Association

The club was founded in 1994 by a group of Chanians, friends of the sea and marine environment.
The club's purpose is to promote ecological consciousness and respect for the protection and preservation of the marine ecosystem, and to demonstrate the natural beauty of our area.
Our activities include lectures, public dialog, phtotographic exhibitions, movie shows, diving excursions, article publication in the media and competitions, often in collaboration with local authorities.
Our club has currently 150 registered members, most of them certicied divers with an acute sense of appreciation for the sea.

MAJOR ACTION:

The earliest major activity was a series of symbolic garbage collection efforts of the seabed in ports around Crete, sending a message that keeping our seas clean is everybody's bussiness.

In a more adventurous direction, we also participated in search and rescue operations and with missions to remote islands.

We took the initiative of organizing a large campaign to inform the public on the destruction caused by dynamite fishing, by visiting several localities and performing enrichment of the fishstock in areas extensively damaged by dynamite.

We documented photographically and publicly denounced through the media the pollution caused by the Missile Range of Crete, both on the coast and on the seabed in te region east of Chania.

In cooperation with the Technical University of Crete we began a 6-month long pollution monitoring program around the waste processing plant of Chania, by taking regular samples and analysing them at the Technical University's laboratories. The results were published through the local press.

As we believe that children are especially sensitive in environmental matters, we organized a series of visits and talks to schools in our city, to promote our ideals to school children and inform them of our activities.

We took the initiative, with the cooperation of the Cityof Souda and the Hellenic Navy, to explore the WWII shipwrecks inside the port of Souda, and we exhibited photography and video images of some historic vessels of the Battle of Crete.

Furthermore, after an arduous search based on old stories and accounts we discovered in the gulf of Chania a well-preserved WWII German Messersmitt 109 military airplane. Despite our insistent efforts to convince the govenment to raise and preserve this relic, it is still lying on the seafloor.

We should also mention our participation in the exploration of the unique Elephants' Cave, an underwater cave near Vamos where the excavation brought to light important paleontological samples, including bones of an extinct species of dwarf elephant. In cooperation with the municipality of Vamos, we organized photo and video exhibitions of the finds.

We also denounced by public letters to the national and local government the practice of overfishing of urchins, which has led to its virtual extinction from the region, and we lobbied hard for protective measures.

Our goal is to continue with equal intensity the efforts to protect the marine environment and we believe that, with everybody  helping, we will achieve our vision of “SEA OF BEAUTY AND LIFE”