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.
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
