No rain, no wind, no cooler weather, great for the tourist but not s good for the corals. With 2010 looking to be the hottest year on record for the past 650000 years the nature around us gets affected. With the unusually hot weather the se temperature has also increased slowly over the year and at this time is reaching around 33-34 degrees Celsius. What an effect this is having on our coral reefs, coral bleaching (where the corals become really stressed and turn white) can be seen on every reef. From our reef surveys we can estimate that up to 70 % of the corals around the island have been affected. We hope for cooler weather once the summer is over.

Apart from the coral bleaching monitoring we have been conducting our regular marine conservation dives, helping the University of Songkra and the DMCR (Department of Marine and Costal Resources) in constructing coral reef nurseries from broken corals. The project was a great success with 4 other dive schools from Koh Tao also helping out. September saw the sinking of the Trident, a long time Koh Tao resident boat that had come to its final days above the water. The owner Jamie came back from the UK to see his old boat go down to create Koh Tao’s first wreck dive. The trident now lies at 30 meters off the south end of Shark Island. Hope you can join us there for a dive one day.

Every year on April the 13^th is the time for one of the most fun Thai Festivals, Songkran or Thai new year happens at the end of the traditional dry season and in the old days the masses celebrated the coming of the rains as it they would water the paddy fields and yield the main food in the Thai diet rice.

These days everyone one around the country takes to the streets and throws water at anybody that’s passing by. Powder is also used and no one is excused. Not a good day to travel with your backpack, if you have any intentions to stay dry, well this day its impossible. As usual we had a great Songkran party at the dive school, the kids start early in the morning and the party goes on all night. This year we had our house band Bora Bora playing live music again and we danced the day and night away in the garden.

A great time to visit Thailand in general, and of course New Heaven where we always do our best to have fun.

Every March Koh Tao holds a 2 day local festival to promote environmental actives and to raise money for future projects. During the day many games are put on for everyone to join in and you can walk around the environmental booths to see some of the work going on around the island. We always have a Turtle release; this year was special as the turtles we release were born on Koh Tao 6-8 months earlier. It was a real pleasure to see those baby turtles swimming away to their freedom. During the evening the crowds are entertained by local Koh Tao residents, famous Thai bands and international DJ’s. Everybody dances away until the early morning hours.

If you are thinking of coming to Koh Tao I would really recommend to come for the festival, its always a great few days and so good to see people enjoying themselves for a good cause.

January - March 2010 As usual we started of the year in good spirits, every year on the 1st of january everyone gets a day off to join in the fun and games on Sai Daeng Beach. What a way to start the new year with plenty of good food and drinks friends and family. Diving gets underway the next day, and due to the lack of monsoon weather visability has been excellent. Clear blue waters the corals looking fab. and plenty of fish to match. As well as the dive courses and fun dives we have been busy with marine conservation, from monday to friday we are researching and restoring the coral reefs around our island.

This February we eventually had the right weather to put the buoyancy world structures down to the sea. This project was the Save Koh Tao’s big marine project for 2009. Due to bad weather last year we had to wait until after the monsoon weather died down. What a perfect day it was, we were on a time limit as the boat we used was the Koh Tao night boat which had to be back in Chumporn the same night, so we only had a window of 7 hours to get the job done. As usual the community came together and many volunteers came to help life the heavy structures from the land all the way to Twins dive site to become Koh Tao’s second artificial dive site.

February also saw the start of our Coral Spawning project; it was just life the discovery channel as we went down to collect the coral eggs and sperm three nights after the full moon. Seeing the beginning of life from these amazing organisms what truly a night to remember. We hope to cultivate the corals and eventually place them back onto the coral reefs. Look at our marine conservation page to get more information about this and other projects.