World Ocean Day Dive Against Debris Cleanup with Sea Experience

Overview

On the morning of June 8th, 2025, The International SeaKeepers Society partnered with Sea Experience to host our monthly dive cleanup out of Pier Sixty-Six in Fort Lauderdale. This month’s cleanup also served as part of our celebration of World Ocean Day. Sea Experience is a dive shop located in Fort Lauderdale that 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. This month, we were lucky enough to be joined by 15 divers who joined us in our ocean conservation efforts as they took mesh bags and sea snips down onto our two dive sites for the day in search of any ocean waste. Our first site was a wreck known as Hog Heaven which is notorious for being inundated with cargo straps tossed overboard from barges and other massive ships that make their way in and out of South Florida waterways every day through the Port of Miami, while the second was a shallow water drift dive on a site known as The Caves. We had near-perfect conditions on the water, making both dives absolutely breathtaking and finding trash even easier than usual. By the time we had finished both of our dives for the day, we had recovered more than 48 lbs of trash from our two sites, nearly half of our yearly total from all of 2024! While removing this much trash is always a positive impact, it shows that more restrictions on dumping off of large container ships as well as more regular cleanup efforts are needed to ensure and maintain happy and healthy reefs in South Florida. We give a huge thank you to the amazing team at Sea Experience for an unforgettable day on the water and to all of our volunteers for their invaluable contributions to keeping our oceans clean and healthy!