Meet 'Saltwater Sean': The diver cleaning up the Atlantic one bottle at a time

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

"August 22, 1921," he reads off the bottle.

“This is an old city, so there could be even some older historic objects in this water right here,” McMullen explains.

We met by the St. Mary's Boat Club as he prepared for his dive with his son’s watching from the shore.

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

Known as Saltwater Sean online, he has built up quite a profile on social media since the pandemic.

He’s been diving in the waters around Halifax since he was a kid, learning from his dad, who was a scuba diver.

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

After one time 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 spike just went like this (gestures upwards), and all these eyeballs started looking at what I was doing,” said McMullen.

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

He even once found a sawed-off shotgun that was confiscated by the RCMP. He says he makes a conscious effort to bring every bit of trash he sees with him, including things like, on this day, a dirty old rug snarled on the ocean floor.

“I’ve become an environmentalist through doing this because I wouldn’t have considered myself one before. I cared about the environment for sure, but now that I’ve seen it with my own eyes underwater, I take everything with me,” McMullen shared.

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

“The phone was still on under water. I was able to give it back to her, and that made me really happy.”

He never asks for money to retrieve lost items.

“I just encourage people to really think twice about diversion of stuff, of their garbage. And try to reuse what you can. Reduce, reuse, and recycle. It’s taught to us in childhood.”