By Founder and President Kurt Lieber
For the last leg of my recent trip to the Hawaiian Islands, I spent several days on Maui. ODA’s chapter coordinator there is Lloyd Johnson. He and I had been trying to coordinate a boat dive for several months.
Lloyd has been leading a team of volunteers for years now, removing abandoned fishing lines, lures, hooks, and lead fishing weights. He and his team have been doing this while diving from the beaches. ODA has expanded those cleanups by chartering dive boats to transport them to areas that are not conducive to shore diving.
We had made arrangements to charter a boat to take us out to a heavily fished area on the northwest side of the island, called Dragons Teeth. It’s about eight miles north of Lahaina.
On Saturday, June 15th, 10 divers met up at the Kihei Pier at the ungodly hour of 5:30 am! This shows to go you how dedicated these people are to making our coastal waters safe for the critters that call these reefs home.
However, before they even boarded the boat, the captain called it off. The seas were just too gnarly to make that two-hour journey…
As people were reassessing what to do next, five of them decided to drive to the site in their cars and swim out to the dive site with their dive gear on. Lloyd made a call to a dive boat operator that was going to be in the area and asked if he could swing his boat by and pick up some of the bags full of lead that the divers would be collecting. He agreed and said he could be there at 10 o’clock.
Lloyd called me and told me about their Plan B, and I headed out to meet up with them. I caught up with them in the parking lot, where they climbed into their dive gear, and then made the loooong walk along the beach. The divers were: Jessica Albietz, John Graves, Joel Schlarb, Brian Siefert, and Lloyd. Jessica took all the great underwater pictures.
By this time, it was around 8am, and the sun was out in full force. This made for a very uncomfortable hike for the SCUBA divers while weighted down by their gear.
As they entered the water, they told me that this is how they normally dive this site, so it was not too daunting of a swim. I watched as they kicked and kicked and kicked out to the point. It took them about 20 minutes to get there, which we estimate was a quarter of a mile. Here they are heading out...
Once they dropped down, I made note of the time, and didn’t see them again for an hour. They were very busy beneath the surface as our photos illustrate (and if you enlarge the first photo in the group, you can scroll through):
The ODA Dive Team saw some beautiful wildlife while doing their cleanup work!
Be sure to enlarge to truly enjoy the colorful critters (and scroll through):
Eventually I saw five heads bobbing on the surface, along with a couple of lift bags. Within five minutes the boat showed up.
By now the seas were pretty choppy and the boat had a hard time staying in one place. So, when the diver would hand one of the bags loaded with lead weights to them, the boat captain would quickly move away to prevent any collision between divers and boat.
At some point the captain decided that they had all the debris onboard that they could handle and departed.
The divers made their way back to where I was on shore. It took them 25 minutes this time to swim back. It looked grueling. But when they made the transition from weightlessness to climbing onto the sand, they were all smiling. They weren’t even breathing hard!
As we walked back to the parking lot, they filled me in on what had happened. They removed so much lead that the boat wasn’t able to handle it all, so they had to leave at least half of it on the bottom, in a pile.
The divers hosed off and we took a few pictures of the crew. Then, we headed to the harbor where the dive boat was stationed. After taking a few pictures of the entire crew and pile of debris, we loaded all the lead into Lloyd’s van. Once he got it home, he told me it weighed 175 pounds!
The next day, Lloyd and I took two hours to cut the fishing line from all the lead fishing weights. Once it was all separated, we got a better picture of the amount of line we had removed, which ended up being 1,200 feet. We also counted 13 fishing hooks.
We will leave no lead behind!
Knowing that there were still bags filled with lead left at the site, Lloyd and a few others went back there a week later, on Sunday June 22nd.
This time the team consisted of: Lloyd Johnson, Barry Lewis, Lori Robertson, Steve Robertson, and Brian Seifert.
Lori and Steve motored their small boat up the coast from Mala Wharf, which is in Lahaina. The boat only holds two people, so they were limited as to how much weight they could take on. As a backup, the divers again swam from shore and towed an empty kayak with them out to the dive site just in case they needed to put some excess weight in it.
The small boat ended up holding 103 pounds before they felt they could take on no more. Then the team put the rest of the weights, another 83 pounds, in the kayak and towed it back to shore.
They then drove back to Mala Wharf and met up with Lori and Steve, showing off the day’s catch of a total of 186 pounds!
As you can tell from reading this, these people are motivated! Making our waters safer for our beloved reefs is in their DNA.
Big Mahalo to all the Ocean Defenders involved in this multi day effort!
You can learn more about what we do in the Hawaiian islands by visiting our ODA Hawaii page. Thank you for caring about clean oceans!
