In late September of 2019, I took my first Florida dive off of Marco Island, a little over an hour's drive south of my University. Our University tripgoers included myself, another college student who became our Snorkel and Scuba Club's communications/media officer, and my student advisor, a Biology professor who would shortly become our club's advisor. After a roughly half hour boat ride with them, our a few employees from Scuba Marco, and a couple who both had integrated scuba diving with their careers (one did research on mussels and the other was a diver with the Navy), we set anchor near the artificial reef where we planned to do a reef cleanup.
Now, when I say "artificial" reef I should be clear about what that means. An artificial reef is an actual reef that has grown on man-made objects. Artificial reefs can be made accidentally, such as when a reef community grows on a downed ship, or purposefully, as in the case of this reef which grew on a large area of concrete slabs placed on the seafloor. We saw sea stars, sea urchins, a nurse shark, and many different kinds of fish, some lone, others in small groups, and even a couple species traveling in large schools! My personal favorite was the goliath groupers, one was smaller and the other was huge (I'll make an article on that species someday)!
We dove on two tanks, meaning that each diver went down twice with a different filled tank each time, and boy, did we get a lot of work done. I had recently bought a dive knife at Scuba Marco, the island's dive shop, and I was glad I did. We cut a lot of misplaced fishing line and rope down there! Our entourage that day pulled up a garbage bin worth of fishing line, rope, crab traps, and even a boat anchor! The experience was fantastic for the opportunity to dive and simultaneously help conserve our Florida reefs, and something I'll remember for the rest of my life. Below, I included some more photos from the trip!
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