People have crabbed off Sidney Pier for generations.
Not everything they lower comes back up.
Traps slip their lines, rope parts, and the gear settles among the pilings.
By early autumn, three separate tangles had built up down there, heavy enough to worry the divers who swim through them.
So a team of volunteers went down to cut them loose.
What they surfaced with explains why this one spot keeps filling back in.
Why lost gear at one pier keeps building instead of drifting away
A crab trap that slips its line does not float tidily off into open water the way people picture it. According to the divers who work the site, the water moving around the pilings does something closer to the opposite, nudging loose gear sideways until it fetches up against a piling or against a trap already stuck there. Diver Ryan Swan, who organized the cleanup, put the pattern plainly: once traps are lost at the pier, current pushes more gear against them, and the pile grows into a tangle of traps, rope and cable wrapped around the pilings.
That is how a handful of traps lost in one bad crabbing season becomes a standing underwater snag. A dive at the same spot in the spring found a seafloor littered with years of lost and discarded traps, many of them already falling apart, and the divers described poor visibility and strong currents while active crabbers kept dropping fresh traps overhead.
Nothing about the site clears itself. The fix is not complicated, just physical: swim into the tangle, cut it apart, and carry each section up by hand. Old line and netting can keep catching animals long after the trap that held them has rotted open.
What five divers actually found under the pilings
Working in two teams over two dives, five volunteer divers cleared three large snags that had built up on the pilings, cutting gear loose one tangle at a time. By the end of the day they had surfaced with roughly 550 pounds of abandoned gear, including discarded crab traps, nets, rope, cable and fishing line wound tight around the pilings.
Sorted on the dock, the haul broke down into something close to absurd. Rope and line alone came to about 240 pounds of the total, hauled up along with traps, netting, cable and a shopping cart.
None of it was new. This was the second cleanup at the same spot within the year, after the earlier spring effort recovered about 20 abandoned crab traps and left the divers certain that far more was still down there.
Where the numbers actually came from
Every figure here traces back to the dive team itself, not to a laboratory or an agency survey. The operation ran under a permit, and every recovered item was sorted, weighed and documented as part of the reporting that permit required, which is why the totals are specific rather than estimated.
Support came from local organizations rather than from any single government office. The South Vancouver Island chapter of the Surfrider Foundation provided shore support, and the Shaw Centre for the Salish Sea was on hand to safely handle any marine life brought up alive in the gear.
The Emerald Sea Protection Society joined the effort too, and local businesses contributed to the day as well. That kind of item by item accounting is what makes a volunteer haul usable as evidence instead of an anecdote, the same approach taken by crews working creeks near Fayetteville, where counting and weighing debris showed how much a single waterway can hide.
The whales that showed up on cleanup day
The pier’s position matters as much as its pilings. Sidney sits on water that marine mammals move through constantly, and the divers got a reminder of that between tanks.
Swan listed what passes by: “Seals, sea lions, dolphins and whales travel through this area, and we saw dolphins before our first dive and orcas at the end of the day.” The same pilings wrapped in rope and cable sit in water where orcas and dolphins turn up on an ordinary afternoon, a reminder that captive and wild animals alike are shaped by what the water around them carries, much like the zoo lions whose routines shifted once their feeding changed.
The site once drew people for a different reason. Swan described a pier that “was once a popular dive destination, with a dive statue, reef balls and a wreck, and it is now a hazard to marine life.” That contrast is what gave the cleanup its urgency.
What happens to the gear now, and what is still down there
The recovered rope, cable and broken traps are sorted for recycling or disposal rather than dumped whole, following the same kind of documentation trail used to track waterway pollution across entire river systems.
Even after two cleanups, more gear remains. After the spring dive, Swan estimated that another 50 to 100 traps could still be sitting on the bottom in the area, well beyond what two short dives could reach. Crabbing continues above, so the supply of lost gear has not stopped either.
Still, 550 pounds lighter and with three major snags cut away, the pilings are less of a net than they were a month ago. For one afternoon, at least, the animals moving through had a clearer run past them.
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