By ODA Hawai’i Island Chapter Leader Sarah Milisen

With summer in full swing here in Hawai'i, it can be hard to find volunteers and staff during these busy times. But not on the Kona Honu diver's boat! 

Armed with a full boat of volunteers, 3 dive guides, and a captain, we ventured out to clean up some reef on a beautiful, calm, and sunny day.

Our volunteers this day: Laura Cartwright, Marlene Demerym Phil Demery, Mark England, John Gallagher, Heidi Gallagher, Anushka Gul, Diane Kim, John Menton, Susan Menton, Dot Norris, Bo Pardau, Jamie Pardau, Doug Posson, Laura Posson, Buzz Samuelson, Laurel Whillock. Our crew was: Captain John Coladonato, Milo Giorgio, Andy Feifarek, and me.

Little did we know, we would face some challenges finding a dive site without ripping current... So, FOUR attempts to tie up and find a dive site led us to Keahole Wash Rock for our first dive, just barely north of Keahole Point. 

This last week hosted a large fishing tournament from shore—so poles and lines were out all across the island. I expected more lines, hooks and lead to be found (all fresh... ready for collecting!) but there was nothing to be found. Anushka and I managed to find some older line in very south and shallow, but most divers came up empty-handed. We are successfully maintaining this reef! Hurray! 

More futile attempts again after this dive—going for our dive sites on the south facing shore of Keahole Point—but the current created a swirling pit of death... and I didn't need to put 18 divers into the water there. And yet again, another attempt at a new site, that I've marked, with fishing lines sometimes up to a dozen at a time in the water, also was occupied and unavailable.

We ventured farther south, to Kaiwi Point, and dove Outhouse to care for the incredible amount of cauliflower corals that inhabit that reef. 

Outhouse is directly off Kaiwi Point, another epic dropoff for large pelagic fish swimming close to shore. We haven't been there on an ODA cleanup since March, and when we were last there, the large swell made the dive difficult to get too shallow for nearshore collection.

Today, we got to get in there. This dive site has the most cauliflower coral density I've seen in all of Kona. I counted ONE boulder with over 50 small coral heads. And fishing line tangling between many, on several boulders. We all got to work, and our hour of tank time flew by. My favorite find of the day was a bag of squishy plastic shrimp "bait" still all the in bag! I freed them to live another day. Just kidding! All the plastic was collected. 

Ocean Defenders Alliance Crew with their "Catch of the Day."

We came up with a small amount of line, lead and plastics, but the corals were freed and healthy. We even found a whole spool of fishing line below! We bagged 16 pounds of lead, about 2000 feet of fishing line, 6 lures, some plastic shrimps, and about 8 fishing hooks.

Please check out our photos from the cleanup, and if you like what we do, and you'd like to volunteer, please email volunteer@oceandefenders.org to get updated on the latest events!