By Jenny Rutherford / Real Estate agent in Georgia, USA
“Happy Tybee News! We had an awesome presentation from “All For Blue organization” yesterday at the Tybee Post Theater for the middle school kids at Tybee Island Maritime Academy. Katerina Topouzoglou and her team flew from Greece for a day and half to be here for this presentation – and also went to schools in Bahamas and Miami along the way! Such an honor to have her here on Tybee; she absolutely loved our island and was blown away by the students knowledge and level of questions. I’m helping her to plan her return trip next year where hopefully she can stay a little longer for a community wide event.
We had 55 kids participate in a beach clean up with this non profit organization who promotes ocean and beach conservation! Happy to report there was hardly any trash on the beach at all, apart some single use plastics, lighters, and pandemic masks. In fact it was hard to find and All For Blue team said this was the first time it’s ever happened on a beach clean up across the world!
Most of the trash we saw was around the crosswalks and dunes but it was inaccessible.
One student was lucky enough to find a fossil shark tooth during the beach cleanup.
The kids learned an array of subjects about sharks and shark conservation from Katerina who is a shark diver and shark awareness instructor, including ocean life topics by the biologist of All For Blue team Tania Drakou, the great pacific garbage patch and how to make little changes in habit for a big impact like using refillable water bottles vs single use plastics and carrying their own reusable straws. Each kid got a reusable water straw too from the organisation, as well as, a certificate of completion from the seminar by Padi Aware.
TIMA is now forming an All For Blue chapter for the kids to do trash pick ups and were left with gear from Greece (reusable bags & gloves) to get the group going!”
