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By Spencer Grant | Special to the NB Indy
It’s surprising what you can find at the bottom of Newport Harbor.
Bicycles, toolboxes, traffic cones, even a boat. There’s lots of plastic and things that have fallen off boats—not that boaters are dumping stuff deliberately; they just wind up in the harbor.
On one memorable occasion, a diver found a gun. “We informed the police and they said don’t touch it,” explained boatman Guy Harden. “Two divers stayed there until the police showed up, saying the gun was part of an investigation. We never heard anything about it after that, sorry to say.”
Newport Harbor got an aquatic boost on Saturday, Sept. 21 after the fourth annual Newport Harbor Underwater Cleanup arrived at Marina Park on Balboa Peninsula to seek out and collect underwater trash.
Around 60 SCUBA divers and 125 “above-water” volunteers answered the call to make the bottom of the harbor a cleaner place. The event was part of the larger Coastal Cleanup Day along the OC shore.
Explained dive safety officer David Mansfield, “There’ll be divers on multiple boats all over Newport Harbor plus others diving off the beaches. Then there are the above-water people: their job is to clean the beaches and beach heads.
And all trash isn’t of equal importance.
“I’ve personally collected up to 10 pounds, but the entire event collects hundreds of pounds,” said diver Amy Meier. “Some of the most important stuff doesn’t weigh very much: plastic scraps that get eaten and become part of the food chain. They look like sea life, so if you can see them and get them out of the water before they break down any further and get eaten, that makes a difference. A beer bottle in the ocean doesn’t do much harm but plastic does.”
The cleanup began at 9 a.m. as a dozen boats loaded up with divers and headed for prechosen spots in the harbor, each diver equipped with a mesh collecting bag. While the subaquatic searching was random in some places, other target areas had been scoped out a week before, yielding a bigger return on the divers’ efforts.
The harbor is no more than 20 feet deep, meaning that divers had to avoid passing boats whose propellers would stir up sediment and obscure vision. In addition, the divers wore powerful flashlights on their wrists and were careful not to stir up sediment with their foot-long flippers.
Wearing SCUBA outfits costing anywhere from $2,500 to $10,000, the volunteer divers expressed their commitment to the project.
“It’s a new experience and we expect to find all sorts of stuff,” said diver Claire Brown. “We love the ocean and want to give back some of the joy we get from it. We know other people do too.”
Noelle Daniels echoed the sentiment: “The ocean brings me so much peace and joy. It’s my way of giving back and taking care of the ocean. I love the ocean, and a lot of people don’t realize how much trash there is out there. We need the ocean to have everything on earth.”
By 11 a.m., the dive boats were returning to Marina Park with their loads of recovered refuse. After being unloaded on the pier, the trash was piled on a boat owned by Apex Diving who in turn transferred it to a C.R. & R. dumpster for final disposal.
David Mansfield pronounced it a good haul.
“We didn’t get the big stuff this year but we got plenty all the same. I’m grateful to the volunteers who made it such a successful event.”
