Our next diving adventure was my first time at a cleanup event. The entire purpose was to dive around an area in the lake looking for stuff that should not be there. Once found, we removed it.
The idea made sense. I knew that shore cleanups happened all the time. I wasn’t surprised that litter made its way into the lake.
West Wall Bluffs
The area for our cleanup on this day is called the West Wall Bluffs at Beaver Lake in Arkansas. Apparently, litter ends up there from people on shore nearby (especially at the top of the bluffs) so occasional cleanup is required. Shyanne from Diventures guided us and since we were new divers, she our dive buddy for the cleanup. At this point, I should note that we were still in a mode of sort of trailing our experienced dive buddy. We swam parallel to the shore along the bluffs, watching the bottom and looking for debris.
After about 20 minutes, we took a break, had some surface time, and visited with some of our new acquaintances. It was a beautiful day, the water was calm, and visibility was decent – better than it had been when we did our certification dives in this same lake.
We headed back. The only interesting thing Gabe and I found was a fishing lure that was very realistic. Gabe at first thought it was a fish, so he pulled his hand back. I saw a hook, but his angle kept the hooks out of his view at first. I then discovered that picking up a lure can be challenging. The hooks kept trying to snag in everything – my gloves, my swimsuit, the bag we were using to collect trash, and so on.
We didn’t actually find a lot of stuff on these dives. It was only a few bags of trash among the 9 of us. But it got me really curious about lake cleanup events, and that can be a dangerous thing. You’ll hear more on that later.
Gabe and I left a bit early because I needed to be back for some commitments that afternoon, but the rest continued for a while. We missed out on the group photo at the end because of it, but here’s the rest of the crew we dove with.
