Fifteen-year-old scuba diver Alastair Meikle from Peterborough has encouraged dive-gear suppliers to donate more than £500-worth of accessories for an eBay auction to raise money for Bite-Back, the UK shark and marine-conservation charity.
“It was my love for marine wildlife that prompted me to learn to dive, and I’ve never looked back,” says Meikle, who has clocked up 250 dives since he first dived as a scout in 2013 and is now a qualified PADI Master Scuba Diver.
“I was on a dive-trip with friends from Gildenburgh Dive Centre at the Brothers in Egypt and we’d seen hammerheads, oceanic whitetips and grey reef sharks, and it struck us all that we should do something meaningful to celebrate our luck,” he says.
“So we came up with the idea of asking our favourite dive manufacturers and retailers for items to auction for Bite-Back.”
Among the items up for auction are a Fourth Element Manta and Remora set; O’Three 12.5-litre drybag; AP Diving SMB; Kubi S80 bag; Miflex 75cm hose; two Fujifilm Dive X video lights; Beaver fold-up bag plus a framed print from leading photographer Alex Mustard.
“The fact that Alastair has had the passion, integrity and initiative to inspire so many donations for an online auction makes us incredibly proud,” said Bite-Back’s Campaign Director Graham Buckingham.
“Of course we’re grateful to the companies that donated items, and we hope the dive community will feel equally inspired and inclined to bid high on these great prizes.”
Every week for the next few weeks Bite-Back will be auctioning off items in the hope of raising as much as possible for its campaign to make Britain the first country in the world to ban shark-fin soup.
See which items are the first to be auctioned and bid to win here
Divernet – The Biggest Online Resource for Scuba Divers
14-May-17
