We had some wonderful stories, photos and videos from some very passionate people who love Aotearoa and want to help save its wildlife and wild places – tino pai!.
This story is from Sam, one of our runners up.
I think everyone needs to care for our oceans and enviroment because we wont anything left if we keep doing pollution. Sometimes we walk along the beach and we find lots of rubbish like cans, plastic bags, fishing line, bottles, glass, containers and clothing. My mum and I pick up probably 10 kilos of rubbish each month.
My mum works at NIWA and we live at Shelly Beach on the Kaipara Harbour. Sometimes I go with her when she is doing research and sometimes we see some very sad stuff, weird stuff and cool stuff, like shark fins, dead hammerhead sharks, dead school sharks, dead snapper, dead octopus, I dont like seeing things dead. The other day we saw three orcas, it looked cool when they came up to the surface.
I have written some books about NIWA, The Mantis Shrimp Story and The Mangrove Story. I caught a rare South East Asian Mantis Shrimp that has probably came from ballast tanks from a boat from South East Asia. I gave the Mantis Shrimp to Auckland Musuem.
NIWA liked my book and put it on their facebook page. The Auckland Musuem asked me to write their blog for World Ocean Day, that was cool. That was about caring for the ocean. I also showed Graeme Sinclair from Gone Fishing my books and he liked what I was doing about pollution and caring, and he interviewed me for their program. They like that I am caring about the ocean in my books. I even sent the Prime Minister my NIWA book and he liked that I was caring for our ocean and enviroment.
I would really like to win this competition because I havent been on a nice boat like the one in the picture and I would like to see some new places. I would like to take my mum because she cares about the ocean and pollution like me
