By ODA Hawai’i Island Chapter Leader Sarah Milisen
Ocean Defenders Alliance (ODA) hosted our third cleanup this month on Hawai'i Island. This time with Kona Honu Divers (KHD), aboard their large 46-foot Newton dive boat, the Honu One.
Earlier this month, ODA performed two other ocean debris cleanups with two other dive-boat partners. We did a two-tank charter cleanup on May 2nd Big Island Kohala Divers. Then two days later on May 4th, ODA went out with Jack's Diving Locker on a long-range trip to the southern part of the island.
I was thinking our volunteers were just too pooped to go on another cleanup dive in such a short span of time, man was I wrong! About half of the full boat this morning were BRAND NEW ODA divers, and the other half our seasoned volunteers.
With 15 divers and four crew aboard Honu One, we set out to go get more man-made marine debris. Seems to be no shortage of it, as we keep finding. So, we set off for Keahole Point for two more lovely dives of trash collecting. Our targeted sites were a little surgy, but we managed to collect some line and a lot of lead.
The crew on this outing were: Leila Atkin, Emma Behnam, Karen Bohner, Juan Chacin, Kay Cooper, Kenny Edwards, Andy Feiferak, Chris Funada, John Gallagher, Milo Giorgio, Beverly Goad, Maile Goss, Hannah Kiblinger, Meghan Murray, Bo Pardau, Jamie Pardau, Carolina Peil, Buzz Samuelson, Tony Sepanski, and me.
Chris Funada donned freediving gear as the rest of us donned our scuba tanks, and he climbed up onto shore collecting leftover picnic items on the rocks. Chris filled his bag with discarded ketchup, mustard, and French onion dip containers that would have undoubtedly washed into the ocean, as well as cans and plastic food containers.
Meanwhile, Tony, one of our new volunteer divers, found a complete, intact LAPTOP underwater!!! Line was freed from several smothered coral heads, and lots of loose lead recovered on dive one.
We picked up anchor for dive number two and set out for Pipe Dreams, the westernmost point of O-tec, or the Natural Energy Labs in Kona. This is the westernmost point of Hawai'i Island and garners a lot of fishing activity off the steep drop-off. Some divers went deeper to collect longer lures and lead hanging over the drop-off, and some stayed in shallow, recovering small patches of bundled line.
Here you can see, this Ocean Defender is removing a small piece of net that was smothering a coral head!
Every little coral head seemed to be tangled in line, and so some of us were jumping from coral to coral and bagging up our line with this jackpot. Others came up fairly empty-handed, with little line and lead in their areas – all teams succeeded in their own way! I definitely call a debris-free dive site a success – it's what we strive for!
All in all, we got about 70 pounds of miscellaneous debris: Fishing line, food packaging, clothes, lures, plastics, a laptop, etc, and about 50 pounds of toxic lead fishing weights. With one heavy bucket of separated lead, we all felt good pitching in and separating the lead on our surface interval (break) knowing it was getting recycled/reused!
Thank you to all the volunteers and donors that make this cleanup effort possible. We’d like to shout out a special thanks to Kona Honu Divers for your vessel and crew, and our volunteer Bo Pardau for your incredible underwater photographs!
Our next scheduled cleanup with Kona Honu Divers is July 2nd. Hope to see you all back out there again!
And don't forget ODA has their first Hawai'i fundraiser at Kona Wine Market on June 8th!
Visit this page to learn all about the event!
