By Oahu Dive Team Leader & ODA Advisory Board Member Glenn Roberts

Our cleanup work was not in the usual southeast Oahu location on Saturday, May 13^th.

This time we were onboard the South Seas II, a boat of our partner Island Divers Hawaii, departing out of Waianae on the west coast. On the boat was captain Jeff, dive instructor Violet and these ODA volunteers: Mark England, Tyler Green, Gary Liebmann, Temple Liebmann, Glenn Roberts, Kay Smullen, Nickolas Streiff, Sandra Streiff, Marjorie Zensen, and me (Glenn Roberts).

Thank you for the photos: Topside by Temple, and underwater by Marjorie!

We left the dock around 1:30 pm and were at the cleanup site just north of Makaha at 2 pm.

Gary, our divemaster, got us moored up and everyone put their gear together. There was a big swell, 7 to 10 feet breaking on the beach, so we expected surgy conditions since this would be a shallow dive pretty close to shore.

We have been to this site once before and had decent results. Led by Violet, we tried a different area to drop into this time.

The surge was intense, pushing us back and forth, but our volunteers managed to find a fair amount of lead and line.

Horrific example of how the fishing line wraps around the corals.

Whenever we see wildlife like this honu (see below), we are encouraged to keep going!!

Our crewmembers are very careful when removing the line from the corals. It's challenging work, especially when the waves are pushing us around.

 

 

After 40 minutes of searching and removing debris from the reef, we headed back to the boat. As we did our 3-minute safety stop we spotted an area of debris that looked promising. We’ll be sure to start there next time! :-)

 

Our "catch of the day" had a total weight of about 25 pounds and we estimated about 125 yards of line.

Your support is crucial to keep our boats at sea and our crews removing debris, so we thank you for your contribution today!

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