July 8th - BRCS-NCF With 2 USCG Divers
I have wanted to do the NCF event with divers for many years but I couldn't get any interest from the ones I knew. This year, at the BRCS picnic, one of the USCG guys said he was a diver. I "jumped on him like a hen on a Junebug". He agreed to think it over and see if he could get permission from his Commanding Officer.
He called and said he and his buddy got permission to dive with us for the NCF event and I started finding funding for the equipment we needed.
That done, we began to plan how the event would proceed and with the help of Steve Somers, David Fred and Jocelyn Trepte, we came up with a plan which worked really well considering it was our first time to do this section with divers.
Divers change the way we clean the river. It becomes a recovery event with lines and knots and large, heavy very nasty chunks of stuff you really don't want to have in your boat. The learning curve was pretty steep there for a while.
I had brought a lot of line and we tied the items to the fishing boat I had borrowed and when it was so heavily laden that I was having problems controlling it in the wind and current, the diver and I took a break and made a very slow run to the drop off points.
The weather could not have been better for this cleanup. Just lovely.
We made a few errors but all in all it was a very successful event. We got all sorts of large, old, historic and hidden debris out of the deeper sections of the river with very little trouble. We got things that would never have been accessible to us without the divers. They made it work.
We took a damaged canoe from the bottom of the pond, emptied it and used it to ferry most of the other trash we had to the takeout. I guess it's true that "The River Provides". It was left with the debris it carried.
The bike we found was taken by one of the USCG volunteers to be used on the base. He was thrilled.
The safe that we found was opened later and the possible owner contacted.
Look for more pictures on the www.BRCleanSweep.org website in a week or so.
I want to thank everyone who attended this event. You all were fantastic and very professional in your work and no one got hurt.
I want 4 divers and 2 power boats next year. Send your diving and fishing friends to me. I will get them the gear they need to help us.
Norm
Taken by Jocelyn