Southwest Florida anglers love artificial reefs. This area is not blessed with massive hard coral structures like the Florida Keys. Although we do have many limestone outcroppings of various sizes in local Gulf waters, these can be difficult to locate and none offer much vertical relief. Manmade reefs get a lot of attention around here.
So when a reader emailed me to ask If I’d head anything about a new reef planned for Charlotte County waters, I was both interested and surprised that I hadn’t heard anything about it. Usually anything like this generates buzz quickly.
What he sent me was a request for bids for a military reef memorial structure, issued by Charlotte County Dec. 15. According to the request, the planned reef would commemorate the six branches of the U.S. Armed Forces and would be placed in 30 feet of water 1.5 miles off the coast. And the estimated budget for the whole project — fabrication, drawing renderings, material acquisition, excavation and construction — would be $99,000.
That’s cheap. Too cheap. Reef-building is expensive. Just ask the Charlotte County CCA, which has been raising funds to expand the Phoenix Reef, about 13 miles off Boca Grande. In 2019, chapter president Mike Brimer said it would cost about $25,000 to barge material to the site — never mind what the materials themselves cost.
Curious, I dug deeper. The county website had much more detailed proposal, which revealed the planned reef wouldn’t really be a reef at all. Rather, it’s a submerged sculpture made of concrete and bronze, 10 feet high and 30 feet across. Interesting, but probably only peripherally so for fishermen. Divers will love it, though — unless it gets covered up by sand.
The planned location (due west of the Englewood Beach parking lot) places the structure in an area with a lot of sand movement. Think about how often the beaches north of this point have been renourished. The current here flows mostly south, taking that sand with it.
The multi-spoked design of the monument looks like a sand trap to me. Hopefully, actual experts with real credentials have already reviewed the design and placement and determined that I don’t know what the heck I’m talking about.
Now, whether that’s the best place to put a military memorial sculpture is an entirely separate argument, and one that seems better suited to the op-ed page of the paper. I will point out that our coastal Gulf waters are the most likely areas to see red tide outbreaks, and the percentage of people who dive and could actually see the memorial for themselves is pretty small.
Anyway, if you want to see all the project details, they’re available at https://bit.ly/39u2gBV. Click on package 231382 and you can download a 49-page PDF that has loads of information.
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