Dive team to scour the waters off East End Beach for treasures of trash

If you go to the Roddenberry Dive Team website and click around a little, you’ll find benevolent divers dragging some very interesting things from water bodies around the world.

Charles Campbell and his friends pulled a gun safe out of the Lumbee River in North Carolina. Gary Leach and a pal from Texas can be seen dragging what appears to be a ride-on lawnmower, which I doubt can be repaired, from the shallows of a beach. In another picture, Floridian Lawrence Berry captured the image of a Suzuki motorcycle submerged in blue-green murkiness.

Doss Powell of Phoenix, Ariz., submitted this photo to win Roddenberry Dive Team's monthly prize for the most trash cleaned up in a SCUBA diving effort. (www.roddenberrydiveteam.com)

In just over two weeks, we’ll find out if anything like that is lingering in the waters off Portland’s East End Beach. On Saturday, June 16, the city is holding a “Splash for Trash” event in conjunction with the Roddenberry Dive Team, in which SCUBA divers will take to the waters to pick up garbage.

That was what our aforementioned photographed divers were doing as well when they came up with the interesting, albeit probably now worthless, treasures.

The best “catch of the day” in Portland will be awarded a prize provided by Barclay’s Skindivers Paradise. (The original date for the “Splash for Trash” was this Saturday, June 2, but it’s been postponed until the 16th due to the weather.)

The whole thing is part of the National Association of Underwater Instructors’ Green Diver Initiative. Here’s more about why picking up trash underwater is important, as provided in an announcement by City Hall:

Trash in the ocean kills more than one million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals and turtles each year through ingestion and entanglement. Trash left at the beach can easily be picked up by the tide and find its way to the floor of Casco Bay where it could sit for hundreds of years posing a hazard to our local marine life. A tin can will take more than five decades to decompose and a plastic bottle thrown into the ocean today will still be decomposing four centuries from now.

Seth Koenig

About Seth Koenig

Seth has nearly a decade of professional journalism experience and writes about the greater Portland region.