Win with the Mother Ocean Fund

Written by Mother Ocean Fund. 

A startup nonprofit firm out of Key Largo, Florida, has come up with a unique way of bringing awareness to ecological diving, mammal rescue and release, conscience recycling and waste management efforts within their local diving community. How? They’re partying on the beach for it!

Meet, the Mother Ocean Fund (MOF) www.motheroceanfund.org, a community of scuba divers, who have come together to help Mother Ocean get, stay, clean and healthy. They do this by organizing ecological friendly music festivals and farmers markets, at a local beach, while conducting varied “ecological-dives” at sea. Together they are growing to be a powerful force in environmental stewardship among all ages through advocacy, ecological scuba diving excursions, education and conservation awareness the world over. They call these festivals EcoPalooza!

For most of us, who are used to diving deep wrecks, kelp forests, natural and/or artificial reefs, lobster hunting and other recreational diving; MOF wants to introduce us to a whole new facet to the sport we’ve all grown to love, with these ecological dives. Normally, these types of eco dives were mostly used in the academic and scientific communities to help further research for varied studies they’d be exploring. But this group, they want to make it mainstream and show the diving community what other type of dives they too can partake it. They call it, “diving for a purpose”.

Such “purposeful” ecological dives are orchestrated to tackle a specific environmental need that our beautiful aquatic playground longs for, starting with coral reef restoration. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few decades, you’re aware that coral reefs provide coastal protection for communities, habitat for fish, and millions of dollars in recreation and tourist revenue, among other benefits. But corals are also severely threatened by rapidly worsening environmental conditions. Due to this rapid decline in coral reefs overall health, several both scientific, as well as, academic organizations specializing in marine biology and ocean conservation, have devised a way to replant lab grown pieces of coral, back onto a reef a nurture that small fragment of a coral back to adulthood, restoring the reefs natural habitat.

Another “eco dive” MOF promotes through their festivals are reef and pier clean-ups which too have grown in popularity through the years, when shops promote a dive like this yearly. From plastic bottles, car tires, fishing lines, metal grates, bicycles parts to even stop signs, it all needs to go and MOF is looking to increase those clean up events to at least once a quarter to start but aspire to have it monthly at a local coastline, near you soon.

Now, we can’t begin to speak of ecological efforts at sea without mentioning the decades long research conducted in studying one of our largest predators, the almighty, highly misunderstood but beautiful shark! These apex predators have been a topic of major interest, research, and tracking for generations. Recognizing this to, MOF has added shark tagging on to their list of eco dives, which divers too can stand shoulder to shoulder with a marine biologist, graduate students and professors in helping catching, tagging and releasing these amazing creatures!

In MOF’s true spirit, of helping Mother Ocean get, stay, clean and healthy they intend to get as many divers in the water as possible to help truly make an impact in all these great causes efforts.  While celebrating those efforts on land, with their musical festivals and farmers markets at a local beach. How are they going to do this? By fundraising, of course! As the funds collected will not only go to organizing these festivals, but to paying for some, if not all of the divers fees from these charters (depending on how much they receive from donors). In that spirt, they are conducting their first fundraising effort online with a 50/50 raffle on New Year’s Eve in which a lucky winner will walk away with $25,000 cash, if MOF’s target of $50,000 is met.  If not, the winner still walks away with half of the proceeds collected, regardless.

Click here for a chance to win: https://go.rallyup.com/motheroceanfund/Campaign/Details

At the end of the day folks, were all here to protect our precious watery playground and this aquatic tribe here, has found a way to help clean up Mother Ocean’s reefs, piers, and beaches, bringing the coral reefs back to health, rescue entangled sea mammals, further research efforts and much, much more…

So, ask yourselves. “What have you done, for Mother Ocean today?”