Dive Against Debris with SeaExperience
Fort Lauderdale, Florida
August 12, 2023
Overview
On Saturday, August 12th, 2023, The International SeaKeepers Society partnered with SeaExperience, a dive shop located in Fort Lauderdale, for our monthly dive cleanup. SeaExperience is awarded the PADI Green Star to commemorate their efforts and dedication to conservation and identify them as a dive shop that cares about our coastal environment and actively takes steps to protect it.
We had 9 volunteers join us to search for trash at two dive sites, The Tracey and Oakland Ridges. The Tracey is a 131’ ship that was sunk intentionally to form an artificial reef, at a max depth of 75 ft. We spent about 35 minutes at the site, and were pleased to see the site was quite clean, with only a few aluminum cans and fishing line collected. We headed over to Oakland Ridges for our second tank, which was a drift dive at the shallow reef site which had a maximum depth of about 35 feet. This site was also fairly clean, though our volunteers were able to remove some fishing hooks and lures. When back on the boat, we consolidated our findings and weighed them, resulting in 3.2 lbs of debris removed. This number was on the lower end of our dive cleanup statistics, likely due to the fact that we were unable to dive at Hog Heaven, our usual site where we often find many cargo straps and other debris. Although we were unable to remove debris from this site, we were pleased to see how clean the other two sites were. Clean reefs supports a healthy ecosystem, which was evident as the sites were teeming with many species of fish, including two nurse shark sightings. We appreciate all of the volunteers on board who helped us to leave these popular dive sites a little bit cleaner, and we look forward to our next dive cleanup with SeaExperience, which will be our final dive cleanup for 2023. We are grateful to SeaExperience for their support and dedication to protecting our ocean
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