On Saturday May 20, the SPC Underwater Activities Society (Scuba Club) conducted its third annual reef cleanup in the Gulf waters under Pier 60 in Clearwater. Old crab trap rope, fishing tackle and other debris accumulates around the pier pilings and becomes an entanglement hazard for marine birds, turtles, and mammals.
In the months before the 2010 BP oil spill, Reef Monitoring Inc., a non-profit corporation, was formed. I enlisted SPC Marine Science faculty and students both current and former to be on the Board of Directors, and the main purpose of our group was to collect baseline data on the existing marine communities off Pinellas County.
Once we began doing these underwater surveys on local artificial reefs, we found that they were accumulating large amounts of old crab trap rope and fishing line, which poses a very real threat to marine birds, turtles, and mammals, including the now-famous dolphin, Winter, who lost her tail to old crab trap rope. To combat this problem, Reef Monitoring began in 2012 to host a series of Reef Clean-Ups, where we enlisted local sport divers to go out into the Gulf to remove as much of this material from the Clearwater Artificial Reef as possible.
In 2015, the City of Clearwater Harbormaster requested our group do a cleanup of crab trap rope that had accumulated under Pier 60, and the annual Pier 60 Cleanup was born.
This year, 14 club members arrived by car and boat starting at 8:00 a.m. for the event Our student divers used knives and shears to remove these materials and place them in a dumpster provided by the Clearwater Harbormaster.
Clearwater Fire Rescue team had their boat and divers standing by for safety and had their fire rescue truck in the parking lot at pier 60. Clearwater City Council member Dorene
Caudell is a diver, and she joined us for the dive.
By 11:00 a.m., the divers completed the task and the anglers on the pier could resume their fishing. The students were then treated to lunch donated by Hooters on Clearwater Beach.
This annual event has removed well over a thousand pounds of material from Gulf waters over the past three years.