Local Man Removes Lake Trash One Piece at a Time
By Dennis Rahm
Meet Shawn Sherman. His real job is to head the Water Rescue Program for Chelan Fire and Rescue District 7. His passion however is to keep the waters of Lake Chelan as free of garbage as possible by removing one piece of trash at a time.
Sherman loves to free dive in the lake and has been doing so since his childhood.
The 1999 graduate of Chelan High School says its during these dives that he noticed the problem with garbage throughout the lake and decided to do something about it.
LakeChelanNow met up with Shawn at last weekend’s Earth Day. Click below for a piece of that interview.
A longer interview with Sherman is included in this week’s Making Waves, Episode #3.
LakeChelanNow’s Dennis Rahm Interviews Shawn Sherman during Earth Day Fair 2018
Sherman hopes to one day have a boat on the water throughout the year to aid in helping keep the lake free of garbage. In the meantime, he plans to keep busy this year with focusing on cleanup in low-water areas through May and then moving on to free diving between the old and new bridges.
Following that he will continue to work his way up lake to public and private dock areas that allow him access as well as to some of the marina areas. Eventually in late summer he plans on diving for garbage as far up the lake as Lucerne and Stehekin. Dives in the deeper waters of the lake make retrieving garbage more difficult and will necessitate the use of scuba equipment.
Says Sherman, “even though the lake is clean, there is more garbage on the bottom than people would guess”. Sherman had a display booth at last weekend’s Chelan Earth Day Fair sharing his story and his passion.
Sherman operates Pilgrim Lake Services and offers general dive services, property retrieval, salvage, underwater photography and video and more. As concerns his efforts to collect garbage from the lake, he is happy to accept volunteers and donations.
You can contact Shawn by phone at 509-670-0911 or check out his recently created fund raising page at gofundme where he has set a goal of $30,000 to outfit his boat with equipment that will aid in safely retrieving garbage from the bottom of Lake Chelan.
