Our first dive was at the USS Kittiwake, a decommissioned submarine rescue boat. This was my first wreck dive and I was very excited. Inside the boat there was very little coral because of the short amount of time the boat has been sunk in that particular location. I also didn’t see many fish in and around the boat either but it was still interesting to be able to swim through the 251ft boat. On the second dive however, we dove at a smaller (60ft) boat that was used to lay cables between the Cayman Islands. This boat had been sunken for more than 30 years and had large amounts of coral growing throughout it. I personally liked this boat more due to its higher amount of coral and fish swimming throughout. Once most of the divers had surfaced, the ones remaining witnessed a school of large horse-eye jacks including two that swam towards us into the bridge and explored the bow of the boat. I appreciated how much life this artificial reef brought to the area. Artificial reefs are very beneficial to the environment in many ways. For example by sinking large objects it keeps them out of landfills while helping marine life. The increase in marine life the artificial reefs bring give fisherman a new different location to fish at which can lower stress put on other natural reefs. The first know use of artificial reefs for algaculture is in 17th century Japan for kelp, although the use of artificial reefs to block boat passages dates back to 264 BCE during the first Punic war. Reef balls have also been deployed across the oceans. These beehive shaped balls are rough, filled with holes, and are 1 to 5 feet tall. Hundreds of thousands of these have been deployed in low reef areas and they are very cheap compared to larger projects like ships.
After lunch we took a short van ride to a beach for our beach cleanup. There was an extraordinary amount of small broken pieces of plastic which made the cleanup very difficult. It stressed the importance of recycling because even one plastic spoon can end up being more than 20 pieces of trash. Shortly into our cleanup, we discovered a wooden wheel which had been obviously intentionally filled with trash. While it was nice for these people to at least put their trash together how hard would it be to take it with them afterwards. The amount of trash that has accumulated in even the last week since the last group cleaned the beach, was disgusting. Humanity has negative impacts on the environment in so many ways very often yet so many people regard it as if there wasn’t a problem simply because they haven’t seen it with their own eyes. Seeing all of the trash this week and all of the beautiful wildlife in the oceans has really opened my eyes to see the impact we are having on the thing that provides us with more than half of earths oxygen, that provides nearly 3 billion people with their main source of protein every day. Drastic steps need to be taken because humanity as a whole can’t live without the ocean.
