Diver cleans Atlantic one bottle at a time

The day I met him, it took Sean McMullen just 15 minutes of diving in the northwest arm of Halifax Harbour to bring up a 103-year-old bottle that once supposedly contained Orange Crush.

“August 22, 1921,” he reads on the bottle.

“It’s an old town, so there could be even older historical artifacts in this water right here,” McMullen says.

We met at St. Mary’s Boat Club as he was preparing for his dive with his son watching from shore.

He puts on his mask with a GoPro attached to the top that records everything.

Known as Saltwater Sean online, he has built a solid reputation on social media since the pandemic.

He has been diving in the waters around Halifax since he was a child, learning from his father, who was a scuba diver.

“This old childhood passion resurfaced because, like all Canadians, we were stuck at home and I needed something to do. That was in May 2020,” says McMullen.

After picking up trash in front of Peggy’s Cove, he posted a photo that went viral, and that’s when “Saltwater Sean” became an overnight sensation.

“From there, the peak went like this (gestures upwards), and all these eyeballs started looking at what I was doing,” McMullen said.

What he was doing even caught the attention of American television host and comedian Conan O’Brien, who invited him onto his show as a virtual guest.

He even once found a sawed-off shotgun that had been confiscated by the RCMP. He says he makes a conscious effort to take with him any trash he sees, including things like, that day, a dirty old carpet tangled at the bottom of the ocean.

“I became an environmentalist because of that, because I never would have considered myself an environmentalist before. I cared about the environment, for sure, but now that I’ve seen it with my own eyes underwater, I take it all with me,” McMullen said.

People even reach out to McMullen on social media when they lose items underwater. A woman recently dropped her phone while kayaking in Dartmouth. Saltwater Sean came to the rescue.

“The phone was still on underwater. I was able to return it to him and I was very happy about that.”

He never asks for money to recover lost items.

“I encourage people to think twice before reusing their waste. And to try to reuse what they can. Reduce, reuse and recycle. We are taught this from childhood.”