line, but on land. We had to practice walking on land with the speed of about 1.5 meter per minute, which is the speed at which we should do the survey underwater. At that point I felt like doing a survey isn’t that hard until I practice a real one underwater on the next trip.