Saturday 26 April, the first Healthy Seas clean-up diving trip took place in the North Sea. The location for this first dive was a shipwreck called “Chamber –pot wreck”. Healthy Seas volunteer divers descended the 30 meters of the wreck and managed to clean the wreck of a total of 100 kilograms of discarded fishing nets. This wreck is a famous symbol of WWI as it is the HMS Aboukir armored cruiser sunk by the German submarine U-9 on 22 September 1914. It now lies at approx. 35 meter depth and has a rich marine life living around it.
On Saturday 7 June the season started also for the Belgian diving team. The Ecoduikers performed their first clean-up trip in the North Sea. This too was a shipwreck of a French class Destroyer hit by a German mine in 1915. The “Branlebas” shipwreck had two large trawl nets that have been removed and a total of 500 kilograms of fishing nets were recovered during the day.
All the recovered nets are stored in harbor facilities and will be sent to Ajdovscina, Slovenia, all together to be transformed back into raw material with the ECONYL® Regeneration System.
Other expeditions both for the Belgian team and our team in Croatia are planned in these days so stay tuned for the upcoming news on Healthy Seas.