2019 Team's new recond

2019 Will go down in the dive team’s history. In this one year the team has recovered 6542 pounds of lead sinkers.

    The team recovers these in the course of our training dives. As the members learn about search patterns and the power of observation we recover the sinkers we see, sometimes they are just sitting on the bottom and are easy just to pick up and other times they are in large balls of fishing line and have to be cut free. 

  So now the divers have to work to cut them free, using a dive knife or dive/EMT scissors. Learning to work underwater is a must because we never know what we may be asked to do (IE evidence dive, body recovery, car or truck recovery) we want to be ready for anything.

    During these dives the divers now have to do some problem solving, we have found sinkers now we have to cut them free and now we have to get them back to an exit point or up to a boat. We use a capped PVC pipe as a sinker tube to carry the sinkers in, only the more you find the more you have to carry and the bigger the tube the heavier it is. Some of the tubes we use can carry up to 60 pounds.

    Swimming 60 pounds of sinkers is no fun, now the divers get to use another tool that they need to be able to use and that is a lift bag. A lift bag is a water proof bag that the diver fills with air and it gives the sinker tube buoyancy and with the right size lift bag and enough air the sinker tube can become weight less, making it much easier to swim with.

    Since the dive team is part of the first aid squad the team doesn’t get a whole lot of funding. But by recovering sinker and selling back to the fishermen at the annual fishing flea market the team is able help support itself.

    In the course of these dives the divers remove large amounts of fishing line and other debris that litter the bottom. These large mounts of fishing line can trap fish and crabs and this turns into a death sentence.

   So by the team’s training dives we are mastering our skills, cleaning the environment, raising funds for the team and making it a little safer for the marine life.