SAN PEDRO TOWN, BELIZE — A group of local divers ended up turning part of a trip hampered by rough weather into an opportunity to help clean up some local waters in a Central American country.
Earlier this month, divers from Thunder Bay were in Belize on a trip organized by Wally Peterson and Jean Begin of Thunder Country Diving. Peterson, who has been in business since 1971, said the trip was one of the excursions to points south the business offers. On those trips, he said, someone from the shop accompanies the group.
Peterson was on this trip. “It got rough, it was real windy in the area for six days, which definitely hampered going out and getting diving,” he said. “So talking with the manager of the dive operation we were dealing with, I said, ‘you know, there's a lot of bottles and debris on the bottom — how about we get together and we clean up the bottom?’”
The group was working with a local operator in San Pedro Town called Amigos Del Mar. Peterson said their offer was enthusiastically received, with the manager diving with them and providing free tanks for everyone.
About 14 people dove at Amigos Del Mar’s marina site, with another six on land to receive the found debris.
Peterson said a variety of items were pulled from the water.
“There were, of course, a lot of bottles and there was some trim off boats that had been knocked off, I guess, by boats hitting the shore,” he said. “There was one fairly large broken anchor that came up and various other things such as pipes and a lot of rope jumbles and, of course, some hooks and the various things that always get thrown off docks.”
Peterson, who was one of the people on land helping to retrieve the items from the divers, said they were going down to about a maximum of 10 feet. While the cleanup wasn’t a planned eco dive per se, Peterson said most divers will often want to help to maintain a healthy aquatic space.
“Divers tend to be a little ecology minded because when you look at at bottles and debris and stuff on the bottom, and when it's plastics and things like that, you want to get it out of the environment because it just hurts what we go see,” he said. “If you see plastic, when we're diving, we pick it up; if it's on the reef, you pick it up and take it out.”
The camaraderie in a group setting was another highlight of the trip, he said. “Travelling with a group of divers is much easier than travelling by yourself because you have a group that you dive with,” he said.
“You can dive with people that you get comfortable with and that's why we do what we do here.”
