Diving to clean the bottom of the sea

First of all thank you! Thank you for taking care of our seas, for recognizing the importance they have and for showing to the rest of us how easy is to have a positive impact on our environment. And thanks to Area Marina Punta Campanella, to project aware and to everyone involved in the cleaning of the bottom of the sea.

To me, it is difficult to imagine a better plan for a Saturday than going diving to clean the bottom of the sea! It happened for the last 2 Saturdays!

Early in the morning we all got our dive equipments ready, got into our wetsuits and took a bag. Our mission? To remove as much rubbish from Piano di Sorrento and Marina Grande di Sorrento harbor as possible!

Unfortunately, filling bags with trash from the sea is way too easy! Much easier than finding an underwater spot with just sand, rocks, pebbles, seaweed, crustaceans, fishes, worms, bivalves and other types of invertebrates… Instead we find bottles, cans, plastic bags (way too many!), glasses, nets, fishing gear…

The view is utterly ugly and sad. But still, among all that rubbish, we can find a lot of polychaetes, crabs, and small fishes… In spite of human presence there is a great and diverse marine life! This makes me think, how would this sea look like without anthropologic activity? No doubt it would be absolutely amazing! I would really like to have a glimpse of how it could be… for now, finding these wonders through loads of junk will have to do.

When diving you must be close to your partner. This is something all divers know, however, sometimes it is not that easy… Every time we take a bag or a glass from the bottom we move a lot of sand and dust, making pretty easy to get lost for a while. After being underwater for long plastic trash starts to decompose, it is really frustrating to try to grab a plastic bag and to see it become a thousand small pieces impossible to catch!

We cleaned for around two hours, in which we managed to remove a lot of rubbish. The outcome gave us a rather bitter-sweet feeling, we know that much cleaning is needed, that there is too much trash polluting our oceans and that our job was far for being enough… But we decided to look at the bright side! We decided to acknowledge what a great job we had done, we were really proud of the cleaning of these areas. We have taken a wonderful first step!

 

 

 

So, come on! The path is long but it is in our hands to do better: we can use less plastic, we can sort and recycle the waste we generate. Because if we do nothing our oceans will end up being dumps instead of being the most valuable treasure we have!

I am really happy to have taken part in this event. I am already looking forward to participate in the next one and I encourage you to join us, I bet you will not regret it!