Life at KEY Project: Super Sucker Limu Clean-Up!

Volunteers do work in the bay. The barge where the bags were stored is seen in the back, and the barge for the Super Sucker generators is to the left

One super sucker, dozens of volunteers, a few good leaders, and a great vision equals one bay 16,000 lbs. lighter.

Volunteers from the community collaborated with the Oahu Aquatic Invasive Species Super Sucker team on saturday to remove invasive algae from the beloved Kaneohe Bay. I was lucky to be one of those volunteers.

A sign marks the entrance to the fish pond

A volunteer hand bags some algae

As team leader Tristan explained:

We target Smothering Seaweed, Gorilla Ogo, and Prickly Seaweed using a combination of mechanical removal and biological control to combat the spreading problem throughout the bay. This algae has been growing in large, tumbleweed mats, breaking free, fragmenting themselves, and reestablishing elsewhere for decades. The resulting spread around the bay is killing coral and destroying fish habitat.

We labored for about two hours outside the Paepae o' He'eia Fishpond in shallow waters, removing the algae. The set-up was great and we finished up an hour earlier than expected when we ran out of bags. The process is simple: you walk out a ways into the shallow water until you start to feel little algae lurkers creeping on your legs, and then you reach down and yank them out of the water with a rake, wolverine claws, or just the bare hands your mother gave you. The algae just kind of slides out out of the salty water.

Tristan congratulates all involved and informs us that we will be finishing an hour early because all the bags are full

This guy is happy

These make shift tools nicknamed wolverine claws, are designed to drag algae out of the bay

Then you have two choices, you either pack it into a bag until your bag gets full, at which point you hand it off to a designate kayaker, or (if your lucky) you get to hand it off to a team member that will load it into the Super Sucker, an ultra-awesome ocean vacuum cleaner with a zealous vendetta against all invasive plant species. The Super Sucker will suck the algae up and pass it through generator-powered hoses to the team's main barge, where it will then be bagged.

A kayak is unloaded onto the barge

A volunteer from Colorado adds another bag

A kayaker designated to haul the forty pound bags to the barge takes on one more bag

The kayakers took on some heavy loads, thats for sure

The Super Sucker works wonders when the numbers are few, but this time around the volunteers in the water out numbered those bagging on the barge, so although we started off feeding the algae through the Sucker, all of us ended up just hand bagging, and still the work went remarkably quickly, bagging 16,000 lbs in two hours. The algae (probably not all of it) was donated to local farmer Charlie Reppun.

This was the first community project of this sort, but judging by the success, it's likely that we will be seeing more projects of a similar nature in the future.