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On the 7th March 2011, Chulalongkorn University Marine Conservation Youth Training Program launched its second Marine and Coastline conservation project. Altogether, there were some 140 students from 14 southern Thai universities involved with the project.
 This 5 day event was held at two different locations. The first two days of the event, was held at the Prince or Songkla University, Suratthani with the remaining 3 days of the open fieldwork being conducted on the west coast of Trang.
The conservation project covered both marine and coral studies as well as coastlines conservation. The student’s surveyed many different types of coastlines, such as mangroves, sea grass, sandy and rocky beaches etc in order to assess the current status of life around such areas.
In addition to this, the students also conducted an underwater survey on the state and condition of the corals and marine life.
To enable the students to conduct the latter of these studies, BSAC Thailand was asked to partner up with the project by helping to train some 140 students to snorkel.
On the first day, the project started with an opening ceremony, in which the Thai Deputy Prime Minister; Mr. Suthep Thaugsuban attended. Mr. Thaugsuban offered his support for the project and addressed the students in a speech; highlighting the importance of such a project and the protection and conservation of Thailands coastlines, coral reefs and marine life.
Mr. Thaugsuban also requested that this university project should be extended next year by offering this program to Northern and North Eastern universities and their students. Historically, this program has only been available to universities in Bangkok and in the south of Thailand; Universities that have easy access to the coast.
Since this event, there are already plans to integrate these northern-based universities into the program
After the ceremony speeches and formal presentations, each university and their students conducted an individual presentation on their own. Each university group had their own portfolio of the project they are currently working on. Their displays featured articles, survey studies which were supported with photographs and other pictures and diagrams
On day two, we were all off the swimming pool for a full day of snorkel training. The training was conducted at two different swimming pools, with some 70 students training at each venue. The students were broken down into groups of 12 students to 1 instructor, plus 1 assistant.
 The snorkel training started with some basic snorkeling skills which were conduct in a shallow water pool – with an overall maximum depth of 1-metre. After showing the student the correct fitting of their equipment, we then moved on to teaching the students the correct fining techniques, snorkel and mask clearing. The next step was to teach the students some fundamental snorkelling skills, such as, surface swimming, surface dives and surfacing drills, short underwater breath-hold swims and under water mobility and streamlining.
After lunch, and for students that wanted to extent their snorkelling skills further, we move to a deeper pool where students practice some deeper surface diving skills and surfacing drills. At the end of the day we made available a number of scuba diving units to students who were interested in trying a scuba experience dive. The idea was that some students would like to learn how to scuba dive – which would immensely assist them further in their conservation studies.
Overall the day was a great success and the students were ready to embark on their open water snorkelling in conjunction with the fieldwork in Trang province.
The conclusion of the whole project is that it was a great success, so much that we are already planning for the 2012 project.
If you would like to know more about this conservation project you can meet members from Chulalongkorn University Marine Conservation on the BSAC Thailand booth ( Booth No P091 –P092) at this years May 2011 TDEX Expo Dive Show, in Bangkok. www.thailanddiveexpo.com
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