By Oahu Volunteer Coordinator & ODA Advisory Board Member Marjorie Zensen

I start off every report the same when we dive with Island Divers Hawaii’s Sea Fox at the China Walls/ Fish Camp area.  It’s always this: “The day’s dive was very sporty…”  Well, guess what?  Today’s dive with Island Divers Hawai’i was VERY SPORTY!  Again!

Captain Matt expertly maneuvered the vessel Sea Fox out of the bay and around the corner to the China Walls area.  Today, Hunter Vivirito was our dive master and Temple Liebmann was our extra boat hand. Hunter is easy to spot underwater...

We had a full boat of 14 divers!  Several of them are friends of ours from the Sea Lancers Dive Club and we were so happy to have them join forces with us.  They’re always up for a challenge and nothing seems to deter them. Thank you to Sea Lancers Ian Buchanan,  Tim Howland, Bart Jingst, and Don Oberheu!  Also present on the dive was Henry Bennett, Walker Embrey, Mark England, Andrea Fiegle, Gary Liebmann, Aby Liebmann, Dan Okamura, Glenn Roberts, Marjorie Zensen, and Rose Zhang.

Wish we had a shot of everyone together, but here's six of our illustrious dive crew:

Conditions were rough and there was a definite strong current, but we really enjoyed the good visibility!  Maybe you can see a difference in the pictures from past dives we've reported on? 

I had a little fun spotting some of our ocean friends.

Look at this cute little honu.

And check out this beautiful trumpet fish.

You can’t miss the bright yellow butterfly fish.

And look at this awesome scorpion fish! Look closely. He camouflages so well that when he moved, he scared two of our divers!

I also saw several glass bottles. I bring this up because glass bottles are one man-made product that we leave in the ocean! They provide a habitat for critters such as octopus, small fish, and crabs and we certainly don’t want to take away their home.  Most importantly, they don’t harm the ocean in any way. 

Meanwhile, as I was taking pictures of fish, our divers were very hard at work! And such active work requires that we limit our dives to around 30 minutes.

On this dive we had three buckets with lift bags on each.

Lifting these heavy buckets always makes me nervous, but our divers did an awesome job and over 200 pounds of weight and about 600 yards of fishing line was brought to the surface.

Unfortunately, every now and then, things don’t go as well as we would like.  Today, we had some big surf and getting the heavy buckets on to the boat was a bit of a chore.  You can see in this picture, that a bucket was compromised.

Between the weight and bad timing of a wave, the bucket ended up cracking where the rope was attached and fell to 87 feet!  We were so sad, but we are sure the bucket and all of its heavy contents dropped straight down.  Our group (along with those Sea Lancers) are pretty hard core and plans are already being made to retrieve it.  And, yes, we have the GPS coordinates! :-)

Overall, the dive was a success.  

Not only did we gather the normal amount of abandoned fishing weights and line, but a few random items such as a sardine tin and a spoon were found.  Someone “lost their lunch” literally! ;-)

Thank you for all your support and for continuing to provide financially for the oceans so that we can purchase things such as…well…new buckets.

It’d be wonderful if you’d contribute to supplies and other necessities that allow us to keep the ocean free of debris!