"Treasure"....

I don’t remember how it started but it was many years ago. We always saw sinkers on the dive teams training dives and I started picking them up and the next thing you know everyone was doing it. We got buckets full of sinkers now what are we going to do with them!

 

Someone from the fire company said sell them at your fishing flea market in February and that’s what we did. The fire company gives the dive team a table and we sell everything we find underwater. Sinkers, old bottles, lures, fishing poles and reels, boat anchors, you name it we’ll sell it. One year Tom and Sue found a three foot tall concrete owl and it was the first thing we sold that year!! A concrete owl!!!

 

 

 

The money we get goes right back into gear for the team, ( IE, underwater still camera and a underwater video camera, dry suits, whatever the team needs.

 

 

 

 

We help the fishermen by cleaning up the snags that cover the bottom in the inlet. We also get to show them the stills and the videos of what’s on the bottom. We do get to free up fish that get hung up in the fishing gear that is hung on the bottom.

 

So when you see us out there with those PVC pipe tubes that what we’re doing, training to work underwater and getting sinkers and making the inlet just that much cleaner.

 

 

 

In 2012 we recovered 2264lbs of sinkers and that is not counting the few hundred lures we also had or the fishing poles.

In 2011 it was 2154lbs of sinkers  and lures. Every year we get over a ton of sinkers and lures. It’s like a never ending job. As fast as we clean up a snag we find another one. I know we been doing this for  over  ten years and we always get over a ton, so if you do the math that’s ten tons recovered.

  May be we should say you can rent them cause we only get them back again later.

 

We don’t always keep what we find, we have returned phones, rings, watches, pocketbooks, fishing poles, car keys.

 

Chet Nesley

Chief Diver