Divemaster girls

The Fisherman's Cove  project has been ruled by a girl team lately, meet Carolyn and Lois our two new volunteers ! 
Frankie, the Hawksbill turtle 

Hello, my name is Carolyn and I am ecologist who has been stuck on the land for too long. I have travelled from wet and windy Scotland to the tropical shores of the Seychelles to complete my Divemaster training, volunteer with marine conservation projects and, most importantly, spend some time in the oceans again! I recently completed ten weeks with Dive Seychelles Underwater Centre to do my Divemaster internship. The highlight of that was undoubtedly seeing a WHALE SHARK!!! during a dive just round the corner from Fisherman’s Cove. 
So far during my time at Fisherman’s Cove I’ve built confidence with freediving – I still aim to be able to clean a whole row of the nursery on one breath…just now I can do almost half-way along a row. I have wrestled with marine life while cleaning the snorkel trail (the spiny sea urchin won – ouch!) and photographed hawksbill turtles for our database on a near-daily basis. In fact, nearly everyday we see the same hawksbill turtle, who we have named Frankie – check him/her (!?) out in the picture above.  
Lois and Carolyn cleaning the underwater postbox!
  
I’m Lois, and I’m spending my summer break from university (I study zoology) volunteering in marine conservation. I arrived in the Seychelles at the beginning of the month after doing fisheries and coral reef research in Mozambique. I’m now working on the MCSS’s Fishermen’s Cove project with Chloe, Aishah and Carolyn, and am also doing my Divemaster course with Dive Seychelles. 
Since starting here I’ve become so much more knowledgeable about coral and the genus’s found here (although I still suck at latin names!), which has made me admire and appreciate it even more. We’ve spent hours creating small concrete plugs for the coral fragments to attach to once our ex-situ nursery is ready, which is super exciting! Myself and Aishah kayaked out to sea and lowered the plugs into the ocean, so that they’ll neutralise – and had a great time kayak surfing back! Unfortunately the visibility hasn’t been great this week, so we haven’t been able to freedive down to our nursery and clean the corals, meaning we’ll have an extra long cleaning SCUBA dive on this Friday! Hopefully we’ll encounter a turtle or two and get some photographs for the identification software. I’ve really loved my time here so far and am already getting anxious about leaving the sea and the Seychelles and heading back to the UK in September, I guess I’ll just have to come back…


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