Ghosts of Kernow
St Michael’s Mount, Cornwall
I love Cornwall. Who doesn’t?!
With a huge fishing community and the Ghost Fishing UK treasurer now residing there, it was a no-brainer to run our annual Ghost Fishing UK project out of Falmouth.
We booked 3 different boats over 6 days and lined up some public outreach events to capture the hearts of the holiday makers.
We kicked off at the Cornish Seal Sanctuary It was apt, as the SeaLife Trust were keen to fund our project and they also owned the seal sanctuary.
I was fortunate to interview Maz, one of the animal care team and she was explicit about how ghost gear affected and even killed many of the animals brought to the sanctuary's attention.
Working closely with the British Divers Marine Life Rescue, a handful of seals and pups each year would arrive at the sanctuary with horrific wounds from ghost gear which would remain the same size, caught around a limb or neck, while the seal continued to grow, causing awful deep lacerations.
We dived every day and I took a few days off diving to organise a social event where we invited every conservation and wildlife outfit in Cornwall to meet us, dine and drink with us and to introduce ourselves properly.
We were very warmly welcomed and everybody who came were amazed at how much ghost gear we had retrieved in such a short space of time.
We held public outreach events on Marazion beach and Maenporth beach just down the road from our campsite.
I managed to get a super early morning radio interview and Sophie our media lady got is into the local press.
We had our eye on Louis Matisse Nichols, otherwise known as Mini Beach Cleaner.
Louis, 11, has been beach cleaning since he was two years old, and started his famous Instagram account @minibeachcleaner two years ago.
His pictures on Instagram depict the reality of the state of our beaches. Based in Newlyn, Cornwall, Louis and his family clean up litter on almost a daily basis.
Louis tries his hand at diving
At this time of year, with the school break, bank holidays, and summer weather, the beaches are being wrecked by thoughtless tourists and holidaymakers who buy bodyboards, balls, spades, and lots of food, and discard it all on the beach for someone else to deal with.
That is where Mini Beach Cleaner aka Louis comes in. Using his wonderful creativity, Louis creates collages from the vast amounts of rubbish he collects on Cornish beaches. Louis says he has “a list in [his] mind of what [he’s] going to create” and he takes inspiration from “the animals, and farms”.
Louis send up a lift bag
When he was younger, Louis said to his parents that he didn’t need to go to school any longer, because being a bin-man meant no need for qualifications.
“He is incredibly creative” says his mum Nadine, who helps him with his beach cleans and acts as camera operator for his Instagram account. with chairman of ocean clean-up charity Ghost Fishing UK, for a taster session in how to remove deadly and toxic ghost fishing gear from the ocean.
We were so impressed with young Louis that we decided to invite him to join us.
Meeting at Porthkerris Dive Centre, Louis met Rich Walker, Chair of Ghost Fishing UK, to have his first ever scuba diving lesson. As a highly experienced dive instructor, Rich taught Louis how to use the breathing apparatus, hand signals for underwater communication, and most importantly how GFUK survey retrieve ghost gear.
Of course, no Ghost Fishing dive is so easy. Soon after Louis was getting his wetnotes out and surveying the net. He was then shown how to use the inflation nozzle to inflate a bright pink Halcyon Lift Bag and raise the net to the surface.
Insanely shy and probably with no concept of what a difference he is making - and will doubtless continue to make - to the our oceans, Louis didn't quite know what to say or do with himself afterwards so we took him out on the boat to watch the real Ghost Fishing divers in action and we even got to see a pod of dolphins who came out for the occasion.
We are told he did not stop talking about it for weeks afterwards!
The team wrapped up the week having recovered 540 kilos of lost ghost gear and we are extremely grateful to the SeaLife Trust for their support.
Ghost Fishing UK divers clean up the Epsilon
The monster net
“Oh Hello, this is the Guardian. Do you have a moment?”
I was only a few slurps into my morning coffee and my breakfast was about to go cold.
“Sure, how can I help?”
Volunteering for the charity Ghost Fishing UK always threatened to take over our lives and we can safely say it has done just that.
Chair Richard Walker, myself and third trustee and operations officer Fred Nunn, a long-standing friend of about 8 years, all work pretty much full time in addition to our real full time jobs to run this world leading charity.
We have the largest group of Ghost Fishing trained divers in the world, with 70 on our books and 120 on our waiting list. This is in addition to a large pool of surface volunteers who we can call on at any time for help.
It is an incredible achievement and now, as a completely independent charity we are free to do things our way - and the organisation has flourished.
When I first took a bunch of Bristol no.3 British Sub Aqua Club members on a group trip with my small business, WetWellies Caving - my first customers in fact when I started in 2012 - I had no idea it would lead to this!
Much of what we do is self-taught. The skillsets we have adopted over the 5 years of running Ghost Fishing UK have sent many of our brains bulging. Who knew we'd have to write KML files or navigate the .gov website minefields? Risk assessments, mission statements, method statements, articles, training courses, website...you name it!
Many of us are doing things we probably never would have done otherwise and it has been a true rollercoaster. Fred was terribly nervous in front of the camera - now he takes live BBC interviews in his stride.
Diver attaching lift bag to a net. Image: Christine Grosart
I had no press training but found myself having to learn the tough way and absorbing any education around the subject that I could.
This was one such occasion. I had written a press release using a template and some excellent educational materials from Class:PR and it went crazy!
After the Guardian, we started to see that a lot of news outlets were picking up our story.
Scuba divers from Plymouth had reported a very long, lost gill net on the popular and very beautiful Hand Deeps reef.
With a few reports and details in hand, we were pretty sure we could find it and deployed two Ghost Fishing UK teams onto the water. We were treated to a nice big hard boat, Seeker from In Deep Dive Centre and a professional crew who are totally on board with the charity.
One team located it and began surveying it.
Luckily, I was in that team so set about the net with my camera, documenting the trapped life in it.
The lost net at Hand Deeps. Photos: Christine Grosart/Ghost Fishing UK
Spider crabs, lobsters, fish and even urchins had got tangled up in the unforgiving gill net which had been fishing around the clock, indiscriminately.
Once surveyed, the team returned with knives, lift bags, stage bottles for lifting gas and a plan.
The net came free from the reef relatively easily and with no damage to the environment.
Once back on board the boat, the 2 hour ‘crab picking’ began.
Each trapped animal was documented according to species and whether it was dead or alive.
Luckily the sun was shining and the In Deep crew waited patiently as we dealt with each animal.
Over 100 animals were trapped in the net and around 80% were still alive and returned to the sea.
The net was measured at over 200 metres long (Fred is very keen on measuring and weighing things accurately) but its owner, not surprisingly, could not be found.
I put my new-found press release writing skills to the test and with a good story to tell, kept my fingers crossed.
BBC Spotlight did two great pieces on the story and we were then contacted by ITV and Channel 4, all keen to come out and film with us in the future.
Our social media lady, Dolly, also set about Instagram and Twitter and the levels of engagement were phenomenal.
It was a huge boost to the team after several months of being unable to dive, never mind head out on a mission and it was fantastic to get this net out of the sea so efficiently after a long time off.
Check out this fab news piece by the BBC!
Film about the project, created by Christine Grosart
Someone else's job - isn't it?
Published 2020
When Justin Hofman showed the world an image of a seahorse clinging to a plastic cotton bud, the world went into denial.
Some people tried to make excuses. They tried to claim it was fake, photoshopped, not real, a lie, an exaggeration.
People didn't want to believe it.
But everyone knew it was real. So real in fact, he took lots of images that day. He simply selected the best one.
“It’s a photo that I wish didn’t exist..." he said. Who can blame him?
Last week, in October 2020, England announced a ban on plastic straws, stirrers and cotton buds.
But does it go far enough?
I organised my first beach clean in 2011 and was shocked that, even after a few hours, most people on the beach hadn't moved. There was so much plastic litter that it took us all day in the sweltering heat to remove it from 100 metres of beach.
When I set up my own business, WetWellies Caving, way back in 2012, I promised from the outset that my business would be as green and environmentally friendly as it could be.
We did all our bookings electronically or by phone - we never posted out paper or spammy leaflets. We re-used drinks pouches and reduce single use plastics as much as possible. We encouraged our cavers to pick up litter both underground and on the way to and from the caves.
But given that WetWellies pretty much worked from home, I thought I'd share with you a few things I do about the house to make a small difference.
I use biodegradeable cotton buds, recycled and plastic free loo roll from Who Gives a Crap and hair products from Soul and Soap.
I buy kitchen bin liners and compost bin liners from BigGreenSmile.com. These are completely compostable and strong enough to take our household waste and leftovers.
I recycle anything that the local council will take away and run anything else up to the local recycling depot. A handy kitchen basket acts as a collecting vessel before we sort it into the recycling buckets outside.
I have lots of re-usable 'bags for life' and try to avoid single use plastic bags.
I have re-fillable bottles of ecover washing up liquid and every couple of months I get re-fills at the local organic supermarket in Castle Cary.
Buying veg at the supermarket is almost impossible without bringing home single use plastic. I try to pick up unwrapped vegetables and this I made easier by using our farm shop 1 mile away, or even better the Friday veg Market in Shepton Mallet.. Tesco already got rid of their own brand of plastic cotton buds and replaced with paper.
Sadly, many types still come in single use plastic wrapping. Another example of a gesture that only goes half way.
A few years ago I was given 'The Self Sufficient-ish Bible' which is full of great ideas to try to do things in a better way for the environment without having to go to extremes. It offers realistic and achievable small changes for normal, busy people.
And finally, I compost any food scraps and offcuts which go into a fully compostable bag which we have trained the local recycling crew to take as well.
I sat down and worked out, roughly, how much single use plastic use I have used in my lifetime.
It is extremely difficult to work out, so I had a go at just working out, approximately, how many shampoo bottles I have got through as an adult.
I moved away from home and lived independently from the age of 16, so I thought I'd start there.
I have always had long hair and get through about one bottle of shampoo every 3 weeks. So:
I used about 17 shampoo bottles a year.
That's 408 single use bottles of shampoo since I was 16.
ONLY shampoo. You can double that figure for conditioner bottles.
Since 2018 I have been using shampoo and conditioner bars with no plastic packaging whatsoever. The downside is that they are more expensive and this is a problem. Single use plastic is cheap. Plastic free products have a low production volume, lower demand and thus, are dearer.
We need to make non plastic options affordable and even cheaper, before we can get everyone onboard with ditching single use plastic.
Now, I work offshore in the oil and gas industry - but before you shout 'hypocrite' from the rooftops, I should point out that I am a medic. Everyone needs a medic and, frankly, the oil and gas industry is not going to cease overnight just because Christine the medic chose a dfferent job.
I'm a Paramedic, actually and also an offshore diver medic. I look after divers in sat chambers and quite often their jobs are repairing leaks, investigating any break in containment and often making oil and gas rigs last longer so that the fulfill their worth before newer ones are built.
The vessel I work on has a very low carbon footprint and everything gets recycled. Nothing gets dumped in the sea - the fines are horrendous and the company looks bad. We even make water on board and there are recycling separation bins everywhere.
Working offshore does give me an insight into an industry not everyone has access to, plus it gave me enough spare time to support my voluntary work as trustee, secretary, photographer, instructor and general dogsbody for the ocean clean up charity, Ghost Fishing UK.
Even though my background is in medicine, I do enjoy learning about the oceans and educating myself more and more about the threats to our blue planet.
I've enjoyed some excellent (and mostly free) online learning to keep the grey matter ticking over.
Why not give it a go?
For more information, check out the Marine Conservation Society's magazine. You can join for only £3.50 a month to help protect our oceans.
There are loads of free resources, educational materials, ideas and help and you can even become a beach clean champion!
Conger Conger
I've been trying to get to grips with some scientific names for various marine critters. They tend to be formed from genus, species and sometimes order and class.
The easiest one to remember is 'Conger Conger'. Not very imaginative and I guess, in a class of it's own.
This one in Lyme Regis, Dorset was in a cage of it's own.
It had got itself trapped in a large, lost fishing pot, doubtless looking for an easy meal. A spider crab cowered nervously in the corner and the eel was stuck fast through the netting, unable to go forward or back with no chance of escape.
The charity Ghost Fishing UK had been tipped off about two lost pots which had got their lines tangled up in an old diving shot line and subsequently snapped off, abandoning them on the seabed.
Now, both the shot line and the lost pots were threatening unwitting wildlife.
As part of a 5-day marathon effort by the charity and its volunteers, not aided by Covid-19 restrictions and ever changing legislation, a team of 6 divers set out from Lyme Regis to dive the Heroine. Consisting mainly of brick cargo and conger eels, this fairly flat wreck had snagged both a shot line and string of pots, the latter laying hopelessly on the seabed just next to the wreck.
I was on the camera again, using my new Canon 100D and Ikelite housing set up, with Ikelite strobes and snapped some shots of Andy Rath collecting up the old shot rope, made mostly from polyprop. Floating neutrally buoyant, it was a very real hazard for divers, cetaceans and boat propellers alike.
Once removed, the pots eluded us until the other team jumped in to join us. It wasn’t long before we found a large, lost cage just off the wreck and stuck fast, a resident conger eel.
The pots had been there an estimated week or so. The conger wasn’t in bad condition and his cellmate, a nervous spider crab, cowered in the corner, trying hard not to be his next lunch.
I got in close and set about the camera.
Scuba divers are the eyes of the ocean and without underwater images and video, the public remains completely unaware of what is going on beneath the waves. How can anyone care about something they cannot even see or simply just don’t know about?
Satisfied with my images, Fred gave me an OK question signal to which I replied ‘OK’ I was done.
I did not expect what happened next, as Fred immediately opened the lid of the cage!
I screamed through my regulator, climbed over Andy leaving him confused and dishevelled and hid well out of the way, expecting the conger to sense freedom and set about immediately biting me.
Of course, nothing of the sort happened. Fred spent the next 5 minutes trying everything he could to get the conger out of the cage.
He tipped it on its side, shook it about, cut away some of the net which the conger was ensnared in and even tried to remove it by its tail. He wouldn’t budge.
Eventually, after more persuasion the conger slipped slowly and unceremoniously out of the cage and swam nonchalantly off along the sand to head back to his lair in the piles of bricks.
The grateful spider crab also made a break for it at a significantly quicker pace and the team set about raising the pots to the surface.
The pots were returned to their owners in an attempt to work up relationships with the local fishing community. Without their trust, we will not be able to get information where fishing gear has been lost and won’t stand a hope of recovering it before it does untold, wasteful damage.
Lockdown Litter - Time to take a stand?
"Do you think that's cider?"
I asked my next door neighbour, Redd, as we poked through the brambles on the side of the road with our litter pickers.
It was a cold, slightly windy and very dull grey day. We were in the middle of the longest lock down ever and so utterly bored and fed up that we decided to start cycling.
It was during our tentative, lung bursting wobbles around the village that we were both noticing horrendous amounts of litter.
“Mate…that’s not cider….”
I did wonder. I mean, why would you drink some of it and then put the lid back on the 1 litre plastic bottle, then chuck it in the hedge?
How naïve. I’m a Paramedic as well, so the smell as I emptied it should have been a clue.
Just gross.
Turns out, the lorry drivers that have been visiting the village industrial estate have been parking up for the night or for a few hours to take their rest periods - and without toilet facilities, have been peeing in bottles and chucking them into our hedgerows.
Single use face masks. The latest scourge. Once in our drains, they are in our waterways and cause blockages - the least of our concerns.
A new blight was also noticeable, mostly within a short range of our village ‘hub’ the Co-Op convenience store. This seemed to be the final resting place for 15 of the 31 single use face masks we found.
According to the Marine Conservation Society’s Great British Beach Clean 2020 results, Personal protective Equipment (PPE) was significantly increased.
Face masks and gloves were found on almost 30% of beaches during the clean-up. The Source to Sea Litter Quest data showed that more than two thirds (69%) of litter picks finding PPE items such as masks and gloves.
Further down the road, drinks bottles, food containers, takeaway cartons and even full bags of litter thrown from car windows increased in quantity and density.
In one gateway, a pile of plastics had accumulated at the pinch point of a stream, right next to a field where cows were grazing. In another, piles of empty Carling cans densely filled one hedgerow. Someone had clearly had a fun drinking session here, but not only did they forget to take their cans away - they also left the 4-pack plastic yokes behind. Three of them.
Uncut, these can cause horrific injuries to wildlife.
Some companies are now making these yokes not only degradable but edible! Carling claim to have got rid of the plastic yokes but a quick visit to the village Co-Op showed a very different story. There was the puppy - and the poo.
Talking of poo….Redd is a dog owner and is incensed by other dog owners who leave their dog turds lying around on pavements and other people’s driveways. It isn’t surprising either, as the village has several escapees who wander the village by themselves. Presumably the owners neither know nor care.
We recovered over 750 items of litter in just under 4 hours.
Some hero.......Argos - what are you thinking?
At the beginning of February, I embarked on a National Geographic educator course called ‘Collecting Data to Explore Plastic Pollution in Our Communities’. It ties in quite nicely with the data collection work I am doing for the charity I run called Ghost Fishing UK.
Through this course I’ve learned how to create some very powerful and visual results. We did another one in the village on 14th February, just 20 minutes as per the Nat Geo course task.
In just 20 minutes we collected 116 pieces of litter!
If you are interested in doing litter picks, whether in the area you live your favourite beauty spot or on the beach, here are some handy tips to get you started.
Protect Yourself - Use PPE.
Make sure you use gloves and get yourself a litter picker. I definitely recommend a bag hoop to keep your bag open, especially on a windy day.
Get written consent from anyone you take a photo of (you don’t legally need it, but you may with children if you plan on publishing) and complete an easy risk assessment form (Example risk assessment form).
Wear high vizibility jackets, wrap up warm and make sure your phone is full charged.
Data Collection
There are several data collection tools out there - I would argue far too many, as this means all the data is collected differently by different people and there is no standardisation and no central database.
So, it is up to you where you hang your flag and what you use.
Here are some suggestions:
Marine Debris Tracker app
Set up a free account and you can download the data from the CSV file on their website.
This can be imported into Google Earth (instructions below).
Simply choose the list (begin with NOAA if you are new to it, but the Nat Geo list is very comprehensive) and tap on the item of litter each time you bag it. The app follows your route and will drop a pin on a map each time you log a piece of litter.
This is a very powerful tool for collecting geospacial data and provides evidence of litter ‘hotspots’.
To get the map, screen grab the plotted map BEFORE you submit your data
or you won’t be able to get it back!
The app generates some cool graphics which can be screen grabbed from the website.
To make a cool Google Earth KML file, follow these instructions:
1. Go to the Marine Debris Tracker website and download the CSV for your litter pick.
2. Open Google Earth on your computer
3. On your computer, open Google Earth Pro.
4. Click File > Import.
5. Browse to the location of the CSV file and open it.
6. In the box that appears, next to Field Type, choose Delimited.
7. Next to Delimited, choose Comma.
8. Use the preview pane to ensure your data has imported correctly and click Next.
9. Next to "This dataset does not contain latitude/longitude information," leave the box unchecked.
10. Select the fields in your spreadsheet that contain the latitude and longitude data and click Next.
11. Click Finish. Google Earth begins geocoding your data.
12. To use a style template, click Yes.
13. Click OK.
14. Create a new style template, or use a previously generated template.
You should now have all the items you collected, following the path you took. You can also draw a route and measure it using the rule tool in Google Earth, as I have done with the red line here.
Another very cool feature is that you can add images to the litter points to show photos of what was found, where and when.
You can also share your KML file so others can look at your Google Earth litter pick route and see what you found and where.
Village Litter Pick KML 14022021.kmz
Download KMZ • 20.39MB
If you prefer good old paper and pen, then the Marine Conservation Society survey sheet is more than adequate and works fine for inland litter picks as well as beach cleans.
When completed, fill out a summary sheet. Don’t submit it to MCS though unless it was actually done on a beach.
You can track your route and progress using an exercise app such as Strava.
Keep Scotland Beautiful also has a handy survey form. I could not find one for England so please let me know if you come across one.
At the end, I produce a summary sheet along with images as an ‘evidence pack’ and send it to whoever I think will listen. Parish Council, District Council, local papers, local social media - anywhere you think will make people wake up and listen.
Why not let us know how you get on. Have you done a beach clean or litter pick recently? How did it go and what did you find? Where did you send the results?
We would love to hear from you!
Our Village litter pick gallery. A huge thank you to Redd Moon for her company, enthusiasm and bravery in these litter picks!
Winner Winner Chicken Dinner!
Well…that’s what we used to say way back when I worked in horse racing!
But this time, I’m super happy that my image of a diver cutting away a Ghost net in Scapa Flow won an award.
Diver in Scapa Flow. Image: Christine Grosart
I headed down to Brixham with Paul Duckworth to promote Ghost Fishing UK and run a stand at the Brixham Marine Conservation day. We met some great people and I gave a talk on the project which went down really well. I was over the moon that my image of Colin Stratton and the Ghost net won the Underwater Conservation Photograph contest.
I came away with a Manfrotto camera bag and no less than four DSLR photography books.
