Meet the ghost hunters: the volunteer divers cleaning up UK seas

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.

According to a 2016 United Nations report, each fishing vessel is likely to lose 1% of its fishing gear per year. More staggering still is the stat that for in every square kilometre of fishing ground there are likely to be 4.4km of ghost nets.

Ghost Fishing UK was set up in 2015 by Dr Richard Walker, a scientist and technical dive instructor. Walker was inspired by his time joining Dutch divers from the now defunct Ghost Fishing Foundation, to clean up ghost nets in the North Sea, in Croatia and from first world war wrecks in Scapa Flow, Orkney.

Nunn joined the team a year later after becoming increasingly frustrated at seeing nets and other plastic pollution in the ocean – he started diving in 2001 and says he’s seen some form of human-generated litter on every dive he’s ever done. He’s since completed 300 dives for Ghost Fishing UK and plays a key role in training up new divers to add to the existing volunteer roster of 70. The charity works on around 10 projects per year and in 2022 recovered 1,800kg of nets and 35 creels (pots).

It currently has more volunteers than vacancies. Nunn estimates there are 300 on the waiting list, drawn to the charity through word of mouth among the dive community. The selection process is rigorous, with technical dive skills prioritised. Divers tend to self-fund their trips, though the organisation also receives support from private donations and from conservation organisations including the Sussex Wildlife Trust, World Animal Protection and the Sea LifeTrust. People can help by donating to support the charity’s work, and by reporting ghost gear via a form on its website.

The boat ride out to the Vale of Leven is exciting, but the divers – Nunn and three volunteers in their mid to late 20s – are quiet, mentally tuning in to the task ahead. Nunn pulls out an annotated map of the dive site – full site surveys are always carried out in advance of a retrieval dive – and runs through which sections of net each of the two pairs will take on. Commercial diver knives will be used to hack the net free.

We drop anchor and the divers pull their oxygen tanks on to their backs before doing their final checks. When they descend, stepping off the boat platform into the Channel, it feels surreal to be left on deck. Even this close to the action, it’s hard to imagine what’s going on at the dive site 26m beneath us. This, it strikes me, is part of the challenge when it comes to engaging the public on ocean conservation issues. We find it hard to care about what we can’t see.

A lot of people assume we’re at war with the fishers but actually we want to build relationships with them and shatter that stereotype

Emma Critchley, one of the photographers aboard the boat today, tells me she’s working on an art exhibition called Soundings, which explores how film, sound and dance might be used to connect us with the seemingly remote and inaccessible deep ocean. “How can we feel something for this space which 99.9% of us will never go to?” she says.

She hopes her work, which will be shown at the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton and the Tate St Ives this year, will raise awareness about deep-sea mining, another pressing yet hidden threat to our marine ecosystems.

Before long, a series of lifting bags appear on the water’s surface, floating upright like cheerful, neon pink cushions. The boat’s skipper, Steve Johnson, hooks and pulls the bags on to the boat, with some of us joining in for the heavier loads. Now back on deck, the divers are visibly buzzing, a sharp contrast in mood from the journey out. Nunn says they were almost chasing the fish out of the way to be able to see the wreck, such is the richness of life down there, and there is much discussion about a grumpy conger eel who was giving everyone the stink eye.

As they sort through the nets, returning any life they find back to the sea – crabs, sponges, scallops and brill among them – I chat to the volunteer divers. What motivates them to take time off work to join these trips? James Mudge, a dive engineer, tells me: “In recreational diving, you often don’t have a specific reason to be doing it, so this kind of work feels really useful because it has a purpose.”

Alex Willmott, a space systems engineer, talks animatedly about the joy of freeing life. “When a crab is stuck in the net but then you get it free and it scurries off – that’s a great feeling,” she says, adding that they freed more than 130 crabs from along gill net on a project out of Plymouth earlier this year.

For Phoebe Hudson, who is studying for a doctorate in Oceanography at the University of Southampton, being able to have a good dive and feel like you’ve accomplished something is awesome. But it also, she points out, helps to start conversations with people about lost or discarded fishing gear. “Whether you eat fish or not, all this stuff being down there doesn’t help anyone,” she says. She’s keen to point out they work in collaboration with small-scale fishers. “A lot of people assume we’re at war with the fishers but actually we want to build relationships with them and shatter that stereotype.”

Nunn confirms that they have a couple of friendly small-scale fishers in each port who will tip them off about lost fishing nets. A reporting system for fishers and divers on their website helps to inform future projects. He also says they’ll always pass any usable gear back to fishers, while the rest of the nets are recycled through the Ocean Recovery Project – an offshoot of Keep Britain Tidy – and turned into various products: footwear, furniture and insulation. Some of the volunteers wear bracelets made from recycled nets they’ve recovered at specific wrecks.

They were almost chasing the fish out of the way, such is the richness of life down there. There is much discussion about a grumpy conger eel who was giving everyone the stink eye

Tom Collinson is senior advocacy manager at Blue Ventures, a charity that seeks to restore the world’s oceans and improve the livelihoods of fishing communities. He is enthusiastically supportive of the work done by Ghost Fishing UK and other likeminded organisations, such as the Scottish Creel Fishermen’s Federation and the Global Ghost Gear Initiative. “Ghost fishing gear presents a unique and complex challenge and if it weren’t for these dedicated groups, our reefs and wrecks would be festering under blankets of nylon and dead marine life,” he says.

But he also cautions that benefits these groups bring are tiny relative to “industrial destructive fishing practices and particularly bottom trawling”. Critics liken the latter to using a bulldozer and then a vacuum cleaner on the ocean floor.

On the journey back, I realise I haven’t seen Nunn for a while. I’m told he’s having a quiet lie down in the cabin. The sea didn’t get that rough, but when we’re back on land and hauling the heavy nets on to the jetty Nunn admits his seasickness is a regular challenge, even on relatively calm days.

But he adds breezily, it’s not something that would ever stop him wanting to retrieve ghost fishing gear from the seabed. And in so doing, nurturing this growing community of British divers, who want to give something back to the marine ecosystems that have brought them so much pleasure.

To find out more, visit ghostfishing.co.uk

Main image: Volunteer Phoebe Hudson stops briefly for a portrait, in the shadow of the Rampion offshore wind farm near Brighton, UK. Credit: Emma Critchley