Steve Fox
London, England
Originally from London England, I did not have much chance of exploring the underwater world until a friend of mine who worked for one of the big airline companies invited me to their scuba club, so there I was aged about 14 in a swimming pool in London with all my scuba gear on. I loved the diving, I loved the feeling of being underwater, but at that stage in my life I could not afford to carry on.
As I got older I started my own companies and decided that I would go back and learn to scuba dive. Well, once I had qualified, that was it - every vacation was a diving vacation, I carried on like this till I was 40, then decided that I would achieve my boyhood dream of living on a beach in the Caribbean.
I sold everything and I had heard of a small island off the coast of Honduras where Whale Sharks are seen, so I decided that I would go to the island of Utila, 18 miles off the coast of Honduras.
I instantly fell in love with the island and decided that this would be the place I would spend the rest of my life.
I started by buying a dive shop and got more and more involved with the underwater world. Then I wanted to move on and expand, so I purchased some land and built a dive resort. I wanted to incorporate a "looking after the ocean" theme.
The first main objective was to discover more about Whale Sharks, so I started www.UtilaWhaleSharkReseach.com, where for one month of the year I would invite Whale Shark specialists from all over the world to attend and conduct talks and to assist guests with finding out more about the Whale Sharks.
I was looking at a better way of recognizing the Whale Sharks, as conventional tagging methods were not giving the information required, so after a long search I found www.Ecocean.org. They had produced a method of digital tagging. It was so simple, everyone could do it - all you had to do was take a photo of the Whale Shark behind the gill area and Ecocean had developed a computer system that the photo could be entered into and it would tell you if the Whale Shark had been seen before or was new in the database.
My main attraction to this system was that it was totally uninvasive and customer-friendly. Anyone can do it - you do not need to be a marine biologist to help; all the customers at the resort who take photos of Whale Sharks enter them into the Ecocean system. We were the first people outside Australia to take this on. Now there are 26 countries that have sent in photographs, making it the world’s largest database for Whale Sharks. For this system and its development I would like to thank Brad Norman, Jason Holmberg and Dr Zaven Arzoumanian.
All this did was to fire up more interest in the oceans, so my next project was to help with a coral restoration and regrowth project, which is trying to assure the survival of Staghorn Coral in the Caribbean, at my resort we now have a dedicated area where we regrow and replant Staghorn coral.
After being involved with the Whale Sharks for a few years I became more and more interested in sharks in general and the total devastation that we humans are causing them, with reports of between 80 and 100 million a year being killed and the abhorrent practice of shark finning.
Recently, I attended a conference in Costa Rica which was hosted by the Humane Society. It was attended by representatives from most Central American countries and a few South American countries, and during the meeting we managed to form a new coalition whose main aim is to get shark finning banned in this region. In the last few weeks great strides have been made and it looks as if we may be making a difference. This really is such an important step for sharks in our oceans.
Apart from those things, we have also been looking at products for our resort to use that are totally environmentally friendly. One such product we have found is a septic tank treatment which is totally coral reef safe. It is from a company called Micro Bac. Living on the beach, with a reef about 50 yards away, we feel thing like this are very important. This company really understands the importance of our oceans www.micro-bac.com.
For once in my life I feel that I am making a difference, and I will continue doing so.