On a recent Sunday afternoon, the divers arrived on a thin strip of sand at the furthest, watery edge of New York City.
Air tanks strapped to their backs, they waded into the sea and descended into an environment far different from their usual terrestrial surroundings of concrete, traffic and trash-strewn sidewalks.
Not all is pretty. Plastic bottles, candy wrappers and miles and miles of fishing line drift with the tides, endangering sea life.But it has long been a concern of Nicole Zelek, founder of the dive school SuperDive who four years ago launched monthly cleanups at this small cove in the community of Far Rockaway, where New York City meets the Atlantic Ocean, about 4 miles south of John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens.
“Every month we have a prize for the weirdest find,” she said. They have included the occasional goat skull, perhaps used as part of some ritual, Zelek surmises.The divers’ haul one late-summer Sunday wasn’t much, but there were clumps and clumps of fishing line untangled from underwater objects.AP“Unfortunately, tons of crabs and horseshoe crabs — which are under threat — get tangled in the fishing line and then they die,” Zelek said.
Scuba divers prepare to enter the water during an underwater cleanup in the Queens borough of New York on Sunday.Brave scuba diver rescues hooked shark entangled on artificial Florida reef, wild video shows The project invites what organizers call “citizen scientists” to survey their diving sites to help catalog the myriad items that don’t belong in oceans, lakes and other bodies of water.
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