Lakes, but actually freshwater in general, are not very common locations for our divers in our field. It was even more special to run a cleanup project in one of the oldest and most iconic lakes in Europe, both on the UNESCO World Network of Biosphere Reserves and on the UNESCO World Heritage List: Lake Ohrid.

Together with the help of Diving Center Amfora, PSI Hydrobiological Institute, Healthy Seas and Hyundai Motor Europe, we worked for a week to rid this beautiful lake of lost fishing gear. This in itself is extremely special because fishing is prohibited in this lake! So very ambiguous, and more than necessary to draw attention to this problem.

The cleanup itself was difficult, because a very thin type of gillnet is used for trout fishing, which is very fragile, especially if it has been underwater for a while and starts to lose its material strength. The depths in this project went down to 45m and we therefore also used CCRs for it. The team consisted of Ghost Divers from the Netherlands, Italy, Croatia and North Macedonia.

Pascal van Erp, Global Coordinator | Ghost Diving