By ODA Hawai’i Island Chapter Leader Sarah Milisen
Seven of us loaded the Ocean Defenders Alliance (ODA) boat Makau with dive gear and had plans to return to a debris site called Deep Step, but an intermittent engine issue forced us to change plans and keep the boat close to the harbor while Tony and Kai troubleshot the issue at hand. What this ended up meaning is that we headed back to a closer site called Pipe Dreams to keep truckin’ away with the debris hauling!
On this day, Sunday, July 19th the volunteers were: Captain Kai Nalu Kelly-Pozansky, Adrian Murphy, Meghan Murray, Tony Sepanski, Neng Sutherland, and Tony White.
We tied up to the mooring since we were down an engine, which would have made it unsafe to motor around the area where a diver could pop up at any moment. For this outing we had our first-time volunteer captain, Kai, who stayed on board while we furiously cleaned the reefs, swimming straight south per my direction and immediately found a knife that I lost there on Tuesday! YESSSSSS!!!!
All of us kept in visual contact as we kept heading south. We then started working our way inshore and back to the boat, pulling fishing lead weight after lead after lead, and lots of line as well. So much lead! With just 6 divers, we hauled up over 60 pounds of lead on the two dives we took this day.
Having emptied our bags and sucked down all our available air on that first dive, I wanted to live-boat (drift dive) through the area just south of Golden Arches. We seemed to have missed all the last attempts at the "line everywhere, going from rock to rock all the way off the dropoff" on several other attempts since last discovered, so I got us all in north of the last few attempts. We hit the jackpot. There was so much line everywhere that I didn't know where to reach next, as I pulling up 100 feet of line at a time. Following it to its anchor weight or entangled coral from one end to the other. Our divers were crisscrossing over each other following the individual lines we were trying to safely remove without harming the corals they were entangled in.
We kept stuffing weights and lines into our bags, until we all ran low on air. By now each person’s debris collection bad had to weigh 20 pounds each, so we had to fully inflate our BCD’s (Buoyancy Control device) to offset that extra weight. We found an array of debris including clothes, an old mesh bag, some huge ulua hooks, and so, so many lead fishing weights. Two large coffee cans full of lead, and an estimated 3000 feet of fishing line.
The Ocean Defenders "Catch of the Day"!
I'm SO GRATEFUL for our ODA boat and our monthly donors that keep this mission-driven boat operating and collecting these harmful marine debris items!
Check out our ODA Hawaii page to see more of the great work they do to remove ghost gear and all kinds of trash from the coast waters of the islands!
