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What exactly am I doing?
Grenada, the "Isle of Spice" has been my home for the past 3 years. Its beauty and the warmth of its people are like no other. Whilst here I have had the privilege of enjoying its beautiful oceans where I have been able to continue my love for swimming and scuba diving.
During my time here 2 very important things came to my attention
1. Over 90% of Grenadians do not know how to swim
2. The number of sharks has dwindled due to over fishing. However, Grenadian Government has just approved the protection of all sharks within their Exclusive Economic Zone (which is basically their sea zone). GO GRENADA!
As my time here in Grenada is coming to an end, I have decided to say a huge thank you by give something back to the community and the oceans. To do this I have decided to swim a very long way: I will be starting at the northern tip of the island and then swim along the west coast to the stunning beach of Grand Anse. This is about 20miles, which I am hoping will take me less than 13hours, weather permitting. I am doing this in aid of shark conservation awareness as well as raising money to get more of Grenada's children swimming.
Please don’t stop reading here but continue below to see why this is so important and what we will be doing
1. School swimming Initiative
Due to the huge percent of people who cannot swim, Grenada Youth Adventures (GYA), a local swim team, gives children who cannot afford swimming lessons a chance to swim in their swim club without payment. However, the number of children is limited by space in the pool and distance the children have to travel. To increase numbers they started the "Get Grenada Swimming" initiative. Pools restrict the numbers of people able to join, so “Get Grenada Swimming” has set its sight on the seas. They have successfully organised an annual National Learn to Swim week (see, www.nltswgrenada.com for details) where adults and children are taught how to swim at beaches around Grenada.
This is still not enough.
To expand their initiative to enable it to reach more children, “Get Grenada Swimming” is looking to set up another annual swim week, focused solely on children, as well as to develop after school swimming programmes around the island. This will allow swimming to reach more children on a regular basis. It will also enable the sport of swimming to grow in an island where sport is already an important way of life. This is where I want to help out by raising funds in support of my swim. Living on an Island where water and boats are a way of life makes swimming an essential life skill.
2. Shark conservation awareness
11,000 sharks are killed per hour by humans through unsustainable and largely uncontrolled commercial fishing worldwide, driving many species towards extinction. While most people have the inbuilt fear of sharks largely due to movies like Jaws, they often don’t realise that in order to have healthy reefs and marine ecosystem WE need sharks.
Sharks are keystone species in marine ecosystems keeping the food web under control from the top to bottom. By removing sharks we see drastic changes and losses to these environments that we rely so heavily on for income and food.
Sharks are in general slow growers, late maturers and produce very few offspring in a lifetime. These combine to make them even more susceptible to over fishing as they cannot quickly recover their numbers, which makes it even more important to stop over fishing before it’s too late.
Grenada has just approved shark protection in its EEZ which is an incredible boost for sharks in the Caribbean, however we still need to change public option by educating them on how important sharks are.
Worldwide only 10 humans are killed annually by sharks, whereas 100million sharks are killed by humans. To change this mind set in Grenada Ecodive,Shark Defenders, the Pew Charitable Trust as well as other individuals have set up community programmes to promote shark awareness.
What I am going to do, is not only to raise awareness as part of this swim, but to have shark awareness included as part of the swimming lessons to be given as part of the new “Get Grenada Swimming” initiatives. After all the children are the future of this beautiful country.
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