About DiverLaura

Underwater Videography.... Diving, motorcycles, climbing, hiking, travel, dem hund, apple computers, iphones/pods/touch, She-P North America, Halcyon Dive Gear, Megalodon CCR, ..

So you want to clean up a beach!

You want to make a difference…   You LOVE your local beach and are tired of the garbage everywhere, and since many hands makes work light,  you want to get a whole lot of people involved as opposed to just you and a few friends/dive buddies….  (trust me, I know what you are thinking,  I’ve been in this exact position)

My first recommendation would be to give a call to one of your local groups such as Puget Soundkeeper Alliance that run things like this on a regular basis.  They might even have a larger clean up that your smaller group could be a part of for which they have already organized kayaks, boat support, and will be providing bags, tools and have already arranged for trash pickup after the fact.

If you are set on running it yourself, please contact the Parks Department or city/county that manages the area you are looking at cleaning.  They will likely want you to fill out some paperwork for a permit and require a volunteer sign up sheet.  This is perfectly understandable from a liability standpoint :)  In some locations there might be a fee for this permit but often times if you reach out to local businesses one of them might help cover that with you.

What are you going to put the trash in? Bags? Buckets?

Finally, what are you planning on doing with all the trash you collect??  Especially if its stinky underwater or waterlogged trash you don’t want to just leave it sitting around or overflowing the local trash bins.   Please get in touch with your local municipal trash operation and arrange for a pick up.   We don’t need to increase the noticeable garbage or have animal picking through the bags and spreading it, making a nuisance of it.

1000′s of reasons to help us Take Back Puget Sound!

7 simple solutions… not hard ones, not even big ones or expensive ones.. .

7 simple actions that each of us can take to help reduce the flow of polluted runoff into puget sound…

7 simple ways that you can learn about at www.tox-ick.org  and how we can all join together…  Its time to “Take Back Puget Sound!”

I’d like to see it taken back about 200 years, before mans influence with an influx of industry became quite so evident and those who where here lived in harmony and their presence was made invisible to Puget Sound by the forest they lived in and cared for.

Maybe we can live invisibly again…  with the advances of Green Infrastructure (rain gardens, bioswales, green roofs, pervious pavement) that mimics the ideal (the forest) perhaps if we work hard enough at reducing our own output of pollution and we can build enough Green Infrastructure (both privately and commercially),  we can create an invisibility cloak if you will for the city and from the eyes of the inhabitants of Puget Sound we are but a forest on its shores.

 

 

Storm water season begins….

Have you ever wondered how all the water running along the streets during a rain storm looks to the fish? 

Time-lapse that our team shot off Alki Beach – Seattle, WA

This site is one of the storm water outfalls that our team is surveying for a project baseline (www.projectbaseline.org). We are looking at both the heavy plastics and debris on the bottom (which makes an underwater garbage patch) and the beach plastics that are far more prevalent after a heavy rain storm. Our hope is to enlist non-divers and divers in the surveys, grow public outreach, and using multi-media, share the necessity of encouraging storm water management ‘best practices’ that are imperative due to the impervious concrete jungle we have created. 

https://vimeo.com/51456008 (no audio)

or if you like it with a bit more bass, try: 

https://vimeo.com/51491938 (bassnectar version)

If you are curious about the number of outfalls, more info can be found here:

http://pugetsound.org/policy/stormwater/outfalls

If you are interested in what you can do to be a part of the solution:

www.tox-ick.org