Shortly after welcoming me on to the boat, Fred Nunn, a volunteer scuba diver and operations officer at Ghost Fishing UK, asks if I’ve taken any seasickness tablets. I’d cycled along the Brighton seafront to get here and while the water hadn’t exactly looked flat, it wasn’t especially bouncy either. “Will I need them?” I ask. Nunn, whose long hair is dyed a subtle pink, nods solemnly before turning back to his pressure gauge and logbook.
What comes to mind when you picture a perfect dive site? A horseshoe-shaped reef in the tropics, perhaps, rich in colourful fish, coral and plant life, with calm, balmy waters for the dive and bright blue skies for the boat ride. Today, however, we’re heading out in wind chop and mizzle to a silty shipwreck off the coast of Brighton, albeit one in the shadow of the rather majestic Rampion offshore wind farm.
Nunn and his fellow diving volunteers are here for the week. Their task? To remove several large and hazardous chunks of fishing trawler nets that have become entangled in the shipwreck of the Vale of Leven, a steam drifter boat that sank in 1917.
Ghost fishing gear – meaning abandoned, lost or discarded nets, pots or lines – is particularly problematic because it continues to catch marine life. Crabs, rays, fish and even birds or larger mammals such as seals and dolphins get trapped in the gear, where they inevitably die and become bait for more marine life. And so the cycle continues.
