Divers Take Out the Trash : Underwater Cleanup at Cove in Laguna Beach Is Part of Worldwide Effort

John Boyer was about 38 feet deep when he spied what turned out to be the most important underwater find of the day.

It was the plastic holder for a six-pack of cans, the circular wrapping that binds the aluminum containers. Boyer, an experienced diver, knew what to do: Unwrapping a plastic bag he’d brought for the purpose, he stuffed the debris inside it and kept on swimming.

“This is detrimental to the environment,” he explained later, holding the offending object aloft on the beach. “It strangles sea life.”

Other bits of Boyer’s booty included five soft drink cans, a crumpled Panoramic 35-millimeter film box and a plastic fork.

“I thought we’d find a lot more fishing gear,” said Steve Vicencia, a 37-year-old insurance broker from Cerritos. “I was really surprised.”

The two men were part of a team of scuba divers who spent Saturday morning cleaning the bottom of Divers Cove, one of the most popular diving spots in Orange County, just off Cliff Drive in Laguna Beach. While underwater hunters at other beaches were going after Calico bass and sheepshead, these guys were stalking stray cans and plastic drinking cups.

“It’s our way of assuring that the underwater world will be preserved for our descendants and future divers,” said Scott Jones, an official with Santa Ana-based Professional Assn. of Diving Instructors, which sponsored the cleanup. The largest divers’ certification organization in the world, PADI has been organizing such cleanups for three years. “We are strangers in the underwater environment,” Jones said, “and if we damage an area, it will be damaged for life. It’s important for divers to be cognizant of cleaning up the areas they visit.”

Called Project AWARE--an acronym for Aquatic World Awareness, Responsibility and Education--the cleanup campaign is part of a larger effort coordinated by the national Center for Marine Conservation involving divers and non-divers in more than 30 states and 11 foreign countries. While the divers clean up the ocean and lake bottoms, Jones said, the non-divers scour the shorelines for debris.

This year’s event coincided with the annual Coastal Cleanup Day sponsored by the California Coastal Commission, during which thousands of Californians spent part of their mornings picking trash off beaches up and down the coast. Locally, cleanups were planned at Sunset Beach, the Bolsa Chica wetlands, Huntington city and state beaches, Newport Beach, Upper Newport Bay, Crystal Cove State Beach, Aliso Beach, San Clemente State Beach and pier, Dana Point Harbor and beach, Salt Creek Strands, Doheny State Beach, Capistrano Beach Park and San Onofre beach and bluffs.

Last year, according to Jones, more than 145,000 volunteers involved in the PADI/CMC project liberated some 4,000 miles of the world’s beaches and reefs of a record 3,705,939 pounds of trash during a series of weekend cleanups. In California, he said, the volunteers numbered 29,337, as many as 10% of them divers.

Among the more interesting items recovered nationally in 1991 were a toilet seat, a refrigerator, a full tub of Cool Whip, a plastic chicken, a bowling ball, a rubber girdle, an “I Love Lucy” videotape, a pay phone and a T-shirt reading “Give a Hoot Don’t Pollute.”

Participants in California, Jones said, found a washing machine, a Greenpeace flyer, beer keg and a rubber shark.

And during a similar cleanup last April at Divers Cove, he said, one volunteer discovered a hand grenade that caused the beach to be cleared for 45 minutes while police investigated.

“It was in a plastic bag under a rock,” recalled Lester Hiltz, 28, the PADI receptionist who made the alarming discovery. “I was very surprised. It’s not something you’d expect to find in an area like this.”

PADI officials said they promoted Saturday’s beach cleanup by distributing flyers and literature to the agency’s 1,800 training facilities worldwide urging divers at each location to scour their favorite local dive sites. At Divers Cove, which PADI’s Santa Ana headquarters adopted as the object of its own efforts, 38 beachcombers and five divers were busy by 8 a.m. While Jones said he had no way of knowing how many volunteers had turned up at other beaches, he said he expected the number to be in the tens of thousands.

“Divers are becoming more and more aware,” he said. “This is one of the most popular programs we’ve had at PADI because people can see the direct benefits of cleaning up the underwater environment.”

Indeed, by day’s end the joint efforts of divers and non-divers at Divers Cove had yielded a varied list of finds, including 450 cigarette butts, 12 bottles, one racquetball, two tennis balls, one squirrel skeleton, 11 plastic foam cups, eight pieces of lumber, two plastic combs, 34 metal cans, an assortment of men’s and women’s undergarments and eight used condoms.

Yet some participants expressed their surprise at the relative cleanliness of the place. “At the last cleanup we had a lot more debris,” Jones said. “Hopefully some of the environmental concepts we’re trying to impart are beginning to pay off.”

Vicencia was more succinct in his reaction. “Frankly,” he said, “I thought we’d find more trash.”