Looking After Our Reef

Teaching and guiding isn't the whole job — looking after the water we work in is part of it too. So this week five of us from Dive Systems gave a dive to our own house reef at Exiles in Sliema. One hour later we came out with bag after bag of rubbish between us.

Our own house reef

Exiles is our house reef — the one we love diving, whether that's a guided dive, a course, or just getting in the water ourselves. The stretch by the entry is the ground we cover every day, and it showed — there was very little down there to pick up. It was only once we worked further out, past the area we normally dive, that it changed. There was a lot more waiting for us than we'd planned on.

What came up

Plastic bottles, beer cans, a lot of fishing material, and a fair amount of fabric — mostly old clothing. Storm Harry pushed plenty of it in over the winter, and this is a busy stretch of water. The sites we dive daily we clear as we go, almost without thinking about it. This patch hadn't had that, and it needed a bit of love — so we'll be back for it.

One of the bags we brought up was printed “100% biodegradable”. It came up completely intact, still holding its shape. Labels like that describe what happens in an industrial composter, not what happens underwater — so how biodegradable are they really, once they end up down here?

Tyres get used as fenders and drop off boats often enough, and with no shortage of boat traffic along this coast, one on the bottom is a normal enough find — the issue is shifting it. Far too heavy to carry up by hand, so Adam ran a lift bag underneath it and floated it to the surface instead. It's why it's important to dive clean-ups with proper lift bags, just in case a large item needs removing safely.

It wasn't a competition. It was absolutely a competition.

Nobody said it out loud. Nobody needed to. Four instructors, Nadine on camera watching closely, and two mesh bags each with no shortage of things to put in them — of course it turned competitive. That's just what happens when you put four people who spend their working lives underwater into the same stretch of reef with a job to do. Underneath the banter though, it was a proper team effort on something that actually needed doing. We filled two bags each inside the hour and surfaced carrying only what we could comfortably manage, leaving plenty of the heavier stuff marked for round two.

We're going back

Every one of us came out of the water wanting to stay in longer. We'd kitted up for an hour and that's exactly what we dived — but there's plenty still down there, including more tyres. When the timings work in our favour we'll go back with more gas behind us: twinsets or sidemount, a longer dive, and the capacity to bring more up with us. Simon's already talking about making this a regular part of what we do as a team, and it's the kind of thing that should be happening more often.

Who made it happen

In the water picking up rubbish: Xabi, Adam, Joel and I. Nadine was in there alongside us on camera, taking every photo on this page and keeping a close eye on the group — with four of us head-down on the task, having someone watching time, gas and behaviour from the outside genuinely matters. You can see more of her work on Instagram (@cinnadine).

The dive was arranged by Simon, who runs Dive Systems, in support of Ambjent Malta — the government department responsible for looking after Malta's coastal and marine environment. You can follow their work on Instagram too.