Have you heard about how much pollution there is around the world? Well sir Peter Blake used to be a sailor but then he noticed his favorite bird wasn’t swarming around the boat each time he came and it kept getting less and less of the same bird coming. What was causing this issue? Pollution. So the day before the school paid for the company to come to our school to show us in VR to show all the pollution and what’s in the sea around New Zealand.

The two leaders who introduced us to Blake were Grace and Alice, they gave an introduction for what they like and how they live. What Alice does for a living is that she likes to go snorkeling for a hobby and goes to the beach most of the time, Grace likes to go surfing as a hobby and also goes most of the time. After introducing themselves they started introducing who sir Peter Blake was and his story. 

We all sat in a line and had a VR goggles right in front of us, when they told us to put the goggle on we first saw a school of bluefish and when she pressed play we called look around us since the camera they used to record it was 360 degrees and had cameras mostly everywhere so we could look up down diagonal and even behind us. 

First they took us over an island using a drone to record it, it also had seagulls surrounding the bottom of the island. Then she took us under water, she said before she turns onto the next one she will ask us if the water is healthy or unhealthy. It was a Marine reserve so people wouldn’t overfish the area or take anything from that area or pollute. To tell if the sea is healthy you would see seaweed, lots of fish and clear water. We saw stingrays, whales, snappers, dolphins and in some scenes you would see divers! 

The next place we went to was still under the sea but in a different area, we could already see no fish, no seaweed but we saw one sea animal around all the coral and sea sponges, it was a kina, but how did that happen? At first there’s fish but there’s also a Kina and both of them eat seaweed, but the Kina has 5 teeth and uses them to crawl around and eat the seaweed before the fish can. It’s also not a Marine reserve so it’s not protected and gets overfished by the fisherman, so now there’s only Kina in the sea with polluted water. Oh! Sorry, I forgot to tell you what a sea sponge is, it’s the same as a sponge but it sucks up the clear water and when it’s full it squeezes it back out but since there is so much pollution in that water it clogs up the sponge and it can’t do its job.

After looking at the healthy and the unhealthy seas we discussed how this happened and how to keep the waters clean. We decided to look at a really large whale and we had a stingray high five the camera! Later Alice took us to see penguins and ducks, we saw one staring at us which looked kinda terrifying… lastly she took us to see some bonus clips of other sea creatures since we still had 5 minutes left. After finishing watching them we put back the VR goggles and left quietly still thinking about the sea animals.

We finally finished our session about all the pollution and overfishing and it’s surprising how seas that aren’t like a marine reserve end up polluted and overfished. But If you were picked to go around the world to tell people about Sir Peter Blake, where would you go?