Mission JournalEagle Reef
Eagle Reef
Location: Southern California — Eagle Reef, Catalina Island
Site: Eagle Reef
Boat: Giant Stride
Gear Recovery: Curtis Wolfslau, Jim Babor, Andrew Hung, Jung Hsieh, Gavin Davenport, Juan Torres
Surface Support: Angie Biggs, Brendan Coffey
Mission Impact: 18 lost hoop nets recovered from the reef at Eagle Reef and removed from the water.
Lobster season is underway in Southern California, and with it comes a new wave of lost gear. Hoop nets that part their lines or get dragged off a mark do not stop fishing just because nobody is coming back for them. They sit on the bottom, baited or not, and keep catching lobster, fish, and anything else that wanders in.
Team Ghost Diving USA set out aboard the Giant Stride for Eagle Reef, off the west end of Catalina Island, a site new to our team.
With six divers in the water, we split into three teams and spread out across the site to cover as much ground as possible. Curtis and Jim took the deep profile off the northwest corner, working the slope on technical profiles with staged decompression. Gavin and Juan headed east and worked the mid-depth terrain, and Andrew and Jung stayed at recreational depths closer in. Angie and Brendan ran surface support, tracking lift bags as they broke the surface and hauling gear aboard.
Working a hoop net free of the reef. 
Lift bags away on the shallow reef.
Conditions were the best-case scenario, about as good as it gets at Eagle Reef. The gear was there, too. The deep team alone rigged and lifted seven hoop nets off the northwest corner, and the other two teams each sent up a steady stream of their own. By the time the last diver was back on the boat, the tally stood at 18 hoop nets recovered.
A heavily encrusted hoop net, complete with a crab and turban snails that had taken up residence, shows how long some of this gear has been down. 
Another one over the rail and onto the deck of the Giant Stride.
A few notes for the record. We spotted a handful of additional hoop nets on the northwest corner that we simply ran out of lift bags for, so those are marked for a return trip. We saw no gill net or other commercial netting at Eagle Reef on this visit, and we found no hoop nets below 200 feet, which gives us a good picture of where the lost gear is concentrating at this site.
The mission was a success with no incidents. That is 18 pieces of fishing gear that are no longer catching and killing marine life on the reef at Eagle Reef, and we will be back for the ones we had to leave behind.
A very special thank you to the crew of the Giant Stride, to our surface support team, and to our partners at Healthy Seas and Hyundai USA for supporting our clean-up efforts.
