Dive Against Debris with Sea Experience

Overview

On March 15th, 2025, The International SeaKeepers Society partnered with Sea Experience to host our first monthly dive cleanup of 2025 in Fort Lauderdale. Sea Experience is our partner dive shop 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. Our boat of volunteers were briefed on the sites we would be visiting as well as what trash to look for before being handed mesh bags and gloves to remove any trash they encountered during our two dives. Our dive sites were Hog Heaven, the wreck of a 180-foot barge about 60-70 feet deep, intentionally sunk in 1986 as part of the Florida Artificial Reef Program, and The Caves, a shallower reef site ranging in depth from 20-30 feet, named for its small caves. These dives marked our first of many dive days with Sea Experience in 2025, as well as our first time cleaning up these sites in multiple months. The accumulation of trash and plastics in the ocean damages the health of the marine ecosystem and has the potential to create dead zones of limited oxygen nearly all species need to survive. This makes our efforts to remove trash from the pelagic environment critical to our oceans’ health. It was evident on our first dive to Hog Heaven that there had been a great deal of human activity in the area since our last dive, as volunteers quickly and easily filled bags with fishing line, boat scraps, and plenty other types of trash throughout the dive. Overall, we managed to remove nearly 9 pounds of very lightweight trash, meaning our impact was much higher than our poundage would indicate. We give a huge thank you to our amazing volunteers for joining us and to Sea Experience and their incredible team for hosting us. We are beyond excited to continue to work with them and look forward to making 2025 our best cleanup year yet!