HONOLULU (KHON) – A Hawaii nonprofit trying to clean up coastlines made a discovery this month that GoPro would love to make a commercial out of.
Ocean Defenders Alliance (ODA) has been cleaning up garbage in the form of fishing lines, hooks and even tractor tires from the reefs around Hawaii since 2017, with the goal of cleaning our oceans to help sea life.
They do some of their work at Spitting Caves on Oahu’s South Shore.
“We go out and do monthly cleanup dives on the reefs around the islands,” ODA Director of Hawaii Operations Ken Staples said.
On Jan. 10, ODA volunteer Rose Zhang made an interesting underwater discovery at Spitting Caves.
“This was one of the more unusual things that we’ve found was this GoPro still sealed in the case,” she shared.
Zhang went through the memory card, and found that the files still worked, with the last video from July of 2014. Zhang posted the video to her social media account, which eventually made its way to 26-year-old Oahu resident Nainoa Kamai, who had jumped from the cliffs at Spitting Caves when he was 18 in 2014.
“I started getting a bunch of messages of this video of me from seven years ago and I was like what is this? I clicked on it and I was like, ‘No way! Somebody found the GoPro,'” Kamai said.
They set up a meeting at Kamai’s place of work on Jan. 19 and returned it. Kamai says the battery has swollen up a bit, but is thinking of getting a new battery to see if the camera still works.
“I’m surprised it lasted so long,” he said. “GoPro is doing something right with their memory cards.”
Nainoa’s mom had bought the GoPro a few days prior to him losing it on the jump.
“She wasn’t happy.” Kamai said. “She was just like, ‘What are you doing, we just bought it’ and I was like, ‘I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry!'”
Kamai has since gotten another GoPro to replace the one he lost and has learned more about the operations that ODA take on to help clean Hawaii’s oceans.
“They said if I ever want to learn more, just stop by and give them a call, which I think I will be doing,” Kamai shared.