By Founder and President Kurt Lieber
As most of you—our supporters—know, ODA operates in a dark area. But surprisingly, many people have no idea that abandoned fishing gear wreaks havoc on our underwater world.
One of our missions is to somehow bring what we see—in the dark, under the water—to the public so they can be enlightened as to what is happening. We hope that this knowledge of what is happening to our oceans will get folks riled up enough to get out and actually do something to make this a better world.
We do the best we can by getting our information up on our website, Facebook, and email to inform our great supporters and the public. But there is nothing like getting an outsider to go out with us and experience first-hand the thrill of hauling out ghost gear along with myriads of other trash and debris.
Just this past Sunday, June 4th, a media outlet called The Great Big Story came out with 11 of our volunteers to talk about ODA and film what they saw. They had me sit down and do a short interview on Saturday, and then joined us on our flagship Mr. Barker’s LegaSea with us the next day.
The Great Big Story was started by CNN—their description: “A global video company devoted to cinematic storytelling. Humans are capable of incredible things and we're here to tell their stories.” Justin Concalves was the point person for this “great big story,” and he came all the way from New York to cover ODA.
We are really happy about the way it turned out. All the underwater footage from that day was taken by ODA’s longtime awesome volunteer Walter Marti. GBS also used some historical UW footage of ours that was taken by a couple other fantastic ODA documentarians Peter and Trevor Fulks.
Hope you get a chance to enjoy this! Check the video story out here.
Captain Kurt
