Project Bay Islands
Added to website: 06 October 2005
After 5 years of work on Roatán, the volunteers and staff of Project Bay Islands have achieved an enormous amount. The CCC baseline ecological surveying programme has resulted in over 2,400 survey records, documenting the biophysical assemblages of the threatened barrier, patch and fringing reefs surrounding this beautiful island. In all, these surveys covered nearly 300,000 m² of reef, recording the location and abundance of over 165,000 individual organisms as well as the geological structure, oceanographic conditions and physical impacts characteristic of these inshore regions.
These data have been used to create resource ‘maps’ of the island, highlighting ‘good’ areas that need to be protected from degradation as well as impacted areas that need to be monitored for recovery or decline in response to implemented management plans. This is a level of information that few countries can afford to gather in terms of either funding or man-power and will make a huge contribution to securing the reef resources of the island for future generations. In addition, 138 Reef Check surveys have been conducted, with these data contributing to the Reef Check worldwide database of coral reef health.
The extensive community work undertaken by the Project Scientists has resulted in countless beach clean-ups with the local community, a self-financing solid-waste disposal scheme on Santa Helena and a series of teacher-training workshops on the neighbouring Bay Islands of Utila and Guanaja in conjuction with our Honduran project partners PMAIB. In all, nearly 1000 school children of all ages (and frequently their parents) have taken an active role in our environmental education workshops in the towns of Punta Gorda, Coxen Hole, Sandy Bay, French Harbour, Flowers Bay, Gravel Bay, Sico and The Point. Educational posters have been professionally produced in both Spanish and English, hundreds of reef collages and drawings have been made by the schools and even the interior of the public hospital in Coxen Hole has been painted.
Over 150 Honduran counterparts have been trained under the CCC Marine Scholarship scheme, from weekend-long ‘reef-awareness’ snorkelling workshops to full 5 week expeditions, learning to dive and to survey side by side with more than a thousand CCC volunteers. These counterparts have come from the local fishing and tourism communities as well as from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Honduras and the Universidad Jose Cecilio del Valle, both in Tegucigalpa. This ‘passing-on’ of knowledge is essential if the momentum gained by Project Bay Islands is to be continued now that CCC’s work on the island is nearing completion.
On Santa Helena, many of the local men are engaged in SCUBA diving for lobsters but the lack of knowledge or any sort of training has lead to a history of horrific accidents, many resulting in permanent disfigurement, disability or death from the ‘bends’. In an attempt to combat this, the CCC SCUBA Instructors at the Santa Helena base have engaged in a training programme to teach the theory of safe diving to the fishermen. In fact, some of the fishermen have chosen to continue their dive education at the project base, gaining their PADI Open Water, Advanced Open Water and even Rescue Diver qualifications. The formalisation of this training means that the fishermen are eligible to take up Divemaster internships with the local dive shops on Roatán, opening doors for them within the tourism industry in the future.
The current phase of Project Bay Islands will come to completion in April 2006. The Project to date has been an incredibly rewarding and challenging undertaking for all those involved, and CCC would like to take this opportunity to extend our sincere and heartfelt thanks to all of the volunteers, staff and associates who make it all possible. But the story doesn’t end here. After 20 years of projects in the region and 7 years in the Bay Islands, CCC is looking forward to continuing its ongoing association with this area of the world, as the challenges facing the coral reefs of the Caribbean, and the communities whose livelihoods depend on them, continue to grow.
- Shay O’Farrell, CCC Chief Technical Advisor
