AJ Picard — founder of Clava & Sauce Designs

I recently went on vacation with my girlfriend to Cancun, we decided to do two excursions. One of them happened to be snorkeling in the coral reefs and the location we were going to happen to be the second biggest reef in the world.

This was going to be my first time snorkeling and I couldn’t wait to start exploring this beautiful area.

Who wouldn’t want to see something like this?

When we got to the excursion site we began putting on sunscreen 🧴

One of the instructors came over to inform us that if that sunscreen wasn’t organic/ECO friendly we would have to wash it off.

I asked why and they informed us that the coral reef was dying and that in the past year it’s size has been reduced by over 30%.

The reason?

All different forms of pollution us humans continue to dump into the ocean, one of them being sun tan lotion.

Before we went out, they informed us about what we would be seeing…the list consisted of Stingrays, lobster, tons of fish etc.

I couldn’t wait to get out there, I knew the coral reefs were filled with so much color and more importantly, LIFE.

The Dive

Before we dove in the instructor told us not to touch anything, for those who don’t know coral can poison/hurt humans.

He proceeded to tell us we would be starting in the deep section of the reef where we would be able to see bigger fish 🐠 and then we would wrap up the excursion in the shallow section where there would be more smaller fish + plants 🌱

I dove into the water, put my gear on and looked down.

Everything was dead.

We swam for 40 minutes, I saw about 5 fish and all the plants were dead as well. There was absolutely zero life...

45 mins of swimming around the reef hoping to find life we decided to move onto the shallow section.

This section had a lot more fish/life and the plants at least had SOME color but it still wasn’t what I expect.

I could count on two hands how many different types of fish I saw…