2018

On day 5, I was told I wasn't going to be ale to participate in the blackwater dive due to safety concerns along with 8 other people from the whole team. After hearing the news, I was ready to see what else we could do that day. My group went off first to a submarine off the western Kona...

After two long days of diving, day six started off a little slower. We started day with a service project, a beach cleanup. Plastics and other marine debris can be extremely harmful to aquatic plants. Plastics take much longer to break down than most other materials. Often when a plastics are thrown away, they end up in the ocean...

With only one dive remaining in the day, I woke up Friday morning with excitement. We started off our day back at the NELHA facility and entered the incredible deep water air conditioned room. We climbed down into a small, compacted, and cool room. Our guide explained to us again about how the room cooled and how it helped...

Beginning our fifth day, we all got up early, ate breakfast, and drove out to the NELHA facility to look more in depth in ocean air cooling and other facilities. After arriving to the NELHA we crawled through the visitor center closet to find a secret ladder beneath the building. Once we crawled below, we moved under a skylight...

Without breakfast, we travelled to a beach to remove trash and plastic from it. We walked up and down the beach removing trash from the shoreline. After 30 minutes we took a break and were told about anchialine pools. They are little tide pools on the shore where there are usually animals. Unfortunately, sand built up after a tsunami....

This morning we departed for our service project this trip which included cleaning up trash from the beach and digging sand out of a freshwater and saltwater mixed pond. While searching the beach for trash we were lucky enough to stumble upon a green sea turtle on the beach. We could tell it was a green sea turtle due...

Today was our sixth day in Hawaii, and we had another great day! We began our day be waking up later than usual, leaving at around 8:30. My group, the pyrosomes, had to pack a lunch, since we weren't coming back to the house to eat lunch, since we were doing the hike after. We first went to the...

Today we started the day with wonderful breakfast tacos and quickly made our way to the vans and went to the beach. At the beach, we cleaned up trash. This trash can harm the ecosystem because animals think that the plastic is food and it can ensnare the animals. While cleaning, we were fortunate to see a sea turtle...

Saturday 28, 2018 The Sand Castle Service Project makes an effort not only to pick up marine debris and trash, but also restore a fishing pond hit by a hurricane. On the beach we volunteered at, our goal was to pick up and reduce waste which could hurt marine mammals, including Monk Seals. They sometimes eat or play with plastic...