April is National Volunteer Month! This month-long event celebrates the impact volunteers have on our lives and encourages volunteerism throughout the month. We at Nudi Wear feel incredibly lucky to have such amazing volunteers who consistently show up and have grown to feel more like family over the years. During Volunteer Month, we hosted a cleanup dive at Point Panic, assisted with a large-scale cleanup at Magic Island, and then squeezed in one more cleanup at Point Panic on the last day of the month. Many of our volunteers made time in their busy schedules to participate in all three events.
For the last event of the month, we partnered with Hawaii Marine Animal Response (HMAR). We love working with HMAR’s Marine Debris Program. Sometimes their volunteers freedive and sometimes they SCUBA dive, but they always show up in great spirits and pull a lot of debris! This cleanup was no different. In total, we had 22 volunteers. All but 3 were SCUBA diving. The non-divers cleaned up the surrounding park and assisted the divers getting out of the water and up the stairs with heavy gear and bags of debris. The divers removed 84 pounds of trash from the ocean! This time we found a lot of equipment such as a surfboard leash, a body-boarding fin, and part of a snorkel. We also found some of the usual glass bottles, aluminum cans, single use plastics, and fishing line, hooks, lures, and lead weights. On land, we collected 18 pounds of trash including a broken surfboard leaking small pieces of Styrofoam into the rocks near the water. Even though our haul was not as large as some of our other cleanups, we still feel pretty great about removing that much harmful materials from the ocean and waters edge. We hope you can join us at our next cleanup on May 20th with Aaron’s Dive Shop and HMAR!
