By ODA Dive Team Coordinator, Dive Master, and Advisory Board Member Gary Liebmann
Monday morning, September 30th started off like any other Monday. I poured my coffee and fired up my computer in preparation for the work week ahead. That’s when I received a text message from one of our Ocean Defenders Alliance (ODA) volunteers, David Marcelli, alerting me that while leading a group of divers on a drift dive that previous Sunday, he spotted a ghost net tangled up on the reef. According to David, the location of this net was somewhere along the wall, drifting from Spitting Cave towards China Walls, the spot where we perform many of our monthly cleanups!
Here I am with the crew on another outing to this site. I just want to show you what an amazing location it is!
I thanked him for the information and quickly shifted gears. I started making phone calls to some of our volunteers to see if I could get a team together to try to recover this net before it continued to create more damage to the sensitive reef system.
As I was starting to make calls, I received an email from ODA’s Founder and President Kurt Lieber, he also was made aware of this net; somebody who was on the drift dive forwarded him a video. This proved to be very helpful in identifying its location and circumstances surrounding the entanglement. Judging from the video, the net was shallow and sitting up on the reef, close to the wall and in a high surge area. The net was very active in the surge and was causing more damage than I would have expected. I knew at that point we had to get there asap and haul it out.
Here's an example of what a ghost net can do - you can see our ODA diver with a sea lion who died due to being entangled.
As expected, I quickly had half a dozen commitments from our volunteers, and I was able to secure a charter to take us out Wednesday afternoon. I spoke with Brady Thomas, the new owner of Island Divers Hawaii, and he was happy to make some charter adjustments on Wednesday afternoon, so we could use the Sea Fox and Captain Matt Negaard, to go and retrieve this net. Captain Matt was the captain on the charter that past Sunday, so he already knew the approximate location.
Wednesday morning finally arrived, and the sea was not cooperating. The surface was very choppy, and conditions didn’t look favorable for diving. I decided to keep the dive as scheduled regardless of conditions, and as luck would have it, things started to mellow out by the afternoon. By the time we all arrived at Island Divers for the charter, conditions had improved significantly.
We loaded the boat with seven divers including me: Chris Denton, Bill Hockensmith, David Marcelli, Dan Okamura, Ed Sisino, and Bailey Young. We considered ourselves quite fortunate as Brady loaded his gear and jumped on to assist. In addition to the divers, we had three very helpful deck crew members this time out, Temple Liebmann who serves in this capacity on all of our dives as well as our top-side photographers Cassie Liebmann and Sarah Danser.
We were promptly under way at 2:00 pm and reached the dive site shortly after. We didn’t know the exact location; Captain Matt bravely took us closely along the wall so we could try to spot it from the deck, but we had no luck on visual contact. We decided to estimate approximately where we thought it would be based off the intel we received and prepared to dive.
As soon as we got the signal from Captain Matt, we all performed our giant strides to begin the search for the ghost net.
We descended as a group and made our way along the wall with the current, shortly after, we rounded a bend and up on the ledge in about 12 feet of water was the net, completely entangled oon coral heads being tossed around in the surge. We quickly began to surgically remove the net, which proved very difficult in the washing-machine-like conditions. As we began to free the net, Ed started attaching lift bags to keep the free end of the net off the reef.
Check out this amazing video footage! You'll see Diver Dan-O (Dan Okamura) getting spun around like he was in the rinse cycle at about 55 seconds. But he was not alone, as you'll watch several other team members all get spun around together, too! Regardless of the surges of water pushing us around, the team maintained control and reached their goal.
After about 15 minutes the net was loose, and Bailey started to tow the lifted mass away from the wall with his Diver Propulsion Vehicle. We all followed Bailey and the net to about 100 yards safely off the wall, and after finishing our safety stops, we surfaced, and signaled for the boat to come pick us up.
Once the net and all the divers were safely back on board the Sea Fox, we made our way back to Island Divers for the offload. It took some serious untangling but there were two large pieces of net that measured approximately 24 feet long and about 8 feet wide each. There were some other smaller sections of different nets as well. In total the net weighed in at approximately 30 pounds.
It wasn’t the biggest ghost net out there, but it was certainly large enough to entrap animals, which very likely would have happened. Further, it was in precarious location and if left for much longer would have done some serious damage to the reef in Maunalua Bay.
ODA-Hawai'i Ocean Conservation Crew with their "Catch of the Day"
ODA and I are very proud and fortunate to have a team of such dedicated divers on Oahu who are willing to drop everything, including work schedules, to make defending our environment a top priority!
I'm sure your proud of them, too. Please help keep our crews at sea doing what they do best!
