By ODA Hawai’i Island Chapter Leader Sarah Milisen

ODA Kicks off 2025 with Kona Honu Divers cleanup!     

Ocean Defenders Alliance (OD) Island of Hawai’i volunteers got straight down to business after the holiday season, starting 2025 with a Pololū “hike and haul;” a partnered cleanup with Kohala Divers and Keep Puako Beautiful; and then on the 21st of January we had a two-tank boat charter with our boat partner Kona Honu Divers to Keahole Point for a routine, maintenance cleanup. 

Our volunteers on this day were Erin Clement, Kay Cooper, Kerry Edwards, Mark England, Mo Hennessy, John Menton, Susan Menton, Meghan Murray, Dot Norris, Jamie Pardau, James Redshaw, Buzz Samuelson, and Bo Pardau (photographer extraordinaire). Our crew was John C (Captain), Andy Feifarek (crew), and me (Sarah Milisen).

For this expedition, a site called Pipe Dreams was our first destination at Keahole Point. We split into a deep team and a shallow team and headed south from the dive site's mooring.

Shallow Team struggled to find any debris (a good sign!) but Deep Team wound up a little busier than intended, using up all their available bottom time and air supply for a much-needed cleanup.

This dive site is an adventurous site for the Kona dive shops – offering current, pelagics, and beautiful coral reef, which means if dive groups dive there, they will often clean up any stray lures and lines they find on the normal diving depths – between 30-60 feet. Above and below those depths can often be overlooked, so we spend the majority of our time deeper or shallower than their dives so we can clean up the rest of the reef. Success!

Dive site #2 this day was south of Keahole Point, at another regular fishing spot. There’s a TON of pipe construction debris in this area, which our team cannot grab due to logistical issues and weight, but because of the debris, fishing line and lures get more snagged and lost here.

Every pipe, construction fastener, bolt and concrete chunk seemed to be fouled with a bundle of fishing line. We hunted for these little fishing line bundles for an hour. We found lots of lead sinkers and some shoreline food debris as well and then hauled it all up to the surface to finish our day. 

We have some generous volunteers now who will take our fishing lead and repurpose it back into diving weights, so we sorted through all the lead and cut free all the line to separate, allowing it to be reused.

Our cleanup today felt successful because we managed to find some lead, lines, plastics, and pieces of scrap net, but we didn't find an obscene amount – which means our regular maintenance dives on these sites are showing consistent improvement in ODA's care!

THANK YOU to all our amazing sponsors, like Kona Honu Divers, our amazing VOLUNTEERS, and our donors for making this a successful event! 

If you live on the Big Island of Hawai’i and love to dive, please consider joining our crew. We also have opportunities for people who don’t scuba dive, so shoot us an email, and hopefully, you’ll join us on our next outing!