In August, our restoration team made some great strides with our mass transplantation, as they emptied all the corals from the ropes and trees from our nursery in Cook’s Bay and planted them onto the nearby reef where they are already thriving. These efforts brought our coral plant to a total of 24,654 since the first plant, moving us closer to our goal of 30,000 by the end of this year. We still have thousands of corals to plant, so if you want to support our restoration efforts, you can help us directly by adopting a coral on our website.
The nursery in Cook’s Bay did not stay empty for long, as the resto team reseeded it with hundreds of baby corals as soon as they had completed the transplantation. They also got creative to extend the nursery and added three new tree structures to the ones already in place, using local bamboo and wood to increase the sustainability of our restoration methods. So far, the trees are holding strong in the garden, and we are very hopeful with this new method!
August was also a full-on month of activating the surf community, starting with a coral workshop at the World Surf League Tahiti Pro championship event in Teahupo’o, followed by another one back at our main garden in Mo’orea with big wave surfers, Laura Enever and Billy Kemper, amidst other pros and local ambassadors. Finally, we rounded out the month by representing Coral Gardeners at the Roxy Vahine Cup in Tahiti – a special, female-only surf comp for islanders based in French Polynesia. With all of these events, we have already beat the number of last year’s awareness events, marking our 12th of the year.
Lastly, our communications team got to host filmmaker, Sam Potter, to work on a new episode for his Emmy-nominated series, Back to the Wild. We had so much fun adventuring our island and coral reefs together, and can’t wait to show you guys what we created together during his time with us. We also found ourselves amidst a giant humpback whale during one of our shoots – a fitting addition to his nature series.
