Trash or treasure: Divers sweep Black Rock’s cliff diving waters on lake litter tour

MARQUETTE, Mich. (WJMN) — A pair of local divers took it upon themselves on Wednesday to brave the still-frigid depths of Lake Superior to pick up lost or left litter below the popular Black Rocks cliff-jumping spot in Marquette.

Meet Ed Bieber, also known as Ed the Diver. He’s a professional scuba diver from Marinette, Wisconsin, whose mission is to remove as much debris from area lakes, rivers and waterways.

Ed, along with his dive partner, Jason Younk, are on a four-week tour of the Upper Peninsula and Northern Wisconsin.

It’s part treasure hunt, part salvage operation and part awareness campaign. Ed is traveling to places that historically see a lot of unwanted debris in the water, like harbors, boat launches, and popular swimming holes. What started out as an act of environmental kindness, has turned into a lifelong mission.

“I started noticing the garbage under water that was there and then feeling like a responsibility to get out of there. Since I was there, I had to get it out,” said Bieber. “So I put a board on me. I had a board falling behind me. I put a basket on it, which then turned into a kayak later on and I would just fill it up full of trash, anchors, lures, line magnets from magnet fishing, and people lose those and then bicycles, rims, tires. It’s just nice to get those things out of the water.”

Bieber says that trash in our waterways comes from many different sources, but he is encouraged by the increased awareness of how serious this problem is.

“It’s not just from people just throwing stuff in the water,” said Bieber. “It’s studying all the, you know, stuff on the roads. It goes down when it storms or something that goes in the drains and it comes out. We just got to get out there and clean up. It’s not just us doing it. There’s people all over the world doing it. I get a lot of people sending me photos of basic garbage that they collected while fishing or going for a walk. It’s really encouraging to see people do that.”

His first stop in Marquette was the Upper Harbor Marina, where he and Jason removed a considerable amount of scrap metal and other various debris. However, he routinely pulls up a wide variety of lost items, and in one particular dive he even found love.

“We find a lot of cool stuff,” said Bieber. “We find old bottles, we find phones, Apple watches, jewelry, I found a Barbie doll in the Wolf River that sold out for $1,225 on eBay. Now I’m dating the girl that bought it. So it turned into a love story actually.”

Next stop: Black Rocks on Presque Isle, where daredevils jump from the cliffs and often become separated from their possessions. It is, however, too early in the season to find any underwater treasure. A beautiful dive location, but nothing to find underwater. We asked Ed if he’s ever surprised by what he finds.

“I’m not surprised anymore,” said Bieber. “We did a bridge dive yesterday, about 24 feet of water, complete darkness. We had lights. There was a couple of toilets down there, a dryer,
There was even part of a car, like a bumper. I saw a big old propane tank or some kind of a huge tank for welding or something. There was also a microwave. People definitely go out of the way to throw that in there, and it’s not cool.”

All of these aquatic clean ups are done for free as a labor of love, but Ed also runs an underwater recovery service that can reunite lost items with their owners.

“People call me whenever they lose stuff while on this tour, just in the last week and a half, I had about ten calls for me to come to a recovery,” said Bieber. “I’m on the road doing this to clean up from the Midwest. So then I refer to other people, other divers. People lose their phones, they lose their Maserati keys, or their boat’s. They lose something important, their glasses, expensive prescription glasses, expensive sunglasses. They give me a call and I say, ‘Okay, this is what I charge for driving and diving.’ That’s kind of what helps me make money, because all this all the other clean up stuff is just free.”

If you would like to see all the remarkable items they have removed from the water, or just follow his underwater adventures, he is active on all major social media platforms using the name ‘Ed the Diver.’

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