Barracuda and goliath grouper at 105-foot deep Reef Dart site. -COURTESY PHOTO

Dane Kelly remembers the day his father disappeared beneath the waves.

His father was a marine contractor hired to scuttle two old barges to create artificial reefs in Lee County.

While one barge sank, Danny Kelly was punching holes in the side of the other one so it could take on water.

“All of a sudden, a big wave came through, so the barge shifted,” said Dane, who was about 12 years old at the time, watching it happen from a tugboat.

“Then the barge listed and went on its side. My dad slipped into the water, the pumps went into the water, and some steel plate on the barge stabbed him in his gut and took him all the way to the bottom.”

When he hit bottom, the plate finally dislodged, and he was able to swim to the surface.

“We’re all freaking out that he’s dead,” Dane recalled. “And, I don’t know, a minute and a half later, he pops up and goes, ‘Oh, I lost my glasses.’”

For nearly half a century, the Kelly family has made a business out of intentionally sinking things. Not to get rid of them, but to create life.

Dane and Travis Kelly of Kelly Brothers have spent their lives working and playing on the water. -COURTESY PHOTO

Now, Dane and his brother, Travis, own Kelly Brothers, a Fort Myers-based commercial marine construction company that specializes in building artificial reefs, docks, seawalls, marinas, bridges and other waterfront structures throughout Southwest Florida.

“We work hard so we can go out there and go fishing,” he said of his family’s commitment to the water. “So, we believe in it.”

Growing up, Dane said he and his brother “learned the ropes” at the company their father started in 1980. That meant everything from operating a crane to running a tugboat.

As a fisherman and diver who’s spent much of his life on the water, Dane recognizes the effect of artificial reefs on South Florida’s marine life.

“When an artificial reef is built, it creates a habitat for fish and gives them a structure,” he said. “It creates a place for shellfish and marine life to attach to. When the small fish have a place to go and hide from the bigger fish, then it creates a whole ecosystem, so you can go to these locations, and you can see all kinds of fish that you’ve never seen before.”

The United Caribbean is a 147-foot steel cargo ship that was sunk in 2000 off the Boca Raton inlet. -COURTESY PHOTO

Florida leads the nation with more than 4,500 public artificial reef sites across 34 of the state’s 35 coastal counties, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s Artificial Reef Program.

The state’s artificial reefs range from retired ships and barges to specially designed concrete structures and construction debris. Some reefs are made simply from strategically dropped rocks.

But getting them into the water has become more challenging, given the growing scarcity of suitable older vessels, a shortage of qualified contractors to do the work, and fewer staging sites as waterfront property is gobbled up for development.

Choosing the right spot

Choosing where to place an artificial reef is a complex decision, one typically made by local reef managers in conjunction with marine scientists, engineers, contractors and regulatory agencies.

“If there’s coral reef or hard bottom in the vicinity, that’s not ideal, so you’re looking for an area that is more open sand,” said Ana Zangroniz, Sea Grant extension agent for Miami-Dade County.

Proximity to shore is also important.

The Dean Hicks artificial reef project in Fort Myers includes more than 1,000 tons of concrete debris. -KELLY BROTHERS / COURTESY PHOTO

“If it’s a shore-accessible site, it’s probably going to be shallower, and therefore more geared to snorkeling,” she said. “If it’s a little further offshore, that would require a motorboat, so likely more for fishing and diving.”

Large vessels need to be scuttled in water deep enough to avoid navigational hazards.

“You don’t want a mast sticking up out of the water where a motorboat could run into it.”

Zangroniz works for Florida Sea Grant, a research, education and outreach program headquartered at the University of Florida that works with coastal communities on issues including artificial reef management.

She has mixed emotions about artificial reefs because they put foreign material in the water, but she does see value in diverting attention from natural resources, especially the coral reefs on the Atlantic Coast.

“Offering those opportunities to interact with the reef, whether it be through fishing or snorkeling or diving, helps reduce some of that pressure on the natural reefs,” she said.

Life takes hold

Michael Sipos, Sea Grant extension agent for Collier County, noted that while fishing produces $13 billion a year for Florida’s economy, artificial reefs have an impact that extends beyond leisure and sport.

“Any kind of large structure would attract fish,” he said. “But over time, as it becomes covered with those corals and tunicates and other kinds of epiphytic (plant-like) organisms, it’s providing a good ecological niche that could support the base of the food chain, that could provide habitat and feeding opportunities and potentially increase fish reproduction in certain areas.”

Michael Sipos is the Sea Grant agent for Collier County. -COURTESY PHOTO

Sipos said there’s less push for artificial reefs in Southwest Florida because the region has more natural bottom habitat compared to other parts of the state.

In Florida, most projects are the result of public-private partnerships and must win approval at the federal level.  “It’s a really big partnership to get something sunk,” he said.

From warship to reef

One of Kelly Brothers’ biggest projects to date was the sinking of the 165-foot World War II ship USS Mohawk in 2012.

During the war, the “Mighty Mo” was a Coast Guard cutter that survived German U-boats, helped save hundreds of merchant mariners and earned a footnote in history by transmitting the final weather report to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower ahead of D-Day. It was later rescued from a scrapyard to serve as a museum ship and today continues its service by providing habitat for marine life as the nation’s first veterans’ memorial reef.

Danny Kelly and Dane Kelly pose in front of the USS Mohawk, a retired Coast Guard cutter they towed from Key West to transform into an artificial reef in 2012. -COURTESY PHOTO

Yet bringing the ship from Key West wasn’t easy. The boat was towed to the company’s mooring facility in Fort Myers Beach – a nerve-wracking trip. “If anything happened to the ship, we were responsible,” Dane said.

Crews spent months preparing the ship for deployment, an arduous process that involved meticulous scraping and cleaning, as well as draining it of oil and other fluids that could harm the environment.

Finally, a blasting crew placed explosive charges, the boat was towed offshore to a site 28 miles off Captiva Island, and then law enforcement detonated the charges.

The boat sank “perfectly,” landing on its keel in 90 feet of water. “The sheriff dives it, makes sure everything’s OK, verifies all the charges went off, clears it, and now we have an artificial reef.”

Measuring success

Once an artificial reef reaches the seafloor, it doesn’t stay barren for long.

“When we put a structure down, we almost immediately see nurse sharks and sea turtles and bait fish on them,” said Katelyn Armstrong, reef coordinator for Palm Beach County.

Katelyn Armstrong, Palm Beach County’s reef coordinator, out in the field. -COURTESY PHOTO

Palm Beach has 47 miles of natural reef and about 150 artificial reefs – a third of which are sunken vessels, while the rest are some combination of concrete and limestone.

There are strict regulations for what kind of material can form an artificial reef – steel boats are fine, for example, but not fiberglass.

Palm Beach’s powerful currents have been known to tear a sunken vessel in half, so any artificial reef material must weigh a minimum of two tons.

“That is unique to Palm Beach,” she said.

Katelyn Armstrong is Palm Beach County’s reef coordinator. -COURTESY PHOTO

Armstrong said a great example of a thriving artificial reef is the Phil Foster Park Snorkel Trail beneath the Blue Heron Bridge in Riviera Beach. It features an 800-foot underwater trail of boulders with reefs made from hammerhead shark sculptures, sunken boats and shopping carts, where visitors can spot a wide and colorful variety of life: tropical fish, stingrays, starfish, seahorses and octopuses.

“We have people come from all over,” Katelyn said. “We get species that are just out of this world, on a site that’s just under a bridge and adjacent to an urban area.”

Zangroniz said the wrecks off Jupiter have become destinations not only for drift diving, but for watching spawning aggregations of Goliath grouper, a major draw for recreational divers like herself.

Goliath grouper swim past the artificial reef created by the MG 111, an old Mississippi River barge, in Jupiter. -COURTESY PHOTO

“It’s cool to see one Goliath grouper on a dive, but when you see 30 to 40 of them all stacked up in front of a shipwreck, it’s a pretty unique experience,” she said.

The pioneers

The driving force behind Palm Beach’s artificial reef program has been the West Palm Beach Fishing Club.

Founded in 1934, the club created the state’s first permitted artificial reefs in the 1960s.

West Palm Beach Fishing Club began deploying artificial reefs in the 1960s, starting here with old car bodies. -COURTESY PHOTO

“Some of those reefs that were sunk 50 years ago are still out there and are still popular spots to fish and dive,” said Tom Twyford, a 38-year veteran of the club who now serves as executive director of its charitable arm, the Palm Beach County Fishing Foundation.

Under the leadership of president and boat builder John Rybovich, the club created the county’s reef program by dropping old car bodies and washing machines offshore before moving on to old and derelict ships.

But such vessels have become harder to procure. Their value as scrap metal is high, plus it’s increasingly expensive to satisfy environmental requirements.

So the club came up with an innovative idea.

Some of their most recent deployments involved “reef darts”: repurposed concrete power poles standing up to 55 feet high and weighing up to 10 tons. Attached to a flat concrete base, the darts are designed to self-right and land on the bottom, even at great depths.

“Unlike the west coast of Florida, the continental shelf here drops off very quickly,” Tom said. “With that comes the opportunity to get all kinds of really cool fish, and so we needed to develop a reef that would be suitable for really deep water.”

To that end, the club has deployed 181 reef darts since 2017, including a “forest” standing 500 feet deep off Palm Beach Inlet.

“It’s Florida’s deepest artificial permitted reef,” he said.

Photography and video are difficult at that depth, but acoustic telemetry monitors have detected an “incredible” variety of life, including 170 great white sharks in the last few years.

Tom said the reef dart sites show the ultimate benefit of artificial reefs: creating habitat where none existed. “It’s hard to fish in 500 feet of water, so part of our idea with reef darts was very conservation oriented. It’s almost like a deep-water refuge.”

An example of the Reef Darts used by Palm Beach County. -COURTESY PHOTO

A murky future

While the club’s efforts have been successful, future projects are on hold.

“We’ve got yellow edge groupers, snowy groupers, warsaw groupers, amberjack – all kinds of really cool things have happened out there since we built that reef dart forest,” Tom said. “But unfortunately, we had to quit building them because we don’t have a contractor and we don’t have a place to stage our material.”

Palm Beach County’s artificial reef program has been largely dormant since the closure of McCulley Marine Services, a Fort Pierce contractor that built reefs for counties along Florida’s southeast coast. The company closed in 2023 following the owner’s death.

The Sea Emperor is a 171-foot barge that was filled with concrete culverts and sunk in 1991 off Boca Raton. -COURTESY PHOTO

“We can’t get anything offshore without a qualified contractor to take it,” Katelyn added.

Recent projects either received no bids or received bids that were out of the county’s price range.

“We’re all struggling to get our programs back up to where we were at one point,” she said of coastal counties. “No matter what, things will be more expensive, so I don’t believe it will ever be back to five to seven (deployments) a year.”

Another problem is the loss of the Port of Palm Beach as a staging ground. Tom said that alternatives are in short supply given the high demand for waterfront property. “The reef program here in Palm Beach County has been in limbo coming up on two years now because of those two main issues.”

Still building

Despite the challenges facing some counties, new artificial reefs are still coming to life along Florida’s Gulf Coast.

In 2023, Kelly Brothers helped Florida Gulf Coast University deploy Kimberly’s Reef, a 10-acre artificial reef and living laboratory 10 miles off Bonita Springs, where researchers study how marine life takes to new habitats.

Dane and Travis Kelly own Kelly Brothers, a marine construction company based in Fort Myers. -COURTESY PHOTO

Dane is proud to see his family’s work reflected in Southwest Florida’s waters.

On a recent diving excursion near a local reef, he and his family encountered amberjack, Goliath grouper, scamp, mangrove snapper, mutton snapper, hogfish and red snapper.

He said, “It’s really wild what a little bit of structure does.”

 

Kimberly’s Reef is an 11-acre underwater research complex 10 miles off Bonita Springs in 30 feet of water built by Kelly Brothers for Florida Gulf Coast University. -COURTESY PHOTO

IN THE KNOW

Collier County
area reef projects include:

Jackson Fish Camp off Naples Bay is the proposed site for the reef from Fish & Wildlife Foundation of Florida approved on July 14 by Collier County Commissioners.
The Tod Sirod Reef (formerly Collier 1 Reef) is an artificial reef located roughly 10 to 13.5 nautical miles west of Gordon Pass off the coast of Collier County that is to be formally donated during the Aug. 11 County Commission meeting.
The City of Naples deployed more than 300 tons of concrete pilings on April 24 at the Wasmer Reef Site, which is located about 10 nautical miles offshore of Gordan Pass. The pilings were salvaged from the Naples Pier demolition.
View these and other ongoing reef projects on Collier.gov with more being added this summer. (Direct link www.collier.gov/files/content/county/v/4/county-development/transportation-management/coastal-zone-management/artificial-reef-program/reef-locations.pdf )

Lee County
area reef projects include:

View Lee County reefs and shipwrecks on swflwaterways.com (Direct link swflwaterways.com/dive/reef-and-shipwreck-map/ )
About 7 miles off Bonita Beach, Kimberly’s Reef is an artificial reef built and monitored by researchers from Florida Gulf Coast University’s The Water School, near the outflow of the Caloosahatchee River into the Gulf. FGCU researchers track water quality, nutrient flows, and red tide blooms. Covered in algae and populated by nurse sharks, sea turtles, cobia, and diverse fish, it is a popular spot for free diving and fishing.
Completion of the new Big Carlos Pass Bridge and Big Carlos Bridge Artificial Reef was celebrated at the end of June. This bridge, with 60-foot clearance, replaced the bascule bridge, which was then used to construct the artificial reef following demolition. The full $90.8 million project is to last 75 years for Fort Myers Beach.

State reefs and funding data include:

Florida’s main coral reef tract extends approximately 350 miles from the Dry Tortugas through the Florida Keys and north along the Atlantic coast to the St. Lucie Inlet in Martin County. That tract does not run directly along the Naples and Bonita Springs coastline, but Collier County’s waterways and reefs, and those of Lee County northward, are equally important to the health of the coast.
Between 2023 and 2025, the state invested approximately $3.5 million in The Reef Institute’s restoration.
In January 2026, The Reef Institute received approximately 4,500 juvenile corals from The Florida Aquarium. They will grow and return to Palm Beach and Martin counties.
Florida’s fiscal year 2026–27 budget includes an $8 million appropriation for coral reefs, but new restrictions leave funding of ongoing projects uncertain.

Supporting reefs takes many forms:

Methods of supporting reefs include rescuing and biobanking threatened corals, preserving genetic diversity, reproducing corals, raising juveniles, training restoration practitioners, outplanting corals and monitoring their survival, among others.
Advocating for recurring state and federal funding, encouraging foundations to provide multi-year and flexible operating support, engaging businesses as conservation partners, and donating directly to restoration organizations are among other ways to contribute.

Organizations to connect with for supporting South Florida’s reefs: