Ocean Aid 360 (OA360), based in St. Petersburg, Florida, was founded by Captain Neill Holland and Danielle Dawley with the goal of clearing marine debris and restoring marine habitat in Florida’s valuable coastal waters. When they started, they wanted to get community members together and create a broader impact than the two of them could do alone. Now, they make it a priority to involve coastal residents and are powered by their collaborations with thousands of volunteers and commercial and recreational fishermen. In the past eight years, they have gone above and beyond, recovering 715,000 lbs of debris and over 10,000 traps!
As a National TRAP Program partner last year, Ocean Aid 360 focused their project work in the Lower Florida Keys. They saw dramatic success in reducing the prevalence of “legacy gear” from areas where old traps seem to aggregate, so this year they expanded their efforts across the Keys. Working in the new territory has meant including more local fishermen in the removal opportunities, as well as learning to address new challenges. In the Upper Keys, the retrieval team often found multiple traps on the same line, instead of just one trap per buoy, meaning they encountered far more “gear ball” aggregations and had to deploy new removal strategies to pull them up. To clean up the more remote areas of the Marquesas Keys, Ocean Aid 360 organized a 43-foot “mothership” with three smaller boats for multiple collection trips, improving time and gas efficiency while having extra space to stack hundreds of traps found in the area. After just over a month of removals, they have finished their collections and pulled out an incredible total of 1,404 traps this year.
With the expansion of their removal efforts thanks to TRAP Program funding, Ocean Aid 360 has gotten an increasing amount of state and local attention. The magnitude of their impact has attracted the eye of state fishery managers, allowing for greater coordination between community removal organizations and state programming. Local fishing retailers, restaurants, government officials, newspapers, and a marina have all reached out to get involved with the effort. “It’s been a wonderful change from year one, where this was kind of new to the community, to year two, where they know the dramatic impact that was had last time around,” Neill remarked.
Ocean Aid 360 records and monitors their removal efforts to measure the impact on these communities and industries that support them, as well as the ecosystems from which traps are removed. As a National TRAP Program partner, they collect, standardize, and store their data during retrieval trips, and then survey hotspots afterwards for any remaining gear. They’ve also begun to monitor critical sea grass habitats torn up by derelict traps, evaluating how removal efforts are allowing them to regenerate. “When derelict traps are removed from these sensitive areas, life has an opportunity to flourish once again,” Neill said. With their TRAP Program removals, Ocean Aid 360 is helping not only marine wildlife to flourish, but the greater Florida Keys community as well.
