By Jordan Oelke | Project Manager
The White River Fish Sanctuary has exciting announcements! First, our newly built office is open for visitation (with observed social distancing and hygiene concepts of course!). We now have a permanent home to continue to 'Engage-Restore-Protect'. Drop in and say hello monday-friday 8:30 am - 5 pm, located past the "old bridge", before Shaw Park Beach at the White River fishing village.
We continue to enroll the White River fishermen, some of whom work for the White River Fish Sanctuary as wardens and coral gardeners, and other members of the community into our 'Ocean Literacy' classes. Educating the community on topics such as climate change, the complexity of coral reefs and our relationship to the oceans is a priority of ours, and constitutes the Engage part of our three part motto.
We are also proud to tell you of our newly created artificial reef which we call the "Glass Bottle Reef" made from recycled glass bottles and cement. Unfortunately, Jamaica lacks the capacity and resources at the moment to support a mass recycling program, and such efforts can only be found currently in the infancy/testing stage within smaller sustainably minded communities. Therefore, the repurpesing of bottles as bases for our staghorn corals to grow out of solves two problems at once! Staghorn corals are endangered and require human intervention to recover in the Caribbean.
While we received support from our committed sponsors around the Ocho Rios community for our above mentioned project, the White River Fish Sanctuary underwent, and continues to undergo various changes in our operations, while we weather the CoronaVirus Pandemic. Unfortunately, due to financial constraints, we reduced the working hours of our wardens, and thus, the sanctuary patrol; despite the increase in observed accounts of fishermen entering the sanctuary. Our goal now is to return the lost hours to our wardens so that the White River community remains economically strong and fishermen not observing the 'no-take' rules can be intercepted so that the marine-life can flourish without human interference. Our goal is only reachable with your support! Individual donors will play a HUGE role this year in helping us to continue chasing our '500 in 5' (500% increase in fish stocks [size and population] in five years) goal. We need all the help we can get!!
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