Blogs

Words by: Zanele Mayiya If you live in a city that has a beach, then you can spend a day there with your kids and their friends. You can play beach sports with them or let them build sand castles. And as we all know, at this time of the…

Words by: Heidi Thormählen As we look back on a successful International Coastal Cleanup week, let’s take Albert Einstein’s words to heart…

Words by: Eleanor Yeld Hutchings International Coastal Clean-up Day was celebrated on 20 September 2014. The Save Our Seas Foundation Shark Education Centre team and the Conservation Media Unit set out to tackle the Kalk Bay Harbour beach. A small group of just eight people armed with rubber gloves, buckets,…

Picture and words by Paul Millar

Words by: Zanele Mayiya I grew up in a small village called Zimbane outside Mthatha in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. As we all know, the Eastern Cape has beautiful beaches, but they were no more than a dream to me because there was no-one to take me there; my…

Words by Eleanor Yeld Hutchings ‘You would like us to come and do a talk at your school assembly? Of course! We’d love to. Wait, for how many children? Around 700? OK. And what age range? 6-13? We have 20 minutes? Great. See you then!’ …Gulp… Twenty minutes to tell…

Words by Paul Millar Aquariums are places where kids can be seen delighting in the curious creatures on display; some of them undoubtedly leave with a heightened interest in marine life. And while some people may say that there’s a dividing line between learning and having fun, aquariums tend (wisely)…

Words by Eleanor Yeld Hutchings As the school gates closed at the start of the winter holiday, 24 excited Grade 5 children boarded a bus at Capricorn Primary School and were transported to the Soetwater Environmental Education Centre, where the team from the Save Our Seas Foundation’s Shark Education Centre…

School holidays are usually a busy time for us at the Centre, and this time around is no exception. Apart from running a Marine Awareness Camp, we’ve also been running our usual Holiday Club for young children from the area. In addition to this, we’ve facilitated workshops for grade 11’s…

Everyone knows that small increments of growth or change are hard to notice – it’s often only when we compare baseline data with current information that we can appreciate how much (or little) has happened. Every educator needs a regular reminder-to-self in this regard: From our first nervous dips into…

The thirty youngsters who started their long summer school holidays with a three-day Marine Awareness Camp were blessed – not only by the experience of a Save Our Seas funded camp, but also by a South-Easterly gale. While most folk would feel cursed and rattled by forty knots of wind,…

Over the past eight weeks, our Marine Explorers have come a long way. For many of them, their first cautious outing was characterised by trying to keep their hair dry and clinging onto instructors like limpets. Of course there were a few who were entirely lacking in caution. So as…

Most people look forward to Fridays – some of us more than others! There are eleven children at Capricorn Primary School who are looking forward to Fridays more than ever though. They’ve had their first taste of something new and exciting, and are counting the days until the next Friday.…

Going on a mid-winter camp in Cape Town is risky from a weather perspective, but it does have its advantages – the raw power of the Atlantic Ocean is evident, not only in the huge swells that crash into the coast, but also in the abundance of debris – organic…

Last week we spent a day at Moshesh Primary School, in Langa, Cape Town. It’s not an area we’ve worked in before, but being a township relatively far from the sea, our guess was that most of the grade sixes we were to meet would not have too many pre-conceived…