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https://www.positive.news/society/meet-the-ghost-hunters-the-volunteer-divers-cleaning-up-uk-seas/>
"Shortly after welcoming me on to the boat, Fred Nunn, a volunteer scuba diver
and operations officer at Ghost Fishing UK, asks if I’ve taken any seasickness
tablets. I’d cycled along the Brighton seafront to get here and while the water
hadn’t exactly looked flat, it wasn’t especially bouncy either. “Will I need
them?” I ask. Nunn, whose long hair is dyed a subtle pink, nods solemnly before
turning back to his pressure gauge and logbook.
What comes to mind when you picture a perfect dive site? A horseshoe-shaped
reef in the tropics, perhaps, rich in colourful fish, coral and plant life,
with calm, balmy waters for the dive and bright blue skies for the boat ride.
Today, however, we’re heading out in wind chop and mizzle to a silty shipwreck
off the coast of Brighton, albeit one in the shadow of the rather majestic
Rampion offshore wind farm.
Nunn and his fellow diving volunteers are here for the week. Their task? To
remove several large and hazardous chunks of fishing trawler nets that have
become entangled in the shipwreck of the
Vale of Leven, a steam drifter boat
that sank in 1917.
Ghost fishing gear – meaning abandoned, lost or discarded nets, pots or lines –
is particularly problematic because it continues to catch marine life. Crabs,
rays, fish and even birds or larger mammals such as seals and dolphins get
trapped in the gear, where they inevitably die and become bait for more marine
life. And so the cycle continues.
According to a 2016 United Nations report, each fishing vessel is likely to
lose 1% of its fishing gear per year. More staggering still is the stat that
for in every square kilometre of fishing ground there are likely to be 4.4km of
ghost nets.
Ghost Fishing UK was set up in 2015 by Dr Richard Walker, a scientist and
technical dive instructor. Walker was inspired by his time joining Dutch divers
from the now defunct Ghost Fishing Foundation, to clean up ghost nets in the
North Sea, in Croatia and from first world war wrecks in Scapa Flow, Orkney.
Nunn joined the team a year later after becoming increasingly frustrated at
seeing nets and other plastic pollution in the ocean – he started diving in
2001 and says he’s seen some form of human-generated litter on every dive he’s
ever done. He’s since completed 300 dives for Ghost Fishing UK and plays a key
role in training up new divers to add to the existing volunteer roster of 70.
The charity works on around 10 projects per year and in 2022 recovered 1,800kg
of nets and 35 creels (pots)."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
