Today’s post is from Seth Lawrence, aquarist at Heal the Bay’s Santa Monica Pier Aquarium. Seth recently got an unexpected opportunity to dive following an equipment accident. He was astonished by what he found lurking right in our backyard, below the Santa Monica Pier.
As part of my job, I spent a recent morning out in the beautiful water at Bluff Cove in Palos Verdes, free diving to collect kelp for our Aquarium exhibits. There was nothing I would rather do than get back into the water, I thought, as we headed back to the Aquarium. It happened to be my lucky day, because when we returned, we learned that a group of students on a field trip that morning had lost a Van Dorn bottle, a piece of our equipment used to collect water samples, off the end of the Pier. The collecting device (retailing at about $300) consists of a clear tube with removable caps at both ends. The line used to lower it snapped while the students were trying to collect water off the end of the Pier. Whoops!
Staff members Jose Bacallao, Nick Fash and I had a general idea of where it had sunk, but due to current and swell action, it could have been anywhere. I was excited about diving under the Santa Monica Pier, as it was my first time. As we suited up and entered the water I envisioned finding the Van Dorn and lost treasures. I was sure people dropped things off the Pier accidentally all the time.
As we began to look for the bottle (and all the treasure I expected to find), I was horrified. Instead of animals swimming around and invertebrates clinging to the pier pilings, I saw trash, trash and more trash. I saw fish that appeared to have been caught but were not worth keeping, slashed and tossed back into the ocean as trash. We had no luck as we circled, looking for the Van Dorn that we now suspected was entangled by debris. We called the search off, hoping the swell would bring the lost equipment to the beach. I decided to take one more dive down in an area that we had already searched over and over. This time, there it was, in the barren sand. With the Van Dorn in tow we swam back to the beach talking about how, even with Heal the Bay’s presence here on the Pier, there is still an abundance of trash.
I felt deflated, but at the same time very proud to work for an organization that is making strides with the support of thousands of volunteers like you.
