The Save Koh Tao Group’s major project for 2009 was the development of an artificial reef structure called Buoyancy World. The concept design was an idea from Eco Koh Tao’s founder and was voted on by attending members way back in March 2009.

We all know that buoyancy is one of the most crucial skills for divers to master if we are going to protect the environment. We also know that, and you only have to look around sites like White Rock and Twins when doing your safety stop, the amount of damage caused by divers with poor buoyancy, often beginners.

So along the lines of theme parks or amusement parks around the world the idea as suggested to build a new dive site that could become Buoyancy World, an artificial location of enough interest to attract entry level divers away from some of our natural sights.

The aim or objective was be to construct a series of objects on land and submerge them to make an interesting, fun dive site where ‘new divers’ could be taken to practice their skills before being taken to our ‘nice’ or ‘good’ natural sites that are currently being well overused. It will also double as a research site for the propagation of coral nurseries.

To this end a number of dive schools including Eco Koh Tao and Crystal Dive after much planning came together to construct a variety of objects to be sunk to create this new site. Anemones with clownfish, an Octopus, a tree and a bamboo forest were among some of the ideas developed and are now awaiting deployment.

The location for the site (near Twins) has been chosen to allow dive boats to still visit that natural site and the hope is that a percentage of the divers on that boat will actually go to the artificial site for some if not all of their dive. In this way we can reduce the pressure on a natural site that is receiving far too many divers.