By Founder and President Kurt Lieber

It’s become a tradition over the last decade for me to visit the ODA Hawaiian chapters in February. My first destination this time was the Big Island of Hawai’i.

The day after I landed at Kona airport, I met up with ODA volunteer Sarah Milisen and John Gallagher at Honokohau Harbor. We were there to inspect a vessel for possible purchase.

It’s been dream of mine for several years to have an ODA boat on these islands. We could get a LOT more done if we owned one, rather than having to plan our dives around scheduling charter boat (even though we have awesome dive boat partners!).

We’d been looking for several years, all the boats we looked at required extensive work and modifications than we had the time and finances for.

Before I arrived, we arranged to have a professional survey done to evaluate the fitness of the boat. Other than a couple of minor things, the evaluation showed it to be in great shape!

Next step was to take it out for a trial run, which the 3 of us did that Friday morning.  After an hour of putting it through its pace we decided to go for it.  I’m proud to announce: ODA now has our own Hawaiian boat!

Built in 2007, this vessel is a 32-footer with 2 outboard motors. It can carry up to 8 passengers and has a 170-gallon fuel tank.  We’ll make some slight upgrades to it, such as putting in air tank holders that will secure up to 8 air tanks.  This means we can crew the vessel with 4 divers who’ll engage in 2 dives per outing.

The majority of the boat hours will be used on reconnaissance runs up and down the coast scouting for floating masses of plastic and nets. We won’t need divers to remove this surface debris, just willing deck hands.

Bottom line: We’ll be able to get to more remote spots around the Kona Coast and do it on our schedule.  I am pumped!