Bieber dives into marketing off season

MARINETTE – With the weather changing, so is Ed Bieber’s work.

The owner of Bieber’s Underwater Recovery LLC will do less diving for lost and discarded items and more marketing as the days get shorter and the weather becomes colder.

At area retail shops, Bieber might drop off a fish-tank sculpture he created out of miscellaneous deep- and shallow-water finds, such as fishing line, lures, bottles, sunglasses, toys, car parts, necklaces, cellphones and you name it, anything else that might have been dropped into the fresh waters of Oconto, Brown, Marinette and Menominee, Mich. counties, where Bieber is called to retrieve items.

As the Angry Angler sculpture draws store traffic, Bieber promotes both businesses.

Erin Przybylski, an employee at Crivitz Pharmacy where Bieber has in the past displayed his Angry Angler fish tank sculpture for display, recalled what the fish tank contained. “It had every bit of stuff you could think of. I like to think people accidentally dropped it into the water – things like sunglasses, lures and fishing line,” Przybylski said.

“It’s a thoughtful way to tell people in a kind way that when they drop things or lose things at the bottom of the water, our kids are swimming in there. We’re swimming in there,” she said. “It’s something we all should be thinking about and not adding to that pollution in our waterways.”

Bieber also promoted the vibrant Angry Angler display, chock full of colorful lures and an odd assortment of items, in a video showing Crivitz Pharmacy, which brought customers into the store. “It’s a nice exchange between himself and different businesses to bring awareness to the different businesses,” Przybylski said.

This time of year, Bieber, who was born in Marinette and raised in Lena, wears a thicker wet suit when he dives. He retrieved a boat motor from the Wolf River at the end of December last year, he said.

“January was the only month I didn’t dive at all,” Bieber said.
Diving in cold waters is exhilarating, he said, but he stays out of icy water. “In the Marinette area, I don’t go in the rivers if there’s ice,” he said.

Diving below the surface to retrieve items might drive Bieber’s business, but he said he also makes money from his videos and other marketing efforts.

He shares what he’s found in photos, videos and often on his website, EdtheDiver.com, where he sells some of what he’s retrieved. A clear C.L. Hansen bottle from Menominee, Mich. is priced at $25, while tackle trays full of lures run from about $40-100, depending on the number and kind of lure.

He also sells new hats and T-shirts with his logo for $10-40.

Ed the Diver has over 350,000 followers across Youtube, Instagram and Facebook, Ed’s fiancé Christie Barlament said.

Bieber has inspired Barlament and countless others to help clean up the area rivers and river walkways. Barlament said she has helped by organizing the Downtown Green Bay Clean-Up Team to pick up litter.

Donning scuba gear, diving under water and swimming through the muck might not sound glamorous, especially as the temperatures drop, but Bieber has attracted a following, according to Barlament. “Between sponsors on his truck and doing recovering and selling merchandise and social media,” Bieber absolutely has a viable business, she said.

Barlament, who runs City Deck Landing Apartments in Green Bay and does radio shows, is helping Bieber obtain sponsors for his diving recovery business.
Bieber started his business in 2017 with inexpensive equipment, such as a diving mask, boogie board and old gym shoes. Since then, he said he has spent about $20,000 on equipment, including computer technology to support content development to promote the company.

“Social media was a huge part of my growth,” Bieber said. “The money I make on social media helps me keep going.”

Making videos is a time-consuming process, he said, noting it can take seven or eight hours to upload an hour-long video he has shot while diving.

“I’m about 70 videos behind,” Bieber said in October. After the video is uploaded, he edits it and then posts it online.

When he started posting photos and videos, “social media blew up,” Bieber said.

He’s pulled out a snowmobile with help from friends. He’s also retrieved boat engines, tires, cellular phones, bicycles, electronics, anchors, rods, reels, plastics, golf balls, glass bottles and more.

“A lot of the stuff I do is environmental clean-up work,” Bieber said.

At first, he hoarded the stuff he retrieved. Then Bieber realized there was money to be made selling the items he recovered.

Bieber sells lures for $5 on average, though he said he’ll let some go for $2 or $3. He has retrieved thousands of lures, which he sells from his truck near fishing spots in the summer and online year round. When people call him for help retrieving an item, he typically charges $150 an hour.

One of Bieber’s retrieved treasures, a Barbie doll, brought him and Barlament together.

“I ended up winning the Barbie [on eBay]. I ended up with the highest bid, $1,300,” Barlament said. “He delivered it to me on my 40th birthday in a tackle box.”

Bieber said he tries hard to find the rightful owners of expensive items.

Barlament said she once found a wallet while diving with Bieber.

“It feels really rewarding to find someone’s property and be able to return it,” she said.

While Bieber started out free diving by simply holding his breath while he swam under water, he became certified in scuba diving after taking lessons from Bob Berg at M&M Scuba in Menominee, Mich. Berg emphasizes safety first, Bieber said.

“Know the equipment you’re using. For me, it’s having the right tools,” Bieber said. He wears gloves to avoid getting hooks through a finger or thumb. He carries scissors or knives with him in case he needs to cut a tangle of line.

Fishing line under water can be a menace, Bieber said. “All of a sudden you’ve got line wrapped around your fins, wrapped around your gear.”

Berg is quick to point out taking items found underwater on shipwrecks isn’t allowed.

When Berg dives, he often visits ship wrecks, where it’s illegal to take stuff from the wrecks, he said. He thinks some cast-off junk is fine staying in the water where other divers can view it. Some of it is historic.

“The State of Wisconsin and Michigan have rules. When you dive a shipwreck, you’re not allowed to take a bottle off a shipwreck. It’s kind of neat to still see stuff. You can see binoculars, plates, compass, running lights. It’s cool to go down and see some of these old things – because nobody took them. That’s how it should be.”

“Things like old bicycles or a park bench—sometimes I don’t think some of this needs to come out of the water. As a diver, they’re the only ones who are going to see it. It doesn’t hurt the environment, either. Something like a battery would, but it’s garbage,” not a treasure, Berg said.

Because so many divers have taken bottles out of the rivers and bay, Berg said, “Now it’s harder to find a bottle because we have too many of these bottle collectors.”

Bieber has another viewpoint. “If I’m in the water, I want to be cleaning stuff up,” Bieber said, because of the impact it has on the environment. Some water is cleaner than others.

Quarries have cleaner water than the rivers, and visibility in the Menominee River spans five or six feet, compared to about two inches in the Fox River, according to Bieber. “This year I didn’t spend much time diving for lures there because of the low visibility,” he said. “You see bottom fish all the time on the bottom. How did these fish die? Is that going to be me someday?”

In Michigan, Berg said the invasive zebra mussels have made Lake Michigan’s Bay water cleaner.

“You don’t see that many of them in the river. They’re mostly in the Bay. The current pushes them,” Berg said. “They’re covering shipwrecks.” The zebra mussels suck in the water and filter it. “They’ve made the water cleaner, clearer. There are billions of them,” Berg said.

At a shipwreck near the Menominee Lighthouse in 12 feet of clear water, divers see a lot of fish, too, Berg said. “There’s just all kinds of bass around the shipwreck.”