… Which involves going places and taking fishing gear out of the water to protect sealife.
When I get the chance I join a volunteer conservation group dedicated to cleaning up (mostly) derelict fishing equipment from reefs, mainly “ghost” nets and fish traps, lost or discarded by fishermen that end tangled up around reefs causing considerable damage for as long as they stay there.
So we hop on a boat and usually do three or four days of diving cutting things loose and bringining them out of the sea.
As you may imagine, removing a large, old, encrusted fishing net, tangled in every possible way around corals without causing more damage it’s not easy, specially 20 or more meters down.
For the next few days we will be working on the South end of the Andaman Sea, off the West coast of Thailand, let’s see what we haul in this time.
I started magnet fishing a few months ago. My two trips have netted very little worth saving but each time I have hauled a few hundred pounds of scrap metal to a local recycling center. I’m still wondering how come I am finding quite a few fishing poles without the reels. I’m thinking others have come before me and found the pole and reel, took the reel and tossed the pole back in the lake.
Remember the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was found to be mostly discarded fishing gear:
46% nets, BUT “The rest of it is also largely made up of fishing gear, including eel traps, oyster spacers, crates, baskets, and ropes.” Let’s not forget that’s only objects (or fragments thereof) directly used in fishing – a lot of the rest of it may also be generic, non-fishing-related trash thrown away by fishermen – it’s likely the vast majority of the trash is commercial-fishing-related.
I was just reading about a ghost net floating around Maui and how they were actively trying to find it before it came ashore and destroyed reef. I knew they were a problem but the fear and large effort in the article really brought that message home. Good luck to you! And thank you for your work!
I pulled up 3 beer cans from a reef while snorkeling last year- 2 of them were 20+ years old (one was a pull tab!). I imagine flooding brought them out from somewhere on land. So if you can report what you find, I’m very curious!
I live in Bangkok, this place is an hour flight from there.
I’m just back from the first dive, no cleaning just a check up dive for everyone.
Only found a recently dumped bottle and a lenght of thick fishing line so pretty good, for reverse fishing the smaller the catch the better!
I came back from the trip a couple days ago, in the end there was surprisingly little to clean over 12 dives in different places, I don’t think we found more than 10 or 20 kilograms of stuff to remove.
Talking with the organizer of the trip he thinks is a consequence of the death of Marium, a beloved baby Dugong last year, likely caused by eating plastic, the public outcry finally spurred the government to get serious about cleaning up garbage in the sea and it seems it had an effect, at least for now.
So the trip was kind of a failure, and that is great.
On the other hand one never knows what will show up, the previous trip (which I didn’t take part of) to a different area netted, ehmm, a net so large it took six days to remove; in fact it was three nets one on top of the other over a reef; perhaps the older one had been there for several months but the top one may had just drifted into it the week before. Half a ton of net all in all.
To give you an idea of what the work looks like you can see this video shot last year, it isn’t as simple as it may seem, even for small jobs; but it can be dangerous when removing large nets, if the work is not well coordinated someone may drop a large net section on people working deeper down. I filmed this PoV video a few years ago, in that case the net and lines were tangled in rocks and were thin enough to be pulled loose for the most part, but as you can see one has to be very mindful of not causing more damage, I use a finger or two for support some times and carefully choose where to touch to avoid hurting anything. Often there are things tangled or growing on the nets and we try to save them as much as possible, coral, sponges, shellfish, crabs and of course fish now and then.
As you may notice, sea urchins (and other stinging, sharp, bitty, or poisonous things) are a problem, it hasn’t happened to me yet but some people have ended up with spines embedded pretty deep needing a visit to a hospital. The dive computer seems to show a depth of 26 meters (around 4:00), at that depth working time is about 25 minutes for the first dive of the day and it may be 15 minutes or less by the third or fourth, so there isn’t much time to look for and remove things at those depths. You can hear the dive computer alarm going off at the end telling to go up, it’s not uncommon for someone to surface with a nearly empty tank. But in spite of all it’s a very enjoyable experience among good people.
Everyone pays out of their own pocket to finance the trips, it’s not common to be sponsored although in this occasion the boat owner gave us a good discount on the price, and I must say it was the nicest boat we’ve been on, the food was fantastic and the crew very helpful and friendly.