Yellowknife has some pretty vast and iconic bodies of water, but there's more beneath the surface. Sometimes, it's not appealing.

That's what the Team North Scuba Club is for. They're part of Joint Task Force North (JTFN) and on July 19, they took a plunge to do some cleanup around some docks, notably the AHMIC Air dock and the Air Tindi dock.

Alice Twa was one of the divers with JTFN taking part in the cleanup. She has been diving for a few summers now, she said.

There are usually six or seven divers in the water, with more on shore to lend a hand. The biggest pull is tires, according to Twa.

'There are so many of them," she said. "It's just cool every time you find one, especially with the poor visibility here. You're kind of feeling around with no eyesight. So, you come up to something and you're like, is it wood? Is it something else?' If it's a tire, it's kind of fun to pull those out."

Twa and fellow diver Jeremy Macdonald, who's the executive assistant to the commander at Joint Task Force North, took a dip by the dock next to Air Tindi. They found, to no surprise, a tire. Finding it was the easy part, hauling it up onto a dock took much more effort.

Getting a tire out of the water is a fairly straightforward process. Twa explained that a diver locates a tire and digs it out. Someone from shore tosses them a rope to tie around it, then they lift it out of the water.

But lifting a tire, especially when it's slippery and full of mud takes considerable might.

"The tires are pretty heavy, so those add up a lot of the weight," said Twa. 

Most of those tires are coming from the edge of the dock, where they act as bumpers from boats.

According to the city's fees for the dump, it will cost someone between $17 to $24 per tire for disposal. Luckily for Twa and the rest of JTFN, they coordinated with the municipality to waive tipping fees on Friday.

The NWT is enduring record low water levels this year and Twa said when diving in the Cameron River, she noticed the low levels.

"It's sad to see but also nice because you can get into a few crevices you can't usually access and maybe find a few cool things that slipped into the rocks there."

The dive team is scheduled to be back in action on July 26 for another round of cleaning up.