Cleaning Up Ghost Gear

Shawn Bath didn’t set out to be an ocean warrior. As a kid in the ’70s, he and his friends in Twillingate, Newfoundland, thought of the Atlantic as a playground, building and floating on rafts around the harbor. “There’s a lot of stuff we did back then you wouldn’t let your kids do today,” he says. When the sea ice broke up, Bath and friends dared to jump from piece to piece. 

At 14, Bath was already fishing commercially with his parents. After the Canadian government declared a moratorium on the cod fishery in 1992, Bath took a diving course to work in the new sea urchin fishery along the Atlantic coast, “literally picking urchins off old tires,” he recalls. In 2018, Bath thought he’d kill some time by diving the harbor around Bay Roberts. But he found fish and seabirds tangled in traps, ropes, nets and other debris all over the harbor’s bottom. He knew, too, that sea otters dive into traps to eat the crabs or lobsters in them and can’t find their way out again. Known as ghost gear, these lost or discarded nets, ropes, and traps continue to catch sea life, entangling and trapping species they were designed to catch … and many they weren’t. According to United Nations Environment Programme estimates in 2018, some 640,000 tons of fishing gear is lost annually. Every year, this ghost gear kills over 136,000 seals, sea lions, small whales, turtles, sharks, and more. 

For years, Bath had not only overlooked this problem, he’d helped create it, blithely tossing garbage overboard when at sea. But one day, he says, “it just dawned on me.” He saw the garbage for the threat it was to sea life. He continued diving and began pulling up the trash, eventually hauling 15,000 pounds of garbage from the bay in 2018.

With a donated boat, Bath started the Clean Harbours Initiative (CHI) later that year, nearly bankrupting himself to get it off the ground. “Whenever I go at something, I’ve got to do it 110 percent,” he explains. “I’ve tried so many things in my life that I failed at. To get this off the ground, I had to sell my personal items. I definitely lost hope several times, but failing at this was not an option.” Ocean cleanup became his passion. He didn’t need a license or anyone’s permission. Nobody — not the government, not other fishers — could take it away. “There was nothing stopping me other than my own self giving up.” 

Today, Bath is still at it. He launched a “Go Fund Me” campaign that’s bringing in donations from as far away as Australia and the UK. Following a 2021 CBC documentary about Bath called Hell or Clean Water, “the thing just spiraled,” he says. “We were averaging $10,000 [in donations] an hour for the first four hours after that documentary. Within a week, there was $170,000 in donations.”

Through donations and local support, Bath has acquired five boats and a quarter of a million dollars worth of equipment. “We got pretty much everything we need, except for a pickup truck to carry our equipment.”

Still, that was a few years ago, and while donations continue to trickle in, it’s not enough for all his needs, and certainly not enough to hire permanent staff. Currently, he hires three or four workers seasonally as government employment grants become available. Others volunteer for him when they can. Bath also has one big dream left to fulfill: to retrofit a ship for offshore work. “I’ve got a 55 foot (17 meter) longliner we’re waiting to retrofit so we can drag offshore,” Bath explains. “Originally, that was my goal, to get outside and drag so we can get these nets and crab gear out of the water so it won’t be drowning whales.”

On September 24, 2022, Hurricane Fiona slammed into Newfoundland. Wind and record breaking storm surge destroyed 100 homes and washed many buildings into the sea. Bath and his team headed to the worst hit area, Port aux Basque, on the southwestern tip of the island. People donated fuel and food so Bath could help with the harbor cleanup. His group was “treated like rock stars,” Bath says. When they ran out of food and funds after two weeks, someone stepped forward with a $5,000 donation. “That kept us there for another week,” he says. “We had five or six guys busy with several boats going back and forth across the bay collecting garbage. We found skill saws, table saws, pedal bikes, squid rollers [which are exactly what they sound like they are], outboard motors — whatever people had in their sheds.” They even recovered some items belonging to a woman swept out to sea in the storm and returned them to her grieving husband. Bath and crew have continued the cleanup work, returning when they can afford it, most recently in the winter of 2024. 

To date, CHI has conducted over fifty harbor cleanups, and Bath has plans to expand beyond Newfoundland. “We’re trying to get a crew set up in Florida,” he says. Friends there send him photos of targets, including boats sunk in storms up to twenty-five years ago. “With the population of Florida, we have a lot better chance of getting funding and donations to continue our cleanups there.” They’re also getting requests to establish a unit in British Columbia. 

In the meantime, Bath dreams of reaching that special donor, a philanthropist ready with a quarter million dollar donation to purchase that pickup and get that big dragger retrofitted so he can clean up ghost gear offshore. “One of these days, someone with money is gonna see what we’re doing, and they’re gonna say, okay, let’s help this guy out.”