The Chronicle Herald (Provincial)
Saltwater Sean: our underwater eco-hero
There are many ways to measure fame.
Sean Mcmullen could, for example, point to his 107,000 followers on Instagram, or the 171,000 who keep an eye on him on Tiktok.
The 26,000 who subscribe to his Youtube videos also underscore that he has bona fide name recognition.
As does the gear diving companies send him free of charge — and appearance last December on Conan O’brien’s podcast, Conan O’brien Needs a Friend.
All this renown, Mcmullen told me the other day, is “cool.”
But the realization that his celebrity has reached a new level only came last week when he had just emerged from the Halifax Harbour waters in the shadow of the A. Murray Mackay Bridge.
A pair of female beachcombers walking past the neoprene-suited diver did a double take.
“Are you Saltwater Sean,” one of them asked. When Mcmullen said yes, he learned that along with world-wide fame, he had big fans right here at home.
That is as it should be.
RAISING AWARENESS
People mostly know Mcmullen, 36, for one simple reason: he snorkels in the lakes, rivers, harbours, and oceans of Nova Scotia. Then he shows us what he finds there.
By so doing, this ecowarrior has single-handedly raised consciousness about the kind of crap that people throw into our waters.
“I guess the story resonates because I am just a guy, one person,” he explained, “and it shows that one person can make a difference if they believe in something.”
His, in a way, is one of those COVID stories. The son of a scuba diver, he had been snorkeling for as far back as he could remember.
At the start of the pandemic, Mcmullen, who lives in Halifax, needed something to break the interminable boredom. So, he donned his wetsuit, fins, and mask, walked into the waters of Halifax’s Northwest Arm, and started looking around.
“At first I really just wanted to explore, like a kid, and maybe find some bottles,” he said.
What he found was surprising and shocking enough that he thought the world needed to see.
POTENTIAL TO TELL STORIES
In his first Youtube video, shot with a Gopro camera in the waters off Horseshoe Island, he found bottles, but also golf balls, an oar, and an old Betamax tape.
Mcmullen, who studied journalism in Ontario and whose day job is as the head of marketing and advertising for Viewpoint.ca, the provincial real estate data base, liked Youtube’s storytelling possibilities.
So, he shot more videos, including one in August 2020, in which he went diving off Peggy’s Cove, while his father, Jonathan, general manager at Canadian Federation of Independent Business, swam along in scuba gear.
Afterwards, sitting on a wharf, the father and son reviewed what they brought to the surface in their dive bags.
There were pop bottles — Canada Dry and Sussex ginger ale, Wink, Mountain Dew, Fresca, and Hires Root Beer — along with beer, and wine bottles and an old quart of whiskey. There were bottles that once held Heinz Ketchup, Javex, Milk of Magnesia, and other unidentified elixirs. There was a tea pot shard, bits of pottery, and a handle from a ceramic vessel.
In the shallow waters of the province’s most famous cove they found some things that you might have expected by an historic fishing village: part of a lobster trap, an animal’s jawbone, a grappling hook, a workman’s glove, a single rubber boot, and a tire.
They also discovered things that seemed out of place including child’s marbles, a kitchen sink, a toilet too heavy to bring to the surface.
The ensuing photograph from the dive — showing Mcmullen, by then known as Saltwater Sean, with his arms spread wide to encompass the wharf-side pile of detritus recovered from the water — went viral.
“The reception and sequent news coverage made me realize people were interested,” he said.
CONSTANTLY IN THE WATER
A hobby became an obsession. Since then, three or four times a week from March through until late September, he hits the water.
Mcmullen ruptured an eardrum while doing Scuba training, so he dives using a snorkel, or, for deeper depths, a donated, batteryoperated breathing apparatus that floats on the water’s surface.
In some places, the water is clear enough to resemble the Caribbean. In others, including Halifax harbour, visibility can only extend a few feet, making a flashlight a necessity.
In time, he has ranged further from his Halifax home base to explore the waterways of Nova Scotia. Wherever he goes, Mcmullen is careful never to trespass, mostly getting to the water via wharf or some other public access.
You will know he is there by his Toyota Highlander parked on the side of the road.
“It would be good to have a truck,” he said.
That is because Mcmullen estimates that he has taken thousands of pounds of garbage and debris, which he mostly recycles, out of Nova Scotian waters, since becoming Saltwater Sean.
“It kind of blows my mind a little,” he said.
LONG LIST OF DISCOVERIES
It’s not only the size of the haul, but also the variety of things he pulls up from the depths.
A one cent coin in the Sackville River, and a circa-1850 bottle from the Nash brothers’ soda pop plant that once stood across from Halifax’s Citadel Hill, which he found in Ketch Harbour.
In Fall River’s Lake Thomas, he found a sawed-off shotgun, which the RCMP confiscated and sent to its forensics lab.
“Mercifully I’ve never found a body,” he said.
But Mcmullen has found marine markers in Bedford Basin, a laptop in Kearney Lake, and irons from an old-time rail bridge that once connected Halifax and Dartmouth in Halifax Harbour.
“It is aways exciting,” he said. “The thrill of discovery and exploration and getting to places that people wouldn’t think of going.”
It has changed him too. He would not have necessarily called himself an environmentalist before this whole thing began, “but it is hard not to become one seeing it first-hand.”
Even though Mcmullen is an ad and marketing pro, he hasn’t figured out how to monetize his social media presence and isn’t even sure he wants to.
Any following he has, in his view, is because people see him for who he is: “A guy on his own, doing something he loves that he would do even if no one knew he was doing it,” said Mcmullen.
“The passion comes through and that is why people are interested.”
And why Saltwater Sean was born.