My best friend Max and I flew all the way out to St Croix from Washington to enjoy some tropical island paradise diving with our friend Levi from the Netherlands. The water is warm and the viz is amazing. What we weren't expecting and were shocked to encounter, was the underwater dump sites. We were exploring a site just south of Frederiksted Pier, beautiful barrel sponges, having a great dive, when we came upon the first spot. All of a sudden we ran into a field of golf balls, plastic drinking cups, and beer cans. Everywhere. We emptied my pocket and collected all much of the plastic as we could - then luck would have it we found a discarded bin from a fridge (what!!!) that we could use as a container to collect the cans as well. We swam back with our haul and vowed to come back the next day to actually get in a fun, relaxing dive.

Just kidding. Day two was even worse. We found a different, even larger patch of trash. As far from home as we were, we didn't have all of our mesh bags and lift bags like we do at home for dive against debris jobs. So we constructed a bag out of a pair of discarded board shorts and a zip tie we found and filled it with plastic bottles. Then we ran out of room and started stringing cans onto fishing line we also collected, trying to get as much trash as we could before we had to turn for tank pressure.

It's beautiful here, but the disrespect party boats have for the ocean is wild. We'd never encountered anything like it and were (and still are) shocked.

At least we could do our small (over 80lbs) part.