Ten volunteer divers decided to turn up to try to help with the underwater litter pick, even though the conditions all week had been quite awful. Mark Milburn had been keeping a close eye on the weather and beach conditions. The decision was made to dive only from Gyllyngvase Beach, the conditions at the other beaches were either not suitable or not safe. Fathom’s Free set up their gazebo as a meeting point, for both divers and non divers. Once the meet time had passed, the ten keen divers kitted up, ready to enter what now looked like an inviting piece of water. Each pair were armed with at least one bag each, knowing what they had to do.
In water the visibility ranged from 2-5m depending on where the divers went, parts of the kelp covered reef were the worse. As the divers hunted around underwater, they found an array of items including, traffic cones, a car tyre, balls, parts of glass bottle, a diver’s mask, dozens of pieces of plastic and tins cans, a sugar server, gloves, footwear and even a piece of bakelite. The bakelite was identified by Mr Milburn, as part of a lead acid battery casing from one of the several German WWI U-Boat wrecks in the area. The divers all returned safely with their haul of litter, which was then sorted out on the beach, along with the many bags of litter collected from along the sea front by the non diving volunteers. Mr Milburn said “I am quite pleased that we found so little, we do remove litter every time we dive, this proves that we are keeping it at bay”. He also stated “It is a global problem but it would be nice if less rubbish ended up in the sea.”.
