By Founder and President Kurt Lieber
Maui’s reefs can breathe a little easier thanks to ODA’s vigilant volunteers.
On my last trip to Maui, in November, I had a chance to spend time with Lloyd Johnson, Bobby John, and Brian Seifert. Due to the expenses of staying on the island, I don’t normally hang around for long. We charter a boat, take 8 to 10 divers out to a cleanup site, and then a day or two later I’m on my way.
This time particular time, I had a good reason to stay longer -- for team strategy meetings. I also talked with Bobby about a photo project he was working on. He was putting together a collage of all the “Crew with Their Catch of the Day” pictures he had taken after each successful underwater cleanup they had done in 2025.
The Maui ODA team organizes debris removals once a week. They decide which site to hit based on conditions. Even when conditions are forecasted to be favorable, they often are different by the time the crew arrives. Of the 52 planned dives in 2025 they were able to get out 41 times. Thanks to “mother nature” for allowing us to do 80% of our planned cleanups (but of course we’d like it to be 100%).
Our adopted sites they work on are all on the west side of Maui. Places like: Dragons Teeth, Popawai Point, McGregors reef, LaParouse Bay, and the reefs just off the coast of Kehei, to name a few.
At the end of each one of these dives, the team weighs all the lead weights they’d removed and logs the info into a database. A typical haul will be around 150 pounds of lead fishing weights. Keep in mind that each one of those fishing weights only weighs 6 to 8 ounces.
Crew with Their Catch of the Day. Left to right: Bobby, Kurt, and Lloyd.
That translates into roughly 300 pieces each time they go out!
At the end of the year, they totaled up how many pounds of lead they had removed. 2,107 pounds! Lets call it ONE TON!
In addition to that remarkable stat, I had asked Lloyd to keep all the hooks that they removed over the course of a year, and the pile was a sobering reminder of what gets left behind when fishermen leave their fishing tackle on the reefs. You can see the hooks here, but we removed and safely disposed of the thousands of feet of fishing line.
Turtles, fish, and eels can become entangled in the fishing lines that are attached to the hooks when they’re left behind underwater. Sadly, we’ve even seen manta rays, dolphins, turtles, and eels with hooks dug into their bodies.
We estimate that there were 1,450 hooks in this Catch of the Year collage.
I’m in awe of the dedication of all these Maui volunteers. What a better world you are making for our friends in the oceans!
Check out our Hawai'i page and see how much ocean cleanup work is happening, not just on Maui, but the Big Island and Oahu, too.
