Qualla: Koh Ach Seh

Koh Ach Seh: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The strangest thing on the seabed around this island is not a wreck or a reef. It is a hexagon. Concrete, heavy, deliberately ugly, one of 150 blocks lowered into the shallows off Koh Ach Seh with a very specific job: catch the net of any trawler that drags across them and rip it open. Illegal trawling had been scraping the Kep Archipelago flat for years, and the people working from this island decided that argument had run its course. The blocks do not negotiate. They also, over time, grow bivalves, sponges and algae, so a device designed to destroy fishing gear has quietly become a reef.

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Koh Ach Seh: Bunkers Under the Fruit Trees

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Koh Ach Seh - Khmer កោះអាចម៍សេះ, generally shortened by everyone to Koh Seh, Horse Island - sits in the Gulf of Thailand off Cambodia's southern coast, part of the Kep Archipelago and administered by Kep province. Its recent history is written into the vegetation. During the Camb...

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Koh Ach Seh: A New Tenant

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Since 2013 the island has been home to Marine Conservation Cambodia, the country's first permanent marine conservation organisation, founded in 2008 by the British conservationist Paul Ferber and originally based far to the west on Koh Rong Samloem. The Kep government lent MCC mo...

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Koh Ach Seh: Counting Seahorses

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The work that put the island on the scientific map began with an animal almost nobody had bothered to count. MCC identified four seahorse species living in Cambodian waters and became the first organisation in the country to study them seriously, working with Project Seahorse and...

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Koh Ach Seh: Eleven Thousand Hectares

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In April 2018 Cambodia approved the Kep Archipelago Marine Fisheries Management Area - 11,354 hectares of protected water spanning nine islands, with two no-take zones inside it. MCC helped build the case for it and now manages it. Two months later the concrete anti-trawling bloc...

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Koh Ach Seh: Not That Koh Seh

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

One caution for anyone navigating by name: there is another Koh Seh, sitting inside Ream National Park off Sihanoukville province, and the two are confused constantly. The Kep one is the island with the bunkers, the blocks and the seahorse counts. Look for it south of the Kep pen...

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