This gallery contains 29 photos.
One of the amazingly rewarding things I’ve been able to do this year is some volunteer outreach. I have had the opportunity to share our Underwater World with kids, elderly and everyone in between. Helping grow a common goal, … Continue reading
Does the funding go directly to you or to an agency? What is the accountability chain that the funding goes where you claim it will go? Just wondering as the last dive focused on collection was two months ago according to this blog and no future dives are slated.
Answer:
Good questions George.
The Cox Conserves award goes directly to Sustainable West Seattle, I have zero control over those funds.
With regards to dives posted here, that is partially just me getting busy and not blogging as much, sorry if i left you looking for things to do/read about.
I have spent the past couple months diving with Pacific Marine Research’s Marine Science Afloat program and mentoring some newer divers. Usually I encourage volunteer divers to come out when I am doing this but we were testing a new communication and semi-wireless video system so the dives were not always as straightforward as one would hope, and adding another person to the mix that is not familiar with what is going on was more of a potential safety issue, so i had to weight the risk/benefit ratio.
The Spring plankton bloom and sunnier days have brought summer underwater. With that comes a heavy ‘ground cover’ of Brown Algae such as ribbon kelp and LOTS of Ulva (Sea Lettuce) this covering makes it very hard to find batteries and trash. Instead we’ve been looking at beach clean ups and community outreach including both children and elderly.
There is one battery that I know of left to ‘clean up’ at the old seacrest marina site, and I have an idea of where it is but each time i’ve gone looking for it, it has eluded me due to the ground cover (or someone else has cleaned it and if that is the case, AWESOME!)
Some pictures and stories I have not been able to share because of the Cox nomination, such as bringing the tide pools to the elderly folks because the reporters were there and asked not to share pictures until the announcement was made.
We’ve been focusing on documenting storm drains this spring and then seasonal changes over the summer months, along with bringing the “visibility project” on line.
Thank you for your interest, I hope I was able to answer your questions… We are still out diving, documenting and sharing… Please feel free to email me with any more questions.
Some of my other randomness can be found here: http://diverlaura.wordpress.com/ stuff that is a bit more personal and maybe or maybe not related to diving, and more about my personal fun dives as opposed to cleanup and the likes. (but most likely about diving)
Dear Friends,
Due to our efforts cleaning up and removing over 1000 lbs of discarded marine and automotive batteries from a West Seattle scuba diving site, I have recently been honored with a nomination for the Cox Conserves Hero award. This award comes with a small funding opportunity which I would like to see used toward combating our local environmental problems. If I win this award, I have chosen “Don’t Feed the Monster”, a subsidiary of Sustainable West Seattle as my non-profit honorary grant recipient.
For this to happen, I need your vote! http://www.kirotv.com/s/heroes/
The Puget Sound harbors an amazing abundance of life and profound diversity of habitat. Although the Salish Sea often looks serene and beautiful on the surface, there is a fight for survival going on just beyond the shoreline. It is a battle between the creatures that call it home and a massive influx of toxins and roadside debris; much of this results from our polluted storm outfall. The waterways and their inhabitants are being overwhelmed by an increasingly populated metropolis.
The Salish Sea is more than a collection of names and places on a chart. These same waters give us recreation, inspiration and livelihood, it is our duty to protect them.
This story does not need to have a sad ending. There are agencies, government and non-profit alike, lobbying for measures to decrease our impact by reducing this flow of waste and toxins. But this problem is too big for independent efforts; it requires a coordinated, community response.
The beautiful waters that we take for granted need YOU! Every single one of us can make a difference with the choices we make on a daily basis. You don’t need to be wealthy or have loads of time to donate; you CAN make small changes to your daily activities that will have a profound overall impact. Many people taking small steps over time can develop into a formidable force, fixing seemingly overwhelming problems.
If I am lucky enough to be selected, I would like to see this donation help jump start public awareness for our “7 simple solutions” program (via educational videos and multi-media) which will in turn help educate the general public and help reduce the flow of polluted and toxic storm water runoff into Puget Sound.
I need your support for our continued efforts to make Puget Sound healthier for the future, one person at a time….
YOU can be a part of the solution by voting for me at the KIRO Cox Conserves Hero web site. http://www.kirotv.com/s/heroes/
Thank you for your time,
Laura James
Dear Friends,
Due to our efforts cleaning up and removing over 1000 lbs of discarded marine and automotive batteries from a West Seattle scuba diving site, I have recently been honored with a nomination for the Cox Conserves Hero award. This award comes with a small funding opportunity which I would like to see used toward combating our local environmental problems. If I win this award, I have chosen “Don’t Feed the Monster”, a subsidiary of Sustainable West Seattle as my non-profit honorary grant recipient.
For this to happen, I need your vote! http://www.kirotv.com/s/heroes/
The Puget Sound harbors an amazing abundance of life and profound diversity of habitat. Although the Salish Sea often looks serene and beautiful on the surface, there is a fight for survival going on just beyond the shoreline. It is a battle between the creatures that call it home and a massive influx of toxins and roadside debris; much of this results from our polluted storm outfall. The waterways and their inhabitants are being overwhelmed by an increasingly populated metropolis.
The Salish Sea is more than a collection of names and places on a chart. These same waters give us recreation, inspiration and livelihood, it is our duty to protect them.
This story does not need to have a sad ending. There are agencies, government and non-profit alike, lobbying for measures to decrease our impact by reducing this flow of waste and toxins. But this problem is too big for independent efforts; it requires a coordinated, community response.
The beautiful waters that we take for granted need YOU! Every single one of us can make a difference with the choices we make on a daily basis. You don’t need to be wealthy or have loads of time to donate; you CAN make small changes to your daily activities that will have a profound overall impact. Many people taking small steps over time can develop into a formidable force, fixing seemingly overwhelming problems.
If I am lucky enough to be selected, I would like to see this donation help jump start public awareness for our “7 simple solutions” program (via educational videos and multi-media) which will in turn help educate the general public and help reduce the flow of polluted and toxic storm water runoff into Puget Sound.
I need your support for our continued efforts to make Puget Sound healthier for the future, one person at a time….
YOU can be a part of the solution by voting for me at the KIRO Cox Conserves Hero web site. http://www.kirotv.com/s/heroes/
Thank you for your time,
Laura James
Ah, spring… How we’ve missed thee… The weather warms up, diving is no longer a race to get from the sub zero wind lashed parking lot to the only slightly warmer water.
But with spring, something else departs.. (we couldn’t have it all, now could we) Visibility. Well, technically we have visibility, just not consistently good visibility. We are now well into the plankton cycle of spring.
By cycle i mean…. very bad vis, followed by worse vis, followed by coalescence of snot-balls, followed by surprisingly good vis between snot-balls, followed by OMG, I can’t see my light….
wash, rinse, repeat…. and repeat…. and repeat….
Its an excellent time to get out and start logging secchi disk data, as it would be very neat to not only get vis readings daily but maybe a snapshot of how the planktonic soup is looking (snot-ball, stringy, diffuse, etc…)
If you find yourself wondering where all the blogging went, my apologies, it has been very busy these past few weeks with talks to kids, trade shows, demo days, more trade shows….This weekend the Planktonic One is working in the Halcyon Booth #737 at the Scuba Show in Long Beach.
We are coming up on the 40th anniversary of the clean water act, so stay tuned for ways we can celebrate!
West Seattle Impressions 2
Pike Place Market
Constellation Park AKA Duck Pron
Amazing Clouds from Luna Point/Anchor Park (AKA Duwamish Head)
Sunny in Seattle
West Seattle Impressions 1
Nicholas Weise, from Seattle School of Diving posted this today on my Facebook Page…
heya, tell any trash gatherers that I’ll give them free airfills. honor system. if people are dedicating a dive to removing trash I will gladly give air fills. o2 clean w/ banks. <see Facebook page for the phone number>. appointment only, but I’m super flexible on that. a mile east of 405 in kirkland. I am expecting a fedex shipment tommorrow morning with a fifty foot fill whip, so no need to even lug the suckers out of the car. nice for doubles. I have hauled too many tanks in life – the fill whip will really make me smile
Talk about seriously awesome and generous! Honor system kids, we want to keep this available, because it is donations like this that will allow more folks to come out and do cleanups! (air fills are like money but better, cause you can’t spend it on latte’s)
HUGE THANKS to Nicholas our air fill angel in Kirkland!
You too can sponsor a battery removal!
A huge thanks to M2 from the Bay Area for his kind donation to Beneath the Looking Glass Project! In gratitude for his generosity I am dedicating the removal of Battery #20 in his name.
Battery #20 has been de-crittering in the shallows, and now it is time for the Recycling facility!
Even if you can’t get up here and dive with us, or perhaps are not a diver but still want to help out and be a part of things, you can sponsor the removal of trash from Puget Sound and the continued documentation to help us understand our impact on the waterways we share.
Your donations will be used to help cover the ongoing costs of breathing gas for dives and equipment and equipment maintenance for removal/documentation.
A few questions have come up in the comment sections after the media posted our story… I would like to take a moment to answer them here.
Q) who hauls all these batteries after they have been removed?
A) My dive buddies and I removed the batteries from the site and take them to an environmentally friendly scrap metal recycling facility. Most of them I could take in myself, but i had to enlist my dive buddy’s truck for the 160lb battery.
Q) why not just leave them, they are not hurting anything…
A) Prove to me that bare lead and heavy metals in water is of zero impact and they are not eyesores in the beautiful UW world and I’ll be happy to leave them. Oh wait, I can’t, we already took them out.
Q) What divers used these as navigational aids?
A) Many of us would take note of them when swimming across an area between where there is now a boundary line and a line put in as a ‘trail’ to guide divers to some of the points of interest at this site (some amazing pilings covered with life, a small wreck that often has a few giant pacific octopus under it, a set of I-beams covered in metridium anemones… If we left the rock pile at the top of the i-beams, we knew that if we turned “left” (upslope) at the 70′ battery, we’d end up right at the entryway. This was more prevalent in years past before the lines were in place to guide folks. An interesting side note: where we thought there was a single battery there were in fact 6 or 7. We just kept seeing a different one depending on our angle up the slope.
and finally…
Q) Who is paying for this? A) I am still paying for the privilege to remove discarded batteries from Puget Sound. I have turned the money around from the scrap metal recycling plant directly into the project to pay for more lift bags and mesh sacks for the second phase of plastic removal. No one will pay me for the plastic and garbage we remove so my already minimal ‘funding’ so to speak is drying up. Everyone who has been volunteering their assistance in this project is donating their time and the money as filling tanks is not free, and i am tremendously grateful to them as it would not have been possible otherwise.
Again thank you all for your kind words, they mean the world to me… Projects like this often feel a bit like tilting at windmills… I know its just a tiny infinitesimal microscopic scratch in the bigger picture of pollution and trash that is poisoning Puget Sound, but it is something _tangible_ that we could do and build a bit of momentum for a weekly cleaning effort 
Its often hard to build actual momentum for a movement if you have nothing to show for it. This allowed my divers to have something to show for their efforts and have fun doing it.
For those who are wondering how they can help if they are not divers or don’t have time to get out to the beach for a cleanup, I did figure out how to put a donate now button on the page. Your donations would be used to help pay for equipment and consumables for the cleanups.
