About 2500 kilos of old fishing nets and 850 kilos of fishing weight. With this waste proceeds, a group of recreational divers from the Dive the North Sea Clean Foundation returned on Sunday from a six-day expedition at sea. The stuff comes from eleven different shipwrecks that lie on the bottom of the Dutch, Belgian and French parts of the North Sea. It was brought ashore in Stellendam on Sunday.
“Old fishing lines, nets, fishing hooks and poisonous fishing leads pose a serious threat to marine life,” the foundation describes the problem. This was also evident during the dives: the eighteen participants encountered crabs, lobsters and fish, among other things, that were entangled in the waste. “The animals that were still alive were carefully freed by the volunteers,” the organization said.
The divers were rewarded for their work with wonderful experiences: according to the foundation, they encountered young short-beaked seahorses. “They floated in the water column or sometimes held on to bits of seaweed.” The fact that they were so easy to see was partly due to the calm weather of the past few days.
The Duik de Noordzee Schoon Foundation has been organizing these types of expeditions for years. They say they have already removed a total of more than 100,000 kilos of waste from shipwrecks.