As you all know by now, we have a blast doing underwater clean-ups from the Maui Diamond II several times a year.
So on Earth Day, we headed to our usual area near the look-out along the West Maui Mountains and proceeded to clean, clean, clean. This time, though it felt like I was going through lots of air separating and sending up bags of line and sinkers, I didn’t feel like we were sending up as much as usual. After about an hour, my cleaning crew of six (Ananda on top, two Jeffs below, plus Barbara, John and myself) reboarded the boat to have a look at what we’d sent up. Gabe’s group was still down for several more minutes, but I took a sneakpeek in the bucket to check out how many zillions of pounds of lead there was so far.
Um…where was all the lead? The lead bin is usually too full to lift and we have to separate it to get it off the boat at the end of the day. Today, there was just one layer of lead sinkers from both groups combined! At first, I felt a twinge of disappointment…but wait, could this mean??? Yes, after a couple of years of concentrating on this one area, we have made a recognizable impact!! In fact, it seems that we will have to find somewhere new to clean up in September – awesome!
After celebrating this success, we surprised the generous group of divers who came along to clean with a non-clean-up dive at a second site…but I’ll let them tell you about that!
Thanks to Gabe, Jenny, Don, and Chris who donated time and effort as boat crew on Thursday and big thanks to Paul for continuing to organize, coordinate, and usually lead an underwater crew. After being shown up by the E-Team so many times, he decided to give his crew to Gabe this time. Okay, really he was sick, but he still came along to help out!
See you next time, Rachel
