Island Tour Guides Freshen up on New Regulations as Hol Chan Marine Reserve Expands

The Hol Chan Marine Reserve started conducting its annual “Responsible Tour Guide Seminars” for 2015 last week. The sessions serve to inform and refresh tour guides on the rules and regulations of the Hol Chan Marine Reserves and presents a forum whereby they can provide feedback on management issues.

Hol Chan invited all dive shops and free-lance tour guides from San Pedro and Caye Caulker to participate. Important for this year will be the recently amended Hol Chan Legislation (Statutory Instrument No. 17 of 2015) that includes the expansion of the protected area.

This year’s seminars commenced in mid September and will run into October. The management and staff at Hol Chan stress the importance of each tour guide using the Marine Reserve to attend these sessions, as they will be presenting new boundaries, rules and regulations of the recent expansion of the Hol Chan Marine Reserve.

Seminars are well underway with dives hops and tour guides of San Pedro Town. An important aspect of this year’s seminar is the recent expansion of the Marine Reserve, including Mexico Rocks and management implementation date. Ambergris Divers, Tuff-E-Nuff, ProDivers, Island Divers, Ocean Diver, Action Divers, La Gaviota, Rum Punch, Caribbean Breeze are some of the dive shop that have participated.