White Point
A new boat for us: the Pacific Alliance, with its hydraulic crane and working deck, ready to take on bigger missions.
Location: Southern California
Site: White Point
Boat: Pacific Alliance
Depth: Technical — roughly 185 to 200 feet
Divers: Jim Babor, Karim Hamza, Norbert Lee, Mike Gasbarro, Mark Self, Jung Hsieh
Surface Support: Angie Biggs,
Mission Impact: 300 pounds of net removed (approximately 600 square feet) and delivered to Aquafil for recycling.
This mission was a milestone for us in more ways than one. For the first time, Team Ghost Diving USA worked from the Pacific Alliance, a larger vessel that is new to us and a real step up in capability. With a spacious working deck and a hydraulic crane for handling heavy gear, the Pacific Alliance opens the door to bigger and more ambitious missions than we have been able to take on before. This day was our trial run, and we came with a clear objective: recover a section of net at the White Point that had previously been located and filmed by an ROV in roughly 180 feet of water.
The crane makes light work of heavy loads, here a full rack of cylinders and rebreathers swung aboard.
Building and checking gear on the dock before departure.
On the bottom, the divers located the net and went to work, placing lift bags, cutting it free, and inflating the bags to carry it toward the surface. As always, our divers checked the net carefully for entangled marine life as they cut. The teams worked in pairs on either side of the net, meeting in the middle, then surfaced and signaled all-clear to the boat.
The team aboard the Pacific Alliance after a successful trial run at White Point.
When the net was tallied, the team had removed roughly 300 pounds, about 600 square feet, of ghost net from the site. That is 300 pounds of net that can no longer entangle and kill marine life. The recovered net was delivered to Aquafil to be recycled and given a second life rather than left to fish forever on the bottom.
A very special thank you to the captain and crew of the Pacific Alliance, and to our partners at Healthy Seas, and Aquafil for supporting our clean-up efforts.