The Friends will again benefit from the Global Environmental Ambassador program (GEM), an initiative of the University of Wisconsin. Mike Tanner, a major in Ecology and Public Administration, will be working on various projects for the Liesbeek including signage proposals and content; rehabilitation plans for the Valkenburg wetland; and assessing the habitat of the Liesbeek. We are grateful for the support we have had from GEM students in the past and look forward to making progress on various initiatives over the next two months with Mike.

This is an adventure that no one else has done or at least in recent times using Cape Town’s waterways as the route. Kevin Winter (current Chair of the Friends) is kayaking from False Bay to Table Bay on 23 May together with 3 other wildcats. The idea is to raise awareness about the state of Cape Town’s rivers. A film and media crew will accompany the team. Various environmental groups will meet the paddlers along the way to talk about rivers and to take some water samples. See the proposed route map attached. More details to follow.

After having served us very well for over 2 and half years, out little old blogging platform FlatPress has been replaced by Shiny New WordPress install. Its taken me the better part of today to perform the upgrade and its still not 100 percent complete.

I have to customize the theme a bit and create categories and then categorize the existing posts. I have also to add some static Pages namely About, Contact us and Join Us for a start.

With WordPress comes a much more advanced system of managing the website and cutting out all that comment spam that plagued the old site.

Our OtterSpotter blog will continue to operate as it has – http://otterspotter.fol.org.za until I also port it over to WordPress in the near future.

The WordPress platform will also make it easier to collaborate via multiple authors and the comments system

I look forward to taking the Friends web site forward and hope you all enjoy the new look.

Trev