Santa Cruz Island

Kelp forests are a magical place. An incredibly productive ecosystem packed full of biological life, these temperate underwater forests are an absolute delight to dive in. The image of towering kelp is what initially inspired me to pursue diving, so I was understandably excited to visit one of California’s finest kelp forest diving locations: Channel Islands National Park.

I was visiting Channel Islands to join up with their Kelp Forest Monitoring (KFM) team on one of their week-long monitoring trips. This program, which has been surveying the islands for 38 years now, is one of the longest running monitoring programs in the NPS. Visiting sites all around the five islands that make up Channel Islands National Park, the KFM team collects a huge amount of data to assess the health of this diverse ecosystem and to aid in management decisions.

The island areas closest to ports are heavily impacted by fishing activities. Despite 20% of the Park’s water being closed to fishing, sport and commercial fishing are allowed in the remainder of the Park and is the greatest impact on the marine environment there. The Park’s islands make up around 3% of the California coastline yet account for 15% of all California commercial marine fisheries landings. Unique ocean conditions mix warm and cold water currents around the islands, making them an incredibly diverse location for marine life – more than 2000 marine species live in the area. Such an abundance of life in a place so close to millions of people needs to have some type of monitoring keeping an eye on it, and that’s where the KFM team comes into play.

In order to effectively monitor and gather information on the complex environments, the KFM team collects a litany of data to monitor fish, invertebrates, and algae. They employ a wide array of survey types and methods, from quadrats and swaths to count individuals, to size frequency surveys and recruitment modules to learn of recruitment events and size classes, to more specialized types of data collection like plankton tows and collecting acoustic data to answer more specific questions. They utilize special techniques to be more productive underwater, like using a diver attached with surface-supplied air and communication equipment along with a surface-based tender and data recorder to allow for longer dives without the need for the diver to spend any time writing stuff down, or breathing pure oxygen from a hanging bar while on safety stops to be able to do such long and repetitive dives safely.  If you can think of a type of data to collect in a kelp forest, there’s a good chance this group is doing it.

I was to join up with them for one of their week-long trips out on the water. With so many sites to survey and the relative isolation of the islands (the closest being 9 miles offshore, and the furthest 70 miles), this group does their surveying from a live-aboard research vessel – the Sea Ranger II. This 58 ft. vessel is the perfect floating research station, complete with bunks, a galley, scuba compressor, and lots of sampling gear. It has everything you’d need for a week out on the water. Working and diving from this vessel allows the team to get much more work done, staying out on the ocean all week instead of making the trip back to the mainland each evening.

The back deck of the Sea Ranger II

I joined up with the KFM team Monday morning and before I knew it we were off to the islands. With no time to waste, we’d be going straight to our first survey site and going straight to work as soon as we’d arrived. We had a couple hour boat ride on the way out, giving me plenty of time to read up on the group’s survey protocols and to prepare myself for some cold-water diving. While I’m not a stranger to diving in chilly seas, it had been a couple months since I donned a drysuit for Isle Royale’s 36-degree waters, so I had a little bit of setup in front of me.

When we were on site and bundled up in various forms of exposure protection, we jumped off the swim step and got to work. I had done some kelp forest surveying before during my time at university, so I was put right to work on algae counts and size frequencies. Counting all individuals of certain species within 5m quadrats, I swam down the 100m transect with Joshua Sprague, a Marine Ecologist at CINP. We were counting a small selection of algae and sea star species, one of these being probably the most conspicuous resident in kelp forests, giant kelp itself. As the backbone of these forests, giant kelp creates habitat for countless species of fish and invertebrates. Certain conditions can cause rampant herbivory, often at the tube feet of spiny sea urchins, which can result in these bountiful forests being reduced to bare rock, or  ‘barrens’. Unsurprisingly, some of the species that we collected a large amount of size frequency data on was the two most common species of urchin in Californian waters, the red and purple urchins. I spent a large portion of my first day swimming around plucking these living pincushions off the sea floor and chucking them into a mesh bag for topside sizing.

The Kelp Forest Monitoring team does a lot of sizing of invertebrates, as a robust collection of sizes can be used to glean information of recruitment events and potentially even die-offs. Sizing, however, can take a fair amount of time. Calipers are used for precise measurements and sizes must be physically written down – which all sounds easy and quick but can really add up when you’re trying to size at least 200 urchins at each site. Additionally, time spent underwater is limited, so it must be maximized to its full extent. At sites where urchins are abundant, these inverts are sometimes brought up to the surface to be measured in order to increase efficiency. It seemed like after almost every time I returned to the back deck post-dive there was part of the team sitting out there sizing something.

In addition to the urchin size frequencies, there was a whole other source of need for sizing – artificial recruitment modules, or ARMS. These, essentially little stacks of halved cinderblocks designed to create available and desirable habitat for juvenile invertebrates, are a way for the KFM team to learn a little bit about waves of larval recruitment happening inside their park. Each year, these modules are visited, taken apart and picked clean of their invertebrate residents, brought up to the surface, sized, and then brought back down and put back away in their little artificial homes. This task was a coveted one by the team, and was described to me as the kelp forest monitoring equivalent of opening a Christmas present – you never really know what you’ll find inside. I grew to agree with them, it was always a fun surprise. Sometimes you’d get nothing but some small urchins and a what seems a couple hundred brittle stars, and other times you’d be greeted by a mother octopus and her clutch of eggs (no, we didn’t bring those up to size them as well).

An Artificial Recruitment Module

Diving with the Channel Islands crew, it really was work pretty much all day long. With so much data to collect, there isn’t much time for slacking off. Even when all of the diving was over there was still more data to get – a plankton tow to complete, hydrophone recording to make, or a species list to compile. It was inspiring to see them working nonstop to gather all the information needed to thoroughly monitor these special forests.

After finishing up our site on Santa Rosa Island, we headed off to the neighboring Santa Cruz Island for our next stop. Santa Cruz, the largest of the northern Channel Islands, also has the most native vegetation – the result of a huge effort to remove introduced grazers and reestablish a natural landscape. This made for a beautiful commute, getting a chance to view these sheer sea-cliffs and the greenery that blanketed them. We also got a chance to visit a unique Santa Cruz Island feature – the Painted Cave. One of the largest sea caves in the world, this enormous cavern extends a quarter mile into the island with an opening big enough to fit a 60-ft boat into it. Keith Duran, the skilled captain of the Sea Ranger II, brought the vessel all the way into the cave to give us a close look.

The entrance to the Painted Cave, which stretches up to 160ft tall at its opening

Once we arrived at our new site off of Fry’s Harbor, Santa Cruz Island, we went straight to work. I was starting off with the familiar 5m quadrats, but little did I know I was in for a surprise. The previous sites were relatively easy for these quads, with only a couple species to count, but this one was a different story. A silty bottom with scattered boulders, it seemed like every exposed surface was covered in an invasive algae species called Sargassum horneri. Resigning ourselves to an a long, mind-numbing dive, my buddy Laurie Montgomery and I committed to the count, in the end reaching tallies of thousands of individuals, a task which took 75 minutes and almost all of my sanity.

Understory growth, like the ones pictured here (not Sargassum) can form dense carpets and severely complicate counts

Also while on Santa Cruz Island I got a chance to break out the camera. For most of this trip there was too much work to do to be able to take photos, but I seized an opportunity to join Rilee Sanders and Cullen Molitor as they finished up some work. As visibility was low, I opted to shoot macro, something that I haven’t gotten a chance to do much of recently, in hopes of getting some nice photos of the California morays that everyone was talking about.

The next day we finished off our final site of the trip, and then went to do some logger retrievals. The KFM team has set out some acoustic loggers throughout the park and I was able to join some of the pick-up dives. In hopes of being able to use these hydrophone recordings to gauge ecosystem health, these loggers take 5-minute recordings every 15 minutes until they run out of battery or memory. Diving with Joshua Sprague and Kelly Moore, these dives were short and sweet – drop down, grab the logger, and bring it back up – but a nice way to get a quick view of some diverse sites. While doing these logger pickups, I visited my first marine protected area of the trip – a beautiful, lush kelp forest full of healthy marine life.

Channel Islands National Park is home to a network of marine protected areas. A mix of State and Federal marine reserves and conservation areas, these designations offer various forms of protections to marine life and serve as a sanctuary to preserve species diversity and abundance. In 2005, the KFM team added new sites to their protocol to survey inside and outside of these protected areas to try and gauge their effectiveness, and the results are clear. These MPAs work wonders for preserving species diversity and sizes, which allows for the maintenance of a healthy ecosystem. This is pretty clear when diving in them as well – the protected sites were among the most beautiful ones I visited on the trip, a telling testament to the importance of protection of special places.

We wrapped up our final day with some diving on Anacapa Island, the smallest of the northern islands and the closest to the mainland. This was one of the two islands out of the seven that I had never been diving on, so I was excited to check it off my list (only San Clemente Island left!). Even more exciting was that we had enough time to get a survey dive in after finishing off the last bit of work. We’d be working a couple sites around Anacapa, picking up loggers and such, and would have a little bit of free time before needing to head back to the mainland. I was able to jump into the chilly waters a couple final times and got to enjoy the beautiful kelp forests in the marine reserves off Anacapa Island for a bit before heading back home.

Shortly before leaving the Channel Islands I was met with an unexpected surprise. I was chatting with Kelly Moore, a long term KFM veteran who is about to start a new position at Kalaupapa National Historic Park. Kalaupapa NHP is one of the parks that is frequently visited by OWUSS NPS interns, but was one that I didn’t think I’d be able to visit this year due to shifting personnel and an unfortunately scrapped survey season. I mentioned this to Kelly, and was surprised when she mentioned that the fieldwork was in fact not scrapped, but still planned and was to start literally the day after I returned back from the Channel Islands. Even more exciting, she thought they could probably use an extra hand. At this point in my internship, I had no parks planned for me after CINP, so I sent out an email and before I knew it I was booking flights to Hawaii two days in advance from my phone while on a boat 50 miles offshore. With these exciting plans ahead of me, I drove straight to San Francisco as soon as I left the Channel Islands harbor in Ventura and hopped on a flight to another beautiful island chain, one a little bit more remote – the Hawaiian Islands.

Santa Rosa Island

As soon as I saw the bright blue tropical water from the small plane window I knew my flight was going the right way. The unmistakable vibrant waters of the Caribbean were moving closer and closer as we began our descent. I was eager to return to this part of the world and was looking forward to more picturesque beaches and wildly clear waters. This trip I was returning to the Virgin Islands, but to a new one this time: St. John, home of Virgin Islands National Park.

Virgin Islands National Park, encompassing 60% of the land area on St. John and about 9 square miles of the adjacent ocean, is a beautiful place full of tropical forests, historic ruins, and fringing coral reefs. Surrounding it is Virgin Islands Coral Reefs National Monument, adding an additional almost 20 square miles of protection to the reefs around the island. I was here for the second leg of the National Coral Reef Monitoring Program (NCRMP), a nation-wide effort to survey and keep track of the health of coral reefs. Lead by NOAA, this was a collaborative effort including groups like the NPS and University of Virgin Islands. This work was identical procedurally to what I worked on in St. Croix, as the survey methods must be the same in order to create comparable data. After my previous warm-up round a month before, these surveys collecting information on reef complexity, fish diversity, and coral health felt very comfortable and familiar. There was one big difference between the two for me though: in St. John, I collected much more data.

In St. Croix, I spent 3 of my five diving days photo-documenting the work at hand and shadowing to try and pick up the survey methods, only jumping into data collection on the last two days because the team was short a member. In St. John, I collected data from start to end – forcing me to data dive with a bulky camera strapped to my BC if I wanted to get any photos of the reefs. This was fun, as I like scientific diving and data collection, but did have one major downside. All of this fun data collection was paired with another, far less fun, task: data entry.

All that data has to go somewhere

All data entry had to be done by the end of the trip, so each day of diving 5-7 dives a day means 5-7 data sheets are waiting for you when you return home, tired after a long day of diving. Sure, you could wait to enter these until a little bit later in the trip but they’ll quickly pile up, creating an imposing stack of impending work. This data entry obligation was difficult to manage, with all the other internship duties I had along with dinner and other evening activities. To make matters worse, the survey type that I was doing, line-point intersect, was collecting information on percent cover of the benthic environment – meaning that I’d always have 100 points to enter, regardless on how barren the site was. Certain less-than-interesting sites gave the fish and coral surveyors a welcome break from the intense data collection, but the hapless LPI diver was doomed to work tirelessly.

Sometimes the tables were turned, and recording point after point of turf algae seemed preferable to counting and sizing hundreds of fast-moving fish

All of my gripes aside, this data entry is a key portion of the survey process – completely necessary if you are interested in doing any types of analysis or learning anything from all of these numbers that have just been produced. Additionally, doing it right after collecting it leaves little room for forgetting key information. It’s much harder to decipher messy underwater handwriting a month after it was written rather than a couple hours later.

So what was all this survey data on? If you were to ask members of my vessel during the St. John NCRMP leg, you might get a lot of answers of ‘scrubble’, a lovely benthic habitat composed of sand and rubble (and often not much else). The protocol is designed to survey any type of habitat that could potentially harbor coral, including the ones that may boast one small coral colony in 50m of seafloor (we visited some of these). As long as there was a single piece of hard substrate, we’d survey it (and yes, that little rock over there in that seemingly endless sea of sand counts – we checked). The words ‘coral reef surveys’ may invoke beautiful mental images of expansive living grandeur, that isn’t always the case. Sometimes, you have to monitor the sites that are what I imagine it would look like if a coral reef sneezed and forgot to cover its mouth, or sites that have so much algae and so little coral that you’ll have to double check you aren’t diving in California. However, someone has to collect this data – after all, zeros are important data points too.

Sometimes the algae/coral balance was skewed a little bit more towards the algae than you’d like it to be

As with St.Croix, these were randomly selected GPS waypoints that were chosen based off of benthic maps created using bottom sounder data.  This means that you’re often diving on sites that have never been visited before – and that no one really knows what type of habitat you’ll be dropping in on. Sometimes, that hard bottom that you (and the quickly growing dataset) have been pining for isn’t so hard after all. My team had more than our fair share of bounce dives, dropping in on large swathes of sand or seagrass and coming right back up. Sometimes, these seemingly-uneventful bounce dives would unearth thrilling sites: a school of hundreds of adult bonefish, tiny cryptic sargassum-dwelling invertebrates, or potentially my favorite sight of the trip – the largest palm tree I’ve ever seen. Sitting calmly on the dark ocean floor at around 90 feet deep, this submerged giant must have been over 70 feet tall.

While these soft-bottomed dives sometimes had fun surprises, the reefs were still much nicer

Despite feeling as though our team had somehow angered the gods who pass out the site survey assignments and were doomed to spend our days ticking off point after point of turf algae, we did still manage to visit some pretty spectacular sites. The Friday of our first week was the uncontested peak of the trip – visiting five aggregate and patch reef sites, with unparalleled visibility and surprisingly high coral cover. To top things off, our very first site was on the fringing reef, the reef furthest away from the islands and widely-thought to be the nicest around.

One of the nicer reefs we got to visit

With not many observed instances of disease or bleaching by our team, these reefs seemed pretty healthy. However, it was pretty clear that they had recently been subjected to some wild, intense, storm-driven swells. Occasionally, we’d run into coral colonies that looked like they’d been bashed in by a couple of angry garbage trucks on a bender, huge chunks of growth split apart in ways that seem impossible to comprehend. We’d also run into other signs of storm damage as well. Entire trees underwater was a common one, unintentional visitors from an outside world who’ve turned into a semi-permanent reef feature. Fragments of roof was another one, forcing one to imagine just how strong winds must have been to rip this huge chunk of metal off of someone’s house and deposit it a quarter mile offshore. We also ran into the wreckage of what looked like a rather large ship, broken apart and scattered across the reef.

Remnants of an unfortunate ship

While not a huge amount of disease was observed, as it has relatively recently made its way to the Caribbean, this doesn’t mean that we didn’t take any precautions to avoid spreading it. This park was the most cautious out of all the ones I’ve been to in terms of taking preventative measures – they were promoting what they hope to become ‘the new rinse’. Consisting of soaking gear in a diluted bleach solution (less than 1%) and then rinsing in freshwater, this thorough procedure is designed to remove any possibility of disease transmission through diver’s gear. The Parks Service is attempting to popularize this procedure throughout the Caribbean, supporting local recreational dive operations in their transition by supplying the bleach, with hopes that it’ll become widespread.

With a lot of the surveying gear touching the bottom, disinfecting is a crucial precaution

This disease, stony coral tissue loss disease, has only recently been detected in the U.S. Virgin Islands but poses an incredibly dire threat. Affecting 22 different species of coral with a mortality rate from 66-100%, it poses to decimate Caribbean reefs. First making an appearance near Miami in 2014, this disease quickly spread through the Florida Keys and has recently made its way out to the Caribbean as well, putting reefs already in major distress from climate change under even more stress. Described by researchers as being comparable to an underwater Ebola, this disease is currently incurable and ripping through reefs, killing corals that are hundreds of years old in mere weeks. Scientists are forced to result to dire containment measures, physically removing infected coral colonies from the reefs in a last-ditch effort to stop the spread. The speed and intensity of this disease make it a very real issue, putting even more importance on the island-wide monitoring we were undertaking. With a wide distribution of sites surveyed, this program has a good chance of locating and identifying disease before it becomes too widespread.

A diseased coral quickly losing living tissue – this may be a different disease, black band disease

Diving off of St. John, there’s a lot of boat traffic. Ferries travel around constantly moving between the many islands peppered through the area, private charters zip back and forth between beaches, and seemingly every other person on the islands has their own boat. This meant that we had to be extra vigilant when surfacing, especially as we managed to do a surprising number of sites in major boating channels. For some reason, vessels in this area don’t really seem to care much about dive flags – despite being clearly marked and obvious in the water, they’ll power right over them. Thankfully, the largest vessels (the ferries) weren’t very stealthy – their powerful, rumbling engine was audible even 90 feet down, and was hard to ignore when its booms resonated through your body.

Another hazard that we had to deal with was currents. While sometimes simply a nuisance, causing more exertion than desired, these had the potential to cause more serious issues. We had one memorable dive with such a raging current that I was almost unable to swim against it. The LPI diver has to swim into the current twice in the dive, once to reel out the transect and once more to collect their data, so I had to fight this angry stream of seawater twice over, exerting myself much more than I would have liked at depth to make the tiniest bit of headway. When we’d finally finished that dive and were able to stop fighting it, we noticed that our gas consumption and physical exertion weren’t the only things that this current had taken a toll on – it had also pulled down our dive float. Lying pitifully on the end of a suspiciously slack line at 85 feet down, wrinkled and compressed to half its size, our small buoy and handheld GPS combination had been yanked down to the depths by a whole lot of fast-moving water. With the help of a lift bag and a quick decrease in pressure, it happily returned to its former full and turgid state but was the subject of quite a few post-dive discussions in the days to come.

Strong currents really made us appreciate the dives without them

One final hazard was weather. Despite St. John rarely getting thunderstorms, we had quite a few during our monitoring trip. Often these storms would quickly materialize out of dark clouds without warning, surprising us in the middle of our day. We had one memorable dive where a lightning storm started while we were under – I remember the eerily calm surface of the water, the surface mottled with the impacts of thousands of raindrops and the occasional blast of illumination on the darkened reef from a flash of lighting.

Calm and serene underwater, cold and wet above

One small perk of doing all of these high-traffic, high-current, scrubble dives in the middle of the channel was a small novelty that I’m really pleased to be able to say that I’ve done – an international dive. With the close proximity between the USVI and the British Virgin Islands, it only made sense for a couple of these randomly selected points to fall right on the border. And sometimes, the transect happens to head across international lines, or a drifting safety stop takes you a little into someone else’s territory (it’s hard to see these borders underwater). While essentially meaningless, I got quite a kick out of these globe-trotting dives.

Some British fish

Like St. Croix, the dives for this program were fast and seemingly non-stop. Over the course of the two-week period, we quickly worked ourselves up to an average of 6-7 a day, occasionally even doing eight. Diving a range of depths and a mix of air and nitrox gases, high numbers of dives were achievable and safe – but sometimes lead to long days out on the sea.

Long days underwater are always worth it when you’re rewarded with sights like this

A huge perk of spending two weeks in St. John was that it gave me an entire weekend off between surveying to explore a bit more of the island. A huge amount of the island is National Park, encompassing a vast expanse of undeveloped forest and beaches. While lovely to see from the water as it really highlights the scale of the whole area, it was nice to get up close and personal as well. During time off I got a chance to see the sea turtles at Maho Bay, juvenile lemon sharks at Reef Bay, and even to take a quick visit to the British Virgin Islands. This was a really beautiful area that I’m glad I got a little time to see.

Juvenile lemon shark in the shallows at Reef Bay

I was happy to join on for another couple weeks of the National Coral Reef Monitoring Program as it’s such an important cause. At such a pivotal point for the fate of coral reefs it’s exciting to be on the forefront of the monitoring, collecting the data that will be used to inform policymakers about the ocean health. Additionally, I welcomed the opportunity to learn more about these reefs and the issues they face – all relatively new stuff to a cold-water diver like myself. After two busy weeks full of diving and data, I left the Caribbean for good. I was now heading to the opposite side of the country, to spend the remainder of my internship diving in a completely different ocean. It was time to say goodbye to the corals of the Caribbean and hello to the ecosystem that got me into diving – the lush kelp forests of California, at Channel Islands National Park.

A couple hundred years ago, the water off the coast of south Florida was not a good place to be a mariner. Fringed by submerged reefs, shoals, and islands, this treacherous coastline claimed many unfortunate vessels before the modern era of detailed charts and high-tech equipment. Many of these ships remain in these waters, slowly deteriorating from years of exposure to saltwater and biological activity, but still serving as a piece of history. Now, they act as a maritime time capsule, preserving a glimpse of the past underneath the warm waters.

Matt Hanks exploring the Lugano

These wrecks can teach us a lot about years past, but they aren’t completely safe in their watery resting places.  Along with the slow breakdown of vessel materials from the salt and biological activity, these wrecks are also subject to salvagers and the occasional heavy storm. While the days of intense wreck salvaging are behind us and the protection of National Park waters can serve to keep them safe, these boundaries don’t do much to deter hurricanes when they decide to come to town. Recent years have brought some strong storm activity through the park, causing potential damage to these historic sites.

Dave Conlin examining the Alicia

Biscayne National Park, located in south Florida just below Miami, is a 173,000-acre park that is 95% water. Protecting a number of distinct ecosystems, from mangroves to coral reefs, this park hosts boundless underwater sights. It also is home to a number of shipwrecks – 40 which have been officially documented but countless more likely lay undiscovered. Out of these, a selection of six of the most visit-able wrecks have been turned into the Maritime Heritage Trail – an opportunity for visitors to experience some of the Park’s treasured cultural resources. This trail, encompassing a wide range of vessel types, sizes, and eras, is a curated trip through some of the unfortunate maritime mistakes that occurred in Biscayne’s waters. By utilizing maps, brochures, and mooring buoys, park visitors can see, learn about, and experience these wrecks for themselves while snorkeling or diving.

Jim Nimz reads an informational plaque at the wreck of Arratoon Apcar

I was here with members of the Submerged Resources Center: Dave Conlin, Brett Seymour, Jim Nimz, and Matt Hanks. We were joined by Josh Marano, a talented maritime archaeologist who works the South Florida Parks. While here, we had a couple of objectives, all based around checking on the status of these historical wrecks post-hurricanes. Firstly, we’d be using the SeaArray, the SRC’s cutting-edge photogrammetry machine, to model the wrecks of the Maritime Heritage Trail. This would preserve them digitally as well as to start a baseline for continuous imaging-based archaeological assessments. We would also be conducting an assortment of measurements to learn about the composition and stability of the sediments around the sites – a way to learn how well they can preserve the wrecks and how much they change with the constant influx of storm-based wave energy.

Everyone’s favorite photogrammetry machine at work in Biscayne National Park

Biscayne National Park has a very busy dive program, so while we unpacked and prepared our equipment (a myriad of dive, imaging, and survey gear) we tried to be as compact as possible and to make the smallest impact on the Park as we could. This was a bit difficult with the sheer volume of stuff required to do our work but we did our best, and only colonized a portion of the outdoor patio and roughly half of a large restroom. You have to work with what’s available, even if sometimes it means storing your dive gear next to a toilet – it’s all part of the adventure. Another important first step was to introduce ourselves to the Acting Superintendent of Biscayne, Joe Llewellyn. The SRC works directly for superintendents and park managers so its important that they understand the research or fieldwork, as well as just nice to share info with interested parties.

Superintendant Joe Llewellyn observing the SRC team at work in the field

Once we had prepared all our gear, launched the SRC’s boat the Cal Cummings, and worked out our game plan, it was time to get out on the water. Our first wreck of the trip was the Arratoon Apcar, a wreck on the Heritage Trail in the far northern part of the park. As I mentioned earlier, the waters of Biscayne are full of shallow sandbars and shoals, so navigating out to our site for the day was a twisting trail through countless channels and around submerged hazards. The Arratoon Apcar wrecked in 1878 in especially unfortunate circumstances – this wreck is just a couple hundred feet from a lighthouse which was actively being built at the time of the wreck. The builders at the time were forced to watch as this vessel ran aground right in front of the light, which was just weeks from being complete.

The wreck of Arratoon Apcar

Our goal here was to create a 3D model of the site using the SeaArray. Brett Seymour would operate the beast with Jim Nimz as his buddy, and I was tasked with documenting the process along with creating images of the wreck for the Maritime Heritage Trail’s online documents – websites, story maps, etc. This was a fun opportunity for me to work on my wreck photography – a skill I had just started to develop earlier this summer at Isle Royale – as well as to get a nice introduction to the warm Biscayne waters. This wreck itself was nice, mostly just the bare structure remained after the decades spent underwater but what was left painted a clear image of what the vessel used to be. Located in shallow, clear water with covered in invertebrate growth and surrounded with reef fish, it was a lovely dive.

Fish take shelter under wreckage of Arratoon Apcar

After the dive on the Arratoon Apcar I headed out with Dave Conlin and Matt Hanks, the archaeologists of the SRC, to do some good old fashioned archaeology. For this we were joined by Josh Marano, maritime archaeological expert of the south Florida parks, whose local knowledge and expertise was indispensable when locating these wrecks and navigating the waters. We were to go to a couple more wrecks on the Heritage Trail to create GPS-based datums marking the site. This would allow the SRC to tie their newly created 3D models into maps, to place them accurately in their locations and allow for a full spatial understanding of the site in context to the map. This process involved a couple steps. First, a team of divers would descend on the site and locate two suitable locations on the fringes of the site. At these locations the divers would hammer in metal pins into the substrate, pins which would be incorporated into the model and a map to pair the two. Finally, it was time to take a GPS waypoint of the pins. This required a slightly different diver setup: as GPS signals are unable to travel through water, one diver would swim up to the metal pin underwater while towing along a buoy to mark their location. The other diver would swim along the surface following the buoy with a GPS in a drybag, taking waypoints when the buoy was directly over the metal pin.

Dave Conlin adding a marker pin near the wreck of HMS Fowey

I was able to join Dave, Matt and Josh on three more sites that day: the HMS Fowey, 19th century schooner wreck, and the China wreck. It was pretty special to visit four new wrecks in one day. These next three were full of surprises and artifacts. The China wreck site is littered with pieces of fine China (plates, dishes, bowls), pieces of its original cargo that still remain from when it wrecked years ago. The 19th century schooner was essentially two large piles of ballast (think big stones) but still had some of the original vessel material buried underneath. The HMS Fowey was one of my favorites: this was a 18th century British warship that sank in 1748.

Dave Conlin showing off an encrusted cannonball from the wreck of the HMS Fowey

This wreck is one of the crown jewels of the park with a secret location, limited dive access, and a restricted zone surrounding it to protect it from potential salvagers. This wreck is home to much of the wood siding of the vessel (protected from decomposition by being buried in an anoxic sediment environment), along with many exciting artifacts: piles of cannonballs (the ship’s shot locker, which rusted into an artificial reef after years in saltwater), a cannon, and a sword (amongst others). This is such a historically important wreck that it recently underwent a couple huge archaeological projects: one large excavation effort to uncover the site from its silty resting place in order to map and understand the full extent of the site, shortly followed by a large reversal of that process – covering the wreck in hundreds of pounds of sand in order to halt the decomposition process and to hide it from anyone who might damage it. This huge cover-up operation was unfortunately rather ineffective, as shortly after it was completed a hurricane paid the site a visit and promptly removed much of that newly added sand. This, again, was one of the reasons why our visit to this site was especially important: it was necessary to check in on such a historic cultural resource in the wake of powerful storms.

As well as adding the marker pins a final step to add to the models was site measurements. While the 3D models created by the SeaArray should theoretically be perfectly to scale, the SRC wanted to ground truth the data. To do this, they took an assortment of detailed measurements at the modeling sites -finding the lengths of conspicuous pieces of wreckage to check with the model later, as a way of proofing it. I joined the archaeologists for a couple dives to document this process, always great to see science in action.

Matt Hanks and Matt Lawrence take measurements on the Lugano

The next couple of days were mixed with a combination of shooting site photos with Brett, Jim, the SeaArray, and with marking site GPS points with Dave, Matt, and Josh. I was able to visit four more wrecks, all with storied histories. There was the Mandalay, a luxury windjammer that ran aground in 1966 on New Year’s Eve and was quickly stripped of its fineries. The Alicia, carrying so much valuable cargo that it sparked a huge battle between 70 different groups of salvagers that lead to court battles and salvage law changes. The Lugano, who at the time of her wrecking was the largest vessel ever to wreck in the Florida Keys. The Earl King, a cargo carrier who ran aground in the Keys and was saved and repaired, only to run aground one final time in Biscayne 10 years later. It was a real pleasure to dive on all these sites with the SRC, and travel the Maritime Heritage Trail.

A couple of days into the trip we were joined by two new members of the team: Tara Van Niekirk, a graduate student and frequent collaborator with the SRC doing sediment studies at Biscayne, and Sydney Pickens, a recent Columbia graduate and Slave Wrecks Project collaborator getting an introduction to maritime archaeology with some of the NPS’s finest. They joined up with the archaeological dream team of Dave, Matt, and Josh, creating a talented group of professionals that I was honored to work alongside.

With this team we started to work on some sediment studies, part of Tara’s graduate research that the SRC was working on with her. These were conducted in order to learn more about the stability and composition of the sediments at the site – important factors responsible for preserving the organic materials of the wreck. Silty, mucky sites tend to be the best for preservation, as the muck creates an anoxic environment that greatly slows the decomposition process. By taking sediment cores from locations around study sites and carefully analyzing the layers, archaeologists can learn a lot about the site itself. Along with merely the sediment composition, they can look at the layering and see how it has changed over time: comparing and dating the layers between each other can tell them about the movement of sediments through periods of heavy storm activity, which can be helpful in understanding the abiotic factors affecting the site. Another useful measurement device that we would be installing were scour chains. These, essentially carefully marked and measured lengths of chain, are buried into the sand with a set amount of links exposed. When returning to the site at later dates, archaeologists can continuously check the chain to see if any more or less chain is exposed, telling them information about the changing sediment levels – if the site is being slowly excavated by weather, or slowly covered up.

Josh Marano and Dave Conlin prepare a scour chain for installation

The goal was to take do these measurements at a selection of the Maritime Heritage Trail wrecks. We started off with taking sediment cores at a couple sites, including some of my favorites like the HMS Fowey and China Wreck. The coring process was a cool one to witness. To start, a plastic coring tube was inserted into a length of metal pipe. This pipe was then smashed down into the substrate using a variety of tools, ranging from a mallet to this metal contraption used to drive in stakes (affectionately called a ‘whammer-jammer’ by the team). This core sometimes slid through the sediment with ease and other times took much more effort – it all depended on the substrate composition. Afterwards, the pipe was removed from the ground and the internal plastic core taken out. This was the finished sample, which was to go up to the surface to be sent out for analysis. I enjoyed seeing the sediment cores on the boat – sometimes distinct layers were visible even to my untrained eyes, and it was cool to see the differentiation in sediment types.

After taking all our sediment cores, we moved on to the scour chains. While burying chains in sand may seem like a simple process, it takes a little more effort than you might think. In order to bury them deeply enough and without disturbing too much sediment, the team utilized a special dredge-like tool. Composed of a metal pipe linked via a hose to a water pump on the boat, this tool sends high-powered jets of water into the sand, essentially liquefying it and allowing the chain to be effortlessly planted into the ground. It was very fun to watch the team utilizing this tool at work, and I’m thankful that I was able to document the experience.

Josh Marano adding scour chains in the Pillar Dollar Wreck

Interspersed in between all of this archaeological work I was able to still spend time with Team Imaging (Brett, Jim, and the SeaArray) as they worked to model the sites. I had a really good time working with these guys, especially as I was able to spend most of my time working to creatively photograph the wreck sites. I have fun with all types of underwater photography but it’s a particularly enjoyable experience when I’m able to truly spend time with a site to figure out how I think I can best capture it. It’s a welcome break from the often fast-paced world of documenting science at work, and I really like being able to slowly swim around a site and carefully scrutinize it to determine how I want to portray it. It’s also still thrilling to see the SeaArray cruise through the water, snapping away photo after photo of the wreck sites. I even got the chance to trade roles with Jim for a bit, trading my camera for a DPV, and spent a couple minutes following Brett around as his buddy.

One interesting thing that differed between our modeling work at Isle Royale and Biscayne was the exposure of the project. In sharp contrast to the remoteness of Isle Royale, Biscayne is in close proximity to a lot of people – just south of Miami and just north of the Florida Keys. In an area with such rich maritime archaeological history, there are a lot of people who were very interested in the SRC’s work. Because of this, we had visitors from other organizations come out almost every day to experience the team and the SeaArray at work. We were visited by the Florida Keys Marine Sanctuary’s maritime archaeologist Matt Lawrence, who joined us for a day of diving and site measurements. Florida Public Archaeology Network’s Sara Ayers-Rigsby and Rachael Kangas joined us to check out some sites and help with sediment measurements. Superintendent Joe Llewellyn came out to check out our work in his park one day and visit some wrecks. Jesse, an archaeological intern from Everglades National Park came out with us. A University of Miami graduate student working on science communication joined us for a day, who was excited to witness the modeling process that would make these offshore wrecks so attainable to the general audience. Most of all, everyone wanted to see the SeaArray in action and to watch this cutting-edge imaging tool at work at important archaeological sites. It was really special for me to see the far-reaching impact of this project, the interest and excitement it created, and the collaborative efforts taking place to get this work done. This solidified in my mind how important this work was, with so many different parties wanting to take part and help it along the way.

Brett Seymour operating the SeaArray with his buddy Jim Nimz following closely behind

My first two weeks at Biscayne flew by before I knew it in a wild flurry of archaeology, shipwrecks, and imaging. I really enjoyed my travels down the Maritime Heritage Trail, exploring the submerged history that this beautiful park has to offer. I’m grateful for Biscayne National Park’s support of all our activities during these busy few weeks, Josh Marano for lending his time and expertise, and as always the SRC for having me along for their wild adventures. Now, I’m on to my next project at Biscayne National Park, one I’m especially excited for: working on my first magazine assignment with SCUBA Diving Magazine, documenting the Youth Diving With a Purpose program!

Excited for new projects at Biscayne National Park