By Kay Cooper, ODA North Hawai’i Island Volunteer Coordinator

Ocean Defenders Alliance (ODA) and our dive boat partner Kohala Divers Ltd. (KDL) were back at it again, this time on the North Kohala Coastline with an advanced cleanup charter on Kohala Divers' boat, Namaka!

Along this northern coastline, there are not many shoreline access points, and most are only accessible by four-wheel drive to a rocky hillside, where a lot of locals set up their fishing poles to fish. These Northern sites are well known for strong currents and large swells, making the timing of scheduling boat cleanup dives challenging. 

Our volunteers for this cleanup were Dave Conn, Mark England, Todd Hackett, Sarah Milisen (ODA's Hawaii Island Chapter Leader), Bo Pardau (photographer), James Redshaw, Darlene Richard, Elias Roberts (Divemaster), Tony Sepanski, Don Tremel, Doug Watson, Marjorie Zensen, and me. The Kohala Divers crewmembers were Elias Roberts (divemaster) and Ty Widhalm (captain). 

On our first dive, we were finally able to get to a location we have been wanting to visit for a long time, Kawaihae Gulch, where a lot of rubbish makes its way into the ocean from rainwater runoff and strong winds. A lot of people will also park their vehicles at an overlook spot here and walk down with their fishing gear to some rocky points in the water to fish. This area is only accessible by dropping anchor or doing a live boat scenario. With the wind starting to build, we decided to clean this site from a live boat, but this had to be done a little way from the shoreline to prevent our boat from being blown into the rocks!

After a very thorough and detailed safety briefing, we broke up into 2 groups and everyone got geared up and ready to jump in. Group one was made up of 5 divers and me, Kay Cooper, ODA's Northern Hawai’i Island Coordinator. We all had to be ready to jump quickly as the boat was being pulled in closer to shore. As soon as we splashed, we swam quickly away from the boat as it had to motor out again and reposition itself before the next group went in. Group Two was made up of 6 divers and Sarah Milisen, ODA's Hawai’i Island Chapter Leader, and this group was dropped a little farther north from group one. 

Having to drop in farther out from shore, we had to surface swim to reach our dive location, across choppy waters until we could see the coral below us, which is another reason why this was an advanced charter. After discussing our heading, we descended as a group and began to make our way closer to shore where the rocky walls were.

Another volunteer and I decided to break off from the group and explore farther south, closer to the gulch itself, where we found several very large plastic pieces of what looked like from a small boat! We also found some PVC piping, metal materials, and smaller plastic fragments. Knowing there may be quite a bit more debris the farther south we went, we didn't want to get too far from the group so we decided to turn around and meet up with everyone else, while carrying these larger items. 

We met up with Sarah's group, which had already found some netting and fishing line, and continued to move North. Once we met up with everyone else, we hit the motherload of fishing line! This fishing line was very old and started to really weave and wrap around the coral and rocks below. Our experienced team went to work, cutting, unwinding the line, pulling up some lures and some lead. It seems as if we had just started to work this site when we reached our maximum bottom time of 1 hour.

You can see above the amazing team work of the ODA SCUBA-diving cleanup crew. It's not easy to do this intricate work underwater wtih currents bouncing us around, and sometimes another set of hands can make all the difference.

We had to call everyone off the reef to begin our 3-minute safety stop by deploying a surface marker buoy and swimming away from shore so the boat could pick us up.

While on our safety stop, I noticed one of our divers had found a backpack that had been in the water for a long time and was very heavy. When it was brought on board and looked at, we discovered a gun inside!! There were also bullet cases, a knife sharpener, a gun case, and the owner’s AAA card. I called this into the police so they could come and pick it up later.

Since we left so much line behind on the first dive, we decided to try again, this time a little farther away at a dive site called Outside Crystal Cove. The wind picked up so we could not do another live boat dive, so we needed to moor up. On this dive, my co-worker, Elias, and I were in the water with everyone diving together. We made our surface swim closer to the shore, then descended and stayed shallow to make our long swim over to the area we ended last time. Several of our divers found some line along the way and began to work.

Eventually, we all met up near the spot with all the line and did what we could. We did not have a lot of time to work this area because we also had our swim back to the boat. We discovered some line that was draped down from a tall wall to the coral below, more plastic pieces, and some lures. After our safety stop, the divers came back up to the boat and began emptying their bags. 

Overall, our team recovered an estimated 80 pounds of rubbish including about 3,000 feet of fishing line (wow!), a backpack with a gun, gun case, 2 bullet cases, knife sharpener, thick manual for a truck, headphones with a portable AM/FM radio, a sweater, a couple towels, a gallon-sized Ziplock bag filled with coins, and a cellphone! We also recovered a couple of lead weights for fishing, a couple of lures, around 10 large plastic pieces from a boat, a piece of garden hose, 3 metal pipes, a fishing pole, a spearfishing pole, and oil jug, and an aluminum anchor!

Great work team! We couldn't do this without our shore support. If you're one of our onshore partners, we thank you! If you haven't yet had a chance to donate for clean oceans, there's no time like the present!