You’re on holiday, doing a bucket list dive, or maybe you’re a pro, training at a routine dive site. You see a plastic bottle, you pick it up. This is the unfortunate truth of our oceans; that regardless of how pristine and protected a marine area might be, you will almost always encounter some litter or nylon fishing wire.

Another and bigger part of our debris dilemma is ghost nets. A ghost net is a large piece of fishing gear that is unintentionally abandoned or deliberately castoff. The most common type of ghost nets are gillnets, a wall of nylon netting that hangs in the water column. When lost, these nets get swept up in the current, capturing all its path, eventually settling on a marine structure, carpeting and suffocating its coral and creatures.

Although most of us are used to seeing the lesser side of the scrap spectrum, not many of us witness these large-scale ghost nets. After diving for 13 years, this was the first time I had ever seen one. It left me speechless, and for all the wrong reasons.

Malapascua, a small island in the Philippines north of Cebu island, is famous for its resident Thresher Sharks at Monad Shoal. For many divers, it’s a bucket-list destination. Just a little further south is Kimud Shoal, a large sea mound starting at 12m supporting hard and soft coral, with opportunities of witnessing passing pelagics and especially hammerhead and thresher sharks.

One day in June 2019, some divers from Malapascua went there in search of hammerheads, but instead found a huge ghost net, covering over half the circumference of the pinnacle. The next day they put out an island-wide appeal to the Malapascua dive shops to join a cleanup.

The next day, 40 plus divers from 12 dive shops met for their briefing by long-time Malapascua resident and PADI Instructor, Dennis. Although we were all dive pros, we needed more information to understand what it was we were dealing with and for many of us, this was the first time we had done a clean-up dive of this scale. There were many factors to consider: depth, deco limits, animal entanglement, visibility, current, and the true size of the net. If the conditions were in our favor, Dennis seemed confident that we might be able to remove it in one dive, but we really had no way of knowing exactly what it would take to remove.

After an hour ride southeast from Malapascua we arrived at Kimud Shoal. We divided ourselves into mini teams of 4-5 divers, with the roles of cutting the net and the others collecting it into large rice sacks, then descended down the mooring line to see for ourselves how big the beast was that we were attempting to defeat. We were all shocked at the size and the reach of the net on the sea mound. To say it was enormous, would be a gross understatement. The net blanketed the pinnacle, starting at 12m on the top, reaching down to approximately 35m. Those on Nitrox went for the deeper sections, while the rest stayed shallow. After 20minutes of snipping away, the net forked, one half staying deeper and the rest coming up over the top. The net itself was thin, light and easy to cut, with the parts dangling off the reef, simply ripped off. However, atop Kimud, it had to be delicately dissected to ensure minimal damage to the coral and any creatures stuck within. Mostly it was feather stars that had attached themselves to the structure. Other animals included scorpionfish, which were awkwardly removed and even an angry peacock mantis shrimp which put up a fight when divers surgically cut it from the net. As the official photographer, I’d swim for five minutes ahead of the group, wanting to get shots of the net in clearer water, and away from the crowd. Only a moment later, like a swarm of locusts emerging from their cloud of destruction, divers were stampeding towards me, in a haze of backscatter. After about 50 minutes of diving, the divers had come to the end of the net.

The return journey, the sun shone strong, and like warriors with warpaint, our sunburnt faces symbolized a successful dive.  Friends and strangers-no-more were chatting and comparing stories with mixed feelings of gloom and accomplishment.

With the problem of trash being never-ending and ever-increasing, it can be hard to know where to start. You see a plastic bottle, you pick it up. But what dent does that make in the worldwide problem?

As a singular diver, you may feel overwhelmed and downhearted. It is when we come together, whether it be locally or internationally, that we can make a difference.

I witnessed 42 divers, working together, to remove over 150 meters of netting, weighing 100kg. And all it took was one hour.

Imagine if we all came together, what we could do with the rest of our time.

Special thanks to Evolution Dive Resort, Thresher Shark Divers, Sea Explorers, Fun and Sun, Devocean, French Kiss Divers, Ocean Passion, Sea Slug Divers, Thresher Cove, Emerald Green, Little Mermaid, Blue Nomads and all their divers who contributed to the clean up of Kimud Shoal, 29th June 2019.