Dive Against Debris August Cleanup with Sea Experience

On August 16th, 2025, The International SeaKeepers Society partnered with Sea Experience to host our penultimate monthly dive cleanup of 2025 in Fort Lauderdale. Sea Experience is our partner dive shop and has been awarded the PADI Green Star to commemorate their efforts and dedication to conservation as well as identify them as a dive shop that cares about our coastal environment and actively takes steps to protect it. Today, our dive sites were Hog Heaven, the wreck of a 180-foot barge about 60-70 feet deep, intentionally sunk in 1986 as part of the Florida Artificial Reef Program, and The Caves, a shallower reef site ranging in depth from 20-30 feet, named for its small yet intricate cave systems. Both our Citizen Science Manager, Rosie, and our Educational Outreach Manager, Jack, picked up a significant amount of trash and had the chance to obtain some underwater footage of our cleanup efforts. The accumulation of trash and plastics in the ocean damages the health of the marine ecosystem and has the potential to create dead zones of limited oxygen nearly all species need to survive. This makes our efforts to remove trash from the pelagic environment critical to our oceans’ health. For the first time this year, we found a high amount of aluminum cans hidden within the wreck at Hog Heaven. At our second site, we managed to find two plastic cases of used bait discarded from fishing vessels, something we had never found at either site before. We ended our day removing 6 pounds of trash from the two dive sites, yet as most of our findings were lightweight the impact likely was far more significant than numbers would indicate. We give a huge thank you to our amazing volunteers for joining us and to Sea Experience and their incredible team for hosting us, and we cannot wait to see how much trash we end our 2025 cleanup season with next month!