The organisers of the 2015 Southern African Shark and Ray Symposium made an effort to include the public in the celebration of False Bay, the marvelous ecosystem on our doorstep.
#LoveFalseBay speaker evening
The first event to do this was a free speaker evening, held at the Bluebird Garage in Muizenberg on Monday 7 September. Hundreds of people attended; I took the photo above before the room got so full that no one could move!
Eleven speakers presented short talks about False Bay. We heard about the whales, sharks, orcas, and invertebrates and how they are being studied; about transformative social work taking place in the waves; and about what we can do to care for the bay.
Photographic exhibition
Also taking place starting during the week of the symposium and continuing all summer, is a free public photographic exhibition of Joris van Alphen and Mac Stone’s images of False Bay, taken last summer. You can visit the exhibition along the catwalk between Muizenberg and St James. It’s in the same spirit as the Sea-Change exhibition that was up in Sea Point last summer, and I am excited that it will allow non-diving residents of Cape Town to see some of what goes on under the surface!
Welcome evening
Storify, which I originally used to curate the tweets about this evening, is dead. However you can access the story as a pdf by clicking this link.
