Over 70lbs in one day...

...boy am I beat:D

Well a couple of months ago I took ladvr's lead and started diving for lead.
And I do believe I got a little addicted. I started by grabbing a handful of lead
sinkers after hunting fish and not long after that I began dedicating my entire dives
to solely picking up lead. I even skipped out on wsb diving to go hunt for lead :crazy:
Man were my dive buddies giving me a ton of shit for that. Luckily my latest
dive has run the lead craze out of me and I think I'll return to hunting fish from
now on, at least for the near future

Anyways I thought you guys might enjoy the pics and video's I made in my leadhunting~

Here's a short video I filmed around a month ago.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRm--B10JVE

Below is a pic of a typical underwater lead stash

And here's my latest haul from last Saturday, over 70lbs from 2 separate dives.
I could have gone for the sweat 100lbs in one day, but I was feeling beat so I decided
to spend the 3rd dive looking for fish instead

Quote from ddonnell

What are you doing with all of that? Recycling for dough? Probably burn through a pair of gloves before you make enough to get a new pair.

Good on ya though for cleaning up out there.

I'm not planning on making any money out of this. It's just a fun hobby which is good for the environment and feels a lot like treasure hunting (even though the treasure is practically worthless). I just checked an ebay auction tonight, and saw that similar but brand new lead sinkers are selling for 50 cents per pound. Just imagine how much these rusty, banged up, crusty old sinkers would go for :laughing3:

As for the glove in the video, I've been using it for over a year (the majority of glued up holes were caused by lobster diving).

So what do I do with all the lead? Well right now I dump all the extra lead in a bucket in my garage. But sometime in the future I plan on melting it all down into spare dive weights, which'll get me a lifetime supply. That way if any of my friends ever want to try out diving he/she won't have to spend the sky high prices for dive weights that you find at the local dive shops.

Quote from ddonnell

Sweet, but you seriously need some new gloves... I need to find me a mold for some old school bullet weights. Here at out house we have well over 70 pounds in dive weights and probably some more in another garage we have. If you find one I'm more than willing to split the cost of the mold.

haha yah I'm wearing some other gloves now, the lead diving killed those old gloves. As for molds I know Mark and ScienceMike both have some sort of dive weight mold, maybe we could borrow their's one of these days.

Quote from fishingdude

did you find the lead concentrated in small groups like that or did you put them together for the video?

Yep you normally find the lead concentrated in small groups like that. The video shot from :30 to around 1:10 was exactly how I found the lead. And the other pile of lead in the video all came from a single hole a couple feet away.

Quote from LunkerBuster

I would love some shitty old lead to make custom weights and ballasts. Very good idea and clean up move. You can't dive fishing piers or jetties here or I'd clean house

That sucks.Yah I've wanted to do the same thing at fishing piers at lakes out here in Southern California, but 99% of the lakes in SoCal have a ban on swimming because we use the lake water for drinking. Even though there's fish in the lake and people can chuck lead sinkers in it all day long.

Quote from Ramon

spearstuffTienes un tesoro ajajjeajjeej:thumbsup2::laughing3:
ya no necesitas comprar plomo para hacerte los pesos del cinturón ajajjeej:nono::thumbsup2:

<º))))><

Have you found a treasure ajajjeajjeej :thumbsup2::laughing3:
no longer need to purchase lead weights to make the belt ajajjeej :nono: :thumbsup2:

Haha I don't know what to say to that, but thanks :thumbsup2::D

Quote from ladvr

Good stuff!

I was thinking Mike, you should start posting more pics to your website again and get more people into cleaning up trash from the beach. That shoredivers challenge was a fun event last time you did it. I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to get some more sponsors.

Quote from monster slayer

great post bro, I enjoyed the vid a great deal! thats a heap load of lead. amazing. And they keep keep saying that we spearfishermen are the environmental threat! >(

Ah but it's not like spearfishermen are completely innocent. I know I've lost at least a dozen pounds of lead diving weights in the past.

Quote from Sockeye

Daniel-
I could use some positive ocean karma, let me know if you need a lead diving buddy.
-Marco

Maybe, you'd have to drive up to my place to check out my spots or I could head down to your house and we could explore some spots in San Diego. Just let me know what your up for.

Quote from undrh2ohntr

That's cooll....really makes you think about how much lead is out there. That is a shit load just in one shallow spot, let alone up and down the coast. Nice work.

If I were you I save it up, buy a mold for lead weights, smelt some dive weights and make a little cash. Either that or sell them back to fishermen, just make 2lb. grab bags of assorted sinkers and charge them $2 bag:D

I thought about selling the lead back to fishermen, but then I kinda got lazy to the idea of making a couple bucks at a time.

Also I don't really want to sell any of the lead "as is", because I've found that just grabbing one lead sinker will cause lead dust to rub off on to my fingers. This is probably caused by the rough surface of the lead caused by the years of tumbling in the ocean. So I'm thinking that once I melt down the lead sinkers into dive weights the surface of the lead will be smooth and the lead dust issue won't be a problem.

I'll probably spend an entire day.. one of these days.... melting it all down into dive weights. I kinda want to melt the lead at Monarch Beach since there's a fire pit and plenty of wood around, but it's all on my future to do list. Which may take a while to get around to

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Here's some more lead from my last dive. I didn't bring a float so I only grabbed around 8lbs before I started to sink.

Later on I saw this one rock that had an oddly uniform shape to inside 1ft round hole. Without wondering what it could be I just dove down to check it out. Turned out to be a really old weight belt with around 12 lbs of weight on it. It must have been sitting there for ages, cause the sea weed was so encrusted around the belt the only way I could get the dive weights out was by cutting the belt to bits.