Your day starts around 07:00 with breakfast. After breakfast the plan for the day is reviewed. Some volunteers on longer stays will be doing scuba courses, others will be out doing marine research, underwater cleanups or community work. As a four week program participant, you start with a scuba refresher and check out dive, and then you will concentrate on learning how to take part in the scientific work. You will either join the coral monitoring team or the invertebrate group, and practise for around two weeks, before you will be ready to take part in the real work. Once your back from the days diving (we dive six days a week). We’ll usually have lunch around one or two o'clock - if you’re doing work far from our base, you’ll eat your lunch at a local market there. After lunch we often continue with our various activities till sometime in the afternoon. Typically this consists of entering survey-data on computers or various base work.
The evenings are different. At times you will be at work analyzing data collected on the dives or studying, but often you’ll just want to relax and unwind with fellow volunteers. What you do after dinner in the evenings is very much up to yourself. You may want to organize a game or movie night, share a drink and a laugh, get people around a camp fire or something completely different. Other options would be to go on a night dive, go for a run, catch up with friends and family at home using our free WiFi, work out in our gym or just quietly read a book. It really is up to you.
Sunday is always a day off. No volunteers or staff do any diving, except during unusual circumstances. Obviously food needs to be cooked, but other than that nothing happens on Sundays, unless you organize it yourself. (When’s the last time you went swimming in a mountain lake, visited a faith-healer or sung karaoke anyway?) Many people go out and visit waterfalls, lakes or laze by a pool in a nice resort.