Projects - Artificial Reefs

HHRF Involvement in Artificial Reefs

 

OUR FISH CITIES      One of the most impressive undertakings that our South Carolina Department of Natural Resources has ever administered is the Marine Artificial Reef program. In spite of one of my previous columns about the good vs. bad biological considerations of their effectiveness, SCDNR, since 1973, has accumulated an incredible amount of productive structure off of Beaufort County. Beginning with one of the first reefs, the Hilton Head Reef, they have sent to the bottom, liberty ships, tugboats, barges, armored personnel carriers, M1 tanks, cement trucks, Polaris missile sections, tires, concrete balls, subway cars, steel bridges, culverts, landing craft, PT boats, PVC Christmas trees and shipping containers. The hidden enormity of this accomplishment is not just the acquisition of the materials, which are usually free, but the meticulous cleaning needed to make the structure environmentally safe and the complicated process of finding someone qualified and licensed to deploy it. The result is that we have enough area in permitted sites off of Beaufort County; we can continue to sink materials for the next 10-20 years and not run out of room. We also have enough structure down now locally, that if I fished a different structure every hour, it would take me a month of fishing every day to try all of them. As we do not have a lot of offshore fishing pressure here, compared to other tourist destinations, this offers all of us fishermen a tremendous choice without rubbing gunwales with other boats.    This has also been a boon for the scuba divers. Because a great majority of the structure has not been dived on, this summer the Hilton Head Island Sportfishing Club is undertaking a long term plan to produce underwater videos on DVD of the most significant structures so people can see how impressive and productive these fish cities are.