Early, on the morning of Saturday, May 27, members of Trinity Dive Club (TDC) set out from the Canash Apartments to engage in a beach clean-up along the shore of the neighbouring Canash beach.

The eager environmentalists were led by TDC’s president Jesse Schmidt-Antonetti and vice-president Alex Hames. Each medical student was armed with gloves and garbage bags and was determined to spend several hours trying to make a dent in what had become an unfortunate situation of garbage accumulation. The Canash beach is situated in an area just outside the town of Calliaqua. At Canash, on opposite side of the beach, is a longstanding marina.

According to president Schmidt-Antonetti, recently the aged docks at the marina were dismantled and replaced by more modern facilities. She explained the situation as, “We didn’t know it then, but afterwards we realized that the concrete base of the former jetties were layered with styrofoam”. She acknowledged that some of this styrofoam, as it floated on the water during the renovations, had escaped collection by the cleaning crews and was taken on the tide to the shore of the beach on the opposite side of the marina. Some of it had also broken into tiny pellets and was scattered over expanses of beach. Over time, much of this, along with other garbage, had created a serious problem.

The president was adamant: “We walk this beach every day and we see this, but we could no longer leave it like this”. Anyone walking from the entrance to the beach towards the opposite end, would notice that the entrance to the beach was in pristine condition and that would be because Trinity Dive Club had already cleaned that area during a previous activity. The club, however, felt that leaving the lower end untouched would have been a job incomplete.”

When questioned about the importance of taking such a stance against beach pollution, Schmidt-Antonetti proffered her organization’s point of view. She said, “We are happy to do this because it’s our environment and if we don’t clean it up, it will die, basically. Look at these trees here, they are mangroves too and they do not thrive with garbage. We need to do this now or our future will be gone”. She also noted the danger of the small pellets of styrofoam getting back into the water and ingested after being mistaken for food by fish, turtles and other sea creatures, endangering their lives.

Uniquely, it is easy to see why exercises like these fit snugly into the aims and objectives of the Trinity Dive Club. The organization commenced operations in January, 2014. Among its aims were getting students to learn how to scuba dive and snorkel; but it also created an emphasis on learning more of, and working with the environment of the island on which they were living. By the same token, even as the environment benefits from the club’s activities, its members themselves also benefit, as they enroll for training by affiliate dive shops like Indigo Dive, Serenity Dive, and Dive St Vincent, and become certified divers of the open water, in the first instance and then as advanced divers.

For its next activity, the Trinity Dive Club plans to do a dive clean-up where garbage deposited under water will be collected during dive sessions.