Ocean Watch is a closed "secret" facebook group to facilitate the sharing of information for all concerned about the health of the Indian Ocean around Zanzibar and East Africa. We request those diving, snorkelling and fishing to share and report on what they see. This is a more formal grapevine to help us all better understand the issues we are facing in terms of protecting our marine resources as well as to highlight unique or interesting sightings - positive or negative. We welcome into this group members from our scientific community, government authorities, and any concerned residents who can be the eyes and ears for the coastline and surrounding waters.

Another challenging but successful cleanup day on this area which was heavily entangled by multiple old abandoned fishing nets. Thank you to Christopher Bartlett (Indigo Safaris) for the photos (and also video not shown yet here). A huge thank you to all of our volunteer divers who came out to assist which included the chairman of the Zanzibar Association of Tourism Investors, several general managers of top hotels in Zanzibar, Ulli our marine biologist from Chumbe Island, colleagues from Deep Sea Fisheries, our Scuba Do Crew and many more! On followup visits to this site we were amazed at the returning coral growth as well as many fish in and around these coral bommies!

Coral reefs are unique ecosystems that are facing threats of bleaching caused by rising sea surface temperatures due to climate change factors. Monitoring for coral bleaching can be a very costly and time consuming exercise for scientists to cover such vast areas. We had the opportunity to work Ulli Klobier, Marine Biologist form Chumbe Island Coral Park and Dr. David Obura and his team from CORDIO to assist with the creation of a citizen science approach to regional coral bleaching monitoring and reporting. We assisted with the development of an online form to capture data in a form that can be easily understood by recreational divers and snorkellers. The results are automatically entered in the database and this concept has been expanded to include a much larger area. Please see below the link to the form where you can report on your reefs you dive regularly - it is important to submit results even if no bleaching is observed.

We are always trying to do our part to protect our Oceans, and partaking in the Coral Reef Monitoring Workshop led by Dr. David Obura and organised by Marine Cultures and Chumbe Island Coral Park has enabled us to do even more!

Working together with our Department of Fisheries, we called for volunteers from other dive centres to join us to cleanup abandoned fishing nets. Thank you to Lisa Labinjoh (AquaImages) for the fantastic video footage of the day's activities! We made a lot of progress this day, especially of a part of net which was still moving with the tidal water movement and effectively "still fishing". Hard work, but mission successful!

Scuba Do Zanzibar joined other key stakeholders to be trained in Reef Resilience and Coral Bleaching Monitoring. Through a collaborative and interactive approach this stakeholder workshop trained ten participants from government, research and private sectors in principles of reef resilience, emerging climate change issues and early warning systems. On day 2 this knowledge was taken into the field where participants learned how to monitor for reef resilience by using a semi quantitative scoring system. Experiences and feedback from the field trip were discussed on day 3 and taken forward on how to start networking in order to prepare for, monitor and respond to future bleaching events in the Western Indian Ocean region. This workshop was expertly facilitated by Ulli Klobier, Chumbe Island Coral Park's marine biologist and sponsored by The Nature Conservancy.

After our successful cleanup day on the 8th December 2012, we had to wait for the Kaskazi (North tradewinds) winds to pass and organised a week-long cleanup event from the 9th to the 16th of March. We finished the cleanup of the initial area West of Tumbatu Island and continued cleaning nets around Nankivell Reef.