by Douglas Hattendorf…….

I started mamaOcean after a life of working in and on these waters. I dove for universities, public aquariums, pet shops, created a reef for live rock and coral growth and gathered food for people’s dinner plates. I fished any species from bait to spearing dorado, wahoo, big grouper, snapper etc. I’m still a commercial lobster diver but I left for 4 plus years to see America and came back and its loaded with garbage here! Everywhere! What happened? So now I mainly hunt garbage. Plastic is a killer, trap rope is worse.

It’s killing me buds out there, the turtles, rays, dolphins and birds besides the fish eating this broken down stuff and it ending up in our dinner fish. Killing species daily is our waste and ignorance.

We have cleaned up, with quite the crew, almost 6,000 lbs in these last 3 weeks. We have maybe 3,000 lbs more to go and this is just from one spot.  The crew of Trashy Productions is Keys to the Keys and Kendall, Curley’s Coffee and all who work there and help.  We appreciate it!  And MGS with Ray and Greg providing dumpsters to dispose properly of all this garbage and plastic!

Other days we just go by kayak and maybe get 200-400 lbs but its never ending and after doing this since August and documenting how fast it replenishes,  it’s is amazing, 6 weeks later and you cant tell it was clean a month ago? Aarrrr!

So after writing the city, the county, the state and FWC and to no avail in a county that brings in $5 billion from tourism and fishing alone [and that is just whats recorded] none goes back to clean this place?

There is a need in upper, middle and lower keys for this daily, every week of every month. There is no shortage of garbage killing this place, so maybe it needs to be addressed instead of ignored.

We are proving this and the documentation of where it needs monthly or weekly cleanups, mamaOcean has a TM in The State of Florida for Education and Research~ TM with USPTO also, backed by Ocean Conservancy also.

Thanks,
mamaOcean~ she needs our love!

Find out more and how you can help:  http://www.mamaocean.com/home.html