Giving Back Beneath the Waves: My Aruba Coral Conservation Adventure

If you’re new to this blog, then I am Mia DaPonte and I share my life underwater with you after I got certified as the youngest female Master Scuba Diver in the USA! I was also chosen to be a member of the 2025 PADI Jr. AmbassaDiver team. Our AmbassaDiver motto is “Seek Adventure. Save the Ocean.” That means we want everyone to experience the amazing world beneath the waves — and take care of it at the same time.

You can also follow me and all my adventures on Instagram: @underwaterwithmia.

Hey, we’re back in Aruba again! Me and my family went back to Aruba for Thanksgiving, and it was a lot of fun. While I was there, I volunteered to help an organization called ScubbleBubbles, which is a coral reef conservation organization in Aruba.

From their website:

Empowering Youth Through Ocean Conservation in Aruba. Since 2018, Scubble Bubbles Foundation has been a driving force in coral reef restoration and community engagement on Aruba. Led by passionate local youth and volunteers, our programs focus on reef recovery, dive education, and environmental action.

What’s really cool is that there are local kid leaders helping to run the organization, along with adult divers who help watch over everything. It’s such a fun way to meet other kid divers. Now let me tell you all about it!

On this trip, I only helped out for one day, but it was a lot of fun and very interesting to learn more about dying coral reefs. We did a shore dive off a small island called De Palm to get to the trees where the coral was growing. It was just me and Nichole—she is the founder of ScubbleBubbles—so there was a whole lot to learn from her. She showed me all the different types of coral, including ones she had already helped heal. It was so much fun seeing all of these different species.

In the last 30 minutes of the dive, I got to put my coral conservation certification to use. We worked on cleaning the coral trees, removing all the green algae so the corals can continue to grow. After that, we headed back in from our dive. We spent over 100 minutes in the water! It went by so fast because it was so fun. The Aruba water is nice and clear, and I know for sure that my passion is coral conservation.

I wanted to help even from home in Rhode Island, so I asked my mom to get some island beads for me to make jewelry with. There was a children’s Christmas bazaar in my town where I sold the jewelry, and everything I made is going to ScubbleBubbles. I hope that by reading this blog, you’ll be interested in saving the corals with me!

Of course, me and my mom also did our regular diving together with AJ from Aruba Premier Boat and Dive. AJ and his crew are always so much fun, and we dive with them every time we are in Aruba. This visit, we did four dives with him while we were there. There are so many dive sites around the island, and we asked AJ to take us to some spots that big groups don’t usually go to. We saw beautiful reefs, and on one dive there were so many sea turtles that we couldn’t count them all!

I also got to swim through a sunken airplane, which was reeeaaallly cool.

I love Aruba, and I can’t wait to go back again! I’ll be there on a diving trip with my mom in April, so I’ll have lots of stories from AJ to share.

I’m also super excited because I’m going to spend a whole month there in August interning with ScubbleBubbles and doing coral farming for an entire month. How amazing is that?! I can’t wait! They’re also on Facebook, and some of my dive videos are posted there.

As always, thank you for reading this—sea you next time!