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Christ of the Deep celebrates 50 years below the waves.
How long can you hold your arms over your head? How about five decades?
Sunk in 1965, Key Largo’s beloved Christ of the Deep statue has welcomed daily…
Christ of the Deep in Key Largo Celebrates 50 Year Anniversary Read More »
KURT LIEBER
Patrick Strattner
Occupation Founder/executive director, Ocean Defenders Alliance
Diver Since Mid-1970s
Helped Establish California’s MPA network, which protects 16 percent of state waters, nearly 10 percent in no-take zones
Founded in 2000 amongst friends, Ocean Defenders Alliance now connects hundreds of divers and “deck volunteers” in its mission to protect California’s ocean treasures, especially from the deadly effects of ghost nets, equipment lost or abandoned by fishermen. For his efforts, founder and executive director Kurt Lieber is our November/December Sea Hero.
You have been involved in a lot of projects with Ocean Defenders Alliance — which has been the most meaningful to you, and why?
I started this organization in the year 2000, with some friends. Through the years, Ocean Defenders Alliance (ODA) has turned into a dynamic union, and we’ve had over 200 divers and hundreds more deck volunteers go out with us on various projects. In 2013, I contacted the people at the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary (CINMS) to see if they would allow us to go into the sanctuaries and start removing ghost gear there. This area is a national marine sanctuary, national park and marine-protected area. As such, its biological importance — and sensitivity — is without question. After a lengthy qualification process, we were given a scientific collecting permit. We are the only all-volunteer group with this permit that I know of. That means a lot to me.
What is the biggest challenge you have faced in your fight against ghost nets and marine debris in general?
When I first started ODA, I couldn’t find anyone who knew about the damage that was being done by ghost gear. The Internet still wasn’t a tool widely used to gather or share information. So, I had a difficult time convincing the general public that this was a serious issue; marine debris is a good but dismaying example of the old saying “out of sight, out of mind” as far as public consciousness goes. Fast forward 15 years, and the tide is changing. There is now a great source of scientific information available that informs people with a lot of statistics. One that absolutely makes me cringe is that NOAA estimates that 330,000 whales, dolphins, seals, sea lions and turtles die in ghost gear every year. The problem is that every year, the commercial fishing industry loses a staggering amount of gear (i.e., lines, nets, and traps). Consequently, our work is never done.
What’s been your most satisfying moment?
The vast majority of nets we locate and remove are made out of synthetic material, like nylon or mono-filament line. Scientists have estimated that nylon nets will last 650 years in the oceans. A net that is in the water for that long does no one any good. Animals are dying continuously, needlessly, and divers are losing what we all want to see alive, FISH! The fishing community loses as well because of decreased populations. To date we have removed approximately 21,000 pounds of these deadly nets. One of my most satisfying moments was pulling together a fantastic group of volunteers, and together we removed about 1,000 pounds of gill net from just one location. That does not sound like a lot, but think about that for a moment. What would a 1,000-pound pile of fishing line look like? Well, that is what some of these deadly derelict nets are made out of; it can be a huge, and hugely harmful, collection!
Tell us a little bit about what you are working on now?
It is a really exciting time for us right now. Not only are we continuing to clean more of California’s coastal waters, such as in the CINMS, we are also in the midst of establishing a new base in ODA in Hawai’i. As awareness expands through the dive community, we are getting a lot of interest from different areas of the U.S. that are inquiring about creating ODA bases all over the country — and we know that ALL coastal waters need the kind of service we provide. The Seattle/Portland area is looking promising for a future base as well.
How can divers and Scuba Diving‘s readers help further your work?
As anyone who has ever owned or been around a boat knows: Things are always needing maintenance, repair or replacement! We have the manpower and know-how, but we are constantly working to keep our boats running well and fueled up. So, to keep us at sea doing what we do best, donations are very welcomed. Another option is to start a removal project in areas where your readers come across debris. And I don’t mean only ghost gear. Plastics are a huge plague that we have got to address if we want to future generations to enjoy the wide variety of life forms that the oceans historically have supported. Want to know what the oceans looked like before the invention of the steam engine? Read The Unnatural History of the Sea by Callum Roberts for a good dose of reality. In other words: Get educated and get involved! If this problem is going to be solved, we are the ones who are going to have to make it happen.
What’s next for you and Ocean Defenders?
We purchased a new (used) boat late last year, and we’ve been working on upgrades and repairs ever since. It is currently berthed in San Pedro, California. As soon as we are finished with this phase, we’ll be moving the boat up to the Channels Islands Harbor, and resume our removal projects in the Channel Islands.
What would you do with the $5,000 Oris award if selected for Sea Hero of the Year?
If I am selected for this honor, I will put the money directly into our boat in order to launch additional debris-removal expeditions. I have recently received reports of several marine debris sites throughout Southern California that urgently need our removal expertise. This award would allow us to travel further from our home port and get to sites we haven’t been able to reach because of the high costs of fuel, oil and boat maintenance.
Is there anything we did not ask that you would like readers to know about? Tell us what’s important to you!
I’ve been diving since the mid ’70 s, and have seen a drastic decline in biodiversity, water quality and wildlife sightings and interactions. Having witnessed this loss first hand is what drives me to do what I can, in my lifetime, to defend ocean life and habitats. Over the last 15 years or so, I have seen what marine-protected areas (MPAs) can do to help marine species bounce back. I was heavily involved in the state of California’s decision to create MPAs up and down our coast. While the scientists recommended that 30 percent of our waters be set aside as no-fishing zones, when all was said and done, we ended up with 16 percent of our state waters having some kind of protection, and only 9.4 percent of that is no-take. A far cry from what the science dictated for species’ survival. But it is a start. I would love to see our no-take areas expanded, not just in California but throughout the world. The effort we are putting into aquaculture as a “work around” for our diminished fish populations is like putting Band-Aids on a cancer patient. We must attack the root cause, which in this case is the threat to wildlife species and habitats caused by overfishing. Nature has proven time after time that she can heal herself if we leave her alone. MPAs are one of the few real remedies for our dying oceans.
Lastly, I want to leave readers with hope. Each of you reading this can make a difference; you must simply choose to become involved. You can educate yourself and others. You already possess the power to influence things for the better through your votes, your buying decisions, what you eat and where you invest your time and resources. All you have to do is join our alliance and be an Ocean Defender!
Eah Sea Hero receives an Oris Aquis Date watch valued at $1,595. At the end of the year, a panel of judges selects a Sea Hero of the Year, who receives a $5,000 cash award from Oris to further his or her work. Go to scubadiving.com/seaheroes to nominate a Sea Hero today.
November/December 2015 Sea Hero: Kurt Lieber Read More »
Eric Douglas
Check out the latest book by Eric Douglas!
Sea Turtle Rescue and Other Stories now available!
Eric Douglas — author of Scuba Diving‘s Lessons for Life columns and a number of books — has just released a collection of chapter stories for young readers from kindergarten to third grade. Sea Turtle Rescue and Other Stories includes four full-length chapter books in a single package. The stories follow Jayne and Marie, along with their friend Monique and Javier around their home on the Outer Banks of North Carolina as they learn about the ocean, history, science, sea turtles and sharks.
“When my girls were young, after reading innumerable Magic Treehouse books with them, I decided to write them their very own chapter books to read. The first story was Sea Turtle Rescue and sea turtles still hold a special place for us today. Over the years, I wrote three more stories,” Douglas said.
Three stories in the collection were published as part of the Newspapers in Education program, making them available in serial form for kids from all over the country to learn about the ocean. They were published in places as far apart as Bermuda and Iowa.
“These stories are great for kids (or grandkids) interested in the ocean. The two main characters are young girls, but boys like the stories as well. My step-nephews tell me how much they like the stories all the time.”
Sea Turtle Rescue and Other Stories is available in softcover for $10 and in ebook format for $5.99. The ebook is available through Kindle, Nook and most other ebook retailers.
You can find out more, or read reviews from Sea Turtle Rescue and Swimming with Sharks on his website at www.booksbyeric.com.
Description
Two young girls move to the Outer Banks of North Carolina and learn about the ocean and life on the coast. There are four early chapter books in this collection, written for readers six- to nine-years-old. The stories are exciting but also include information on science, the ocean and history.
Sea Turtle Rescue is an ocean story about protecting sea turtles. When an injured sea turtle shows up near their home on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, Jayne and Marie, along with their friends Javier and Monique, search the beach to find the turtle’s nest and protect it from danger. They know the time is getting short and if they don’t find it soon, the eggs might not get a chance to hatch.
Fight for Fort Hatteras is a history story about the civil war. Jayne and Marie take a school trip to visit the site of a Civil War battle near their home on the Outer Banks. Marie wanders off and finds herself in the middle of the battle and afraid she may never see her family again.
Hurricane! is a science story on hurricanes hitting the coast. Jayne and Marie are faced with Hurricane Erin bearing down on their seaside town. Do they evacuate or stay with their father and protect the aquarium?
Swimming with Sharks is an ocean story about sharks and their value. Jayne and Marie love the ocean and enjoy spending time out on the water with their parents. For them, sharks are beautiful creatures, not something to be feared. But an up close and personal encounter makes Marie think twice.
For more information, contact Eric Douglas at 304-421-2203 or eric@booksbyeric.com or on his website at www.booksbyeric.com.
MORE BOOKS BY ERIC DOUGLAS
Book Release: Return to Cayman
Sea Turtle Rescue Children’s Book Now Available Read More »
Brandi Mueller
Corsair wreck at Marshall Islands
New wrecks are being found around the world, and we’ve got the scoop.
WORLD WAR II AIRPLANE GRAVEYARD
Exploring one plane wreck is good — but 150 is better. That’s what awaits divers in the Pacific Ocean’s Marshall Islands, where more than 150 WWII aircraft were found in 130 feet of water. “They should have flown more, lived longer, but they were sunk in perfect condition,” Brandi Mueller tells guns.com. She discovered the site while diving of the coast of Roi-Namur in May 2015. Although this site is called a “graveyard,” these planes did not crash — rather they were pushed of a reef and into the ocean after the war.
SÃO JOSÉ-PAQUETE DE AFRICA
Lost off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa, in 1794, this Portuguese slave ship drew the attention of researchers who spent years searching for it — recently, the authenticity of the São José-Paquete de Africa was confirmed by the Slave Wrecks Project, which educates the public about the global slave trade. Now over 200 years old, the São José-Paquete de Africa sank after it ran into submerged rocks about 300 feet from shore, killing more than half of the 500 enslaved people on board, while it was on its way from Mozambique to Brazil. Surviving slaves were sold shortly after the tragic wreck incident. Divers can also explore nearby reefs.
USS INDEPENDENCE
After more than 60 years on the bottom, the “amazingly intact” USS Independence has been discovered of California’s Farallon Islands, though its depth — 2,600 feet — makes it undivable. Using an autonomous underwater vehicle and a 3-D-imaging sonar system, researchers created a detailed image of the 623-foot vessel. Independence was an American aircraft carrier during World War II; it was a target ship in atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll.
NELSON
Two hundred feet down on Lake Superior’s bottom lies a 115-year-old ship with its name still legible — Nelson. Found intact, the 199-foot three-masted schooner sank during a storm in 1899 while transporting coal to Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula. While conducting a side-scan sonar search of the area, Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society researchers discovered the wreck in August 2014.
Maritime History: See What Wrecks Were Discovered in 2015 Read More »
Every diver remembers his first time. My baptism in British Columbia waters was 25 years ago, in Discovery Passage. The midwinter plunge at a site called Whiskey Point opened my eyes to just how great cold-water diving could
be. Granted, I nearly froze to death. (You would think with 1,000 dives under my belt I would have known better than to wear a ratty, old hand-me-down wetsuit. Chalk it up to the follies of youth and the poverty of a college student.) I survived, emerging from the emerald seas stuttering excitedly about the remarkable color, the diversity of life and the magic of wolf eels.
BACK TO THE FUTURE
Flash forward to February 2015. I smile to think that seminal voyage to British Columbia’s Vancouver Island began much like this one. I’ve just convinced the border agent that, yes, the purpose of our visit to Canada in the middle of a gray winter drizzle is indeed scuba diving, that we’d be taking only pictures, leaving only bubbles. Our little car is stuffed to the gills with dive gear, tanks clinking merrily at each turn in the road. We’re making a beeline for the Tsawwassen ferry, which will whisk us across to Vancouver Island. We’ll arrive at Campbell River in four hours and be underwater in the morning. Tunes are blaring. Life is grand.
TIMING IS EVERYTHING
Tapping his smartphone, Bill Coltart consults his favorite app and then announces that the time is nigh. “Slack should be in about 10 minutes. Make your final buddy checks and hang tight. We’ll move the boat into position.” Coltart, owner of Pacific Pro Dive, gently nudges his 30-foot, custom-built aluminum Ata’Tude close to the rocks, then stares intently downward, reading the gray-green water. Even with a lifetime of midisland ocean experience, he admits that predicting slack water in Discovery Passage — the interval between tides when water movement is at a minimum — is part science, part experience, and part adapt-on-the-fly.
Thankfully, we nail it at Whiskey Point. Dropping down a series of rocky steps carpeted in bright-yellow sponges and strawberry sea anemones, I’m amazed once again that such tropical hues exist in the cool Pacifc Northwest. At 70 feet, my computer shows 47 degrees, but who cares? (This time, we have drysuits.) Hulking lingcod are lounging about, begging to be photographed. A Puget Sound king crab clambers past like a Technicolor Humvee on a mission.
My plan is to keep moving south in hopes of finding my wolf eels of memory. But we are waylaid by a giant Pacifc octopus. It’s a pipsqueak, no bigger than my fist. This little guy is all attitude, launching off the wall and squirting a cloud of ink to bamboozle us. My wife, Melissa, sees through his anemic smoke screen and follows him down to 80 feet, where he settles on a pink-coralline-algae-covered rock and does his best sea urchin imitation. Unfortunately, a building flood tide 30 minutes later encourages us to ascend.
As soon as we break the surface, I begin babbling about the remarkable color, the diversity of life, and the magic of the octopus.
A CURRENT-POLISHED JEWEL
Vancouver Island’s bulk does a splendid job sheltering Campbell River’s dive sites from open-ocean storms and the punishing Pacifc swell. Currents, however, can scream through these inland waters — up to 16 knots in Seymour Narrows, just north of town. Current is the region’s lifeblood, a conveyor belt bringing nutrient-rich, oxygenated seawater and plentiful food to marine life large and small. It’s no surprise that Seymour Narrows is a superb dive whose sheer walls are plastered in a kaleidoscope of anemones and sea stars.
Along the Quadra Island side of the passage, at Row and Be Damned, we make a leisurely, hourlong ramble in 55 feet, over boulders smothered in billions of red anemones. We discover kelp greenlings zinging back and forth, nudibranchs, weird scaled crabs, and a reclusive tiger rockfsh, all amid ruby splendor. Our submersion coincided with the calm of slack water between modest tidal exchanges — otherwise, we would have sucked through our air in a few moments fighting against Poseidon’s sea wind.
Day two finds us weaving beneath the Argonaut Wharf, a forest of pilings from which ghostly plumose sea anemones sprout, and under which critters creep and scuttle about. Accessible by shore or boat, it’s an excellent place to encounter octopuses in less than 40 feet. Second slack is reserved for Steep Island and its garden of giant feather duster tubeworms starting at 50 feet and cascading past 100. Quillback rockfsh hover near their purple, pompom-like blooms, and divers with eagle eyes will spy outrageously painted candy-stripe shrimp under the tentacles of snakelocks anemones.
One of the few sites accessible while current is running is the HMCS Columbia, a 366-foot destroyer sunk by the Artificial Reef Society of British Columbia in 1996. Well prepared, with plenty to see between 60 and 120 feet, it’s a good intro to B.C. wreck diving. For the nocturnal, a night dive in Quathiaski Cove provides an opportunity to poke around the shallows, hunting for micro beasties.
STELLER SHOW
On our final day, we drive over an hour south into Comox to meet up with Coltart again at the municipal marina.
We transfer gear onto Fast Forward, his ex-Coast Guard Zodiac, and greet our dive mates, filmmakers Russell Clark and Trisha Stovel, on assignment for seaproof.tv.
Under leaden skies, we race along at 20 knots to Norris Rocks, just off Hornby Island. The raucous barking and the smell offer irrefutable proof that we’ve arrived. Hundreds of huge Steller sea lions shamble about on the low-lying rock.
Coltart smiles, asking, “Ready for the full-contact action to commence?” Trisha chimes in: “It’s like running around the woods among a massive wolf pack that uses newcomers as chew toys — in the friendliest way possible!”
We back roll into the green. Silence greets us. As do 50-odd marine mammals, eager to play. At first, the sea lions politely swim around us at arm’s length, tilting their heads like curious puppy dogs and ogling us with dreamy eyes. Minutes later, they’re mobbing us. They cuddle, lean heavily on us, and take “exploratory” bites, mouthing our arms and legs. They nuzzle against my camera, pull at coiled strobe cords and nibble our fins. If you don’t fancy being in the middle of an underwater rugby scrum, consider skipping this dive.
Two hourlong dives pass too quickly, and the boisterous throng seems truly sorry to see us go. We will dearly miss the sea-lion loving.
ITINERARY B.C., CANADA
Day One Feast on the loggers breakfast and morning glory muffins at Ideal Cafe. Dive. Dive again at an off-slack site like the Columbia. Dick’s Fish and Chips is a no-brainer for grub to refuel yourself for the third tank. Dive. Afterward, enjoy the authentic Greek and primo steaks at Acropolis Kuizina. Sleep very soundly.
Day Two Between today’s two slack dives visit the Museum at Campbell River to immerse yourself in the thousands-year-old art, culture and history of the First Nations coastal peoples. Picnic under a seaside totem pole. When you climb out of your suit after your last dive, head to funky Freddie’s Pub to meet other scubakind over wings and brew.
DAY THREE Use this as a wild-card day to customize your getaway. Be harassed by sea lions, do additional dives at premier sites such as April Point Wall and Copper Cliffs, or become one with salmon in the Campbell River. Mountain bike in Snowden Demonstration Forest. Watch grizzly bears and whales with Aboriginal Journeys, or shred the slopes at nearby Mount Washington. Let the season — and your style — decide.
NEED TO KNOW
When to Go Diving Discovery Passage is possible year-round. Visit between November and April to add sea lion dives at Mitlenatch Island or Norris Rocks. From August to October, join Pacific Pro Dive for a drift snorkel down the Campbell River to witness mighty Pacific salmon concluding their epic journey to spawn and die.
Dive Conditions Sea temperatures range from 45 to 55 degrees, and visibility 20 to 80 feet. Winter generally delivers the best viz, and summer and fall the best topside weather and warmest water. Drysuits or thick semidry wetsuits are strongly recommended. Dive with experienced locals, use a live boat, plan a submersions for slack water, and be wary of boat traffic, especially during summer.
Operators Pacific Pro Dive (pacificprodive.com)
Price Tag Custom charters are from $99 to $120 (Canadian) for two-tank air dive charters.
Drive and Dive: Cold-Water Diving in British Columbia Read More »