In January 2023, the FGCU Artificial Reef project was on pause due to Hurricane Ian.

Debris was still being collected throughout Storm ravaged southwest Florida, both in and out of the water.

With Hurricane Ian coming through.

It really did a lot of damage to Fort Myers Beach, the back side of Fort Myers Beach, San Carlos Island, where Kelly Brothers is based, where we keep one of our boats.

And so there was just a lot of damage, a lot of debris that really continues to impede the movement of materials, barges, boats in the area as we prepare for this deployment.

And there was a renewed rush to get the 18 concrete culverts into the Gulf of Mexico.

While the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers permit was good until September 2023, Kelly Brothers main concern was the approaching spring weather.

As far as timing and the weather, that becomes, that's the biggest deal for this type of project.

We go out to the Gulf, were exposed were nine miles out, we need to be on point timing the weather.

March weather in Southwest Florida can be variable and windy, a dangerous situation for a wide barge and a tall crane out in the shallow Gulf of Mexico.

So my brother Travis, he will schedule everything around a weather window and everybody has to be ready.

Okay, There's a gap.

You shoot the gap, do all the work and get back in safe.

To prepare for the weather gap.

The culverts were loaded onto a semi flatbed trailer at Oldcastle Infrastructure in Cape Coral, then transported two at a time to the Kelly Brothers Beach yard.

Then the entire reef team waited for the call, which came on Wednesday, March 1st.

Today is our first deployment of culverts that will be making up Kimberly's Reef, FGCUs Research Reef.

It's an exciting day.

18 culverts going in six today, and then the other 12 at a later date.

Dr. Parsons and his team, along with local TV news crews, piled into boats at the FGCU Vester Field Station off of Bonita Beach road to travel the eight miles into the Gulf to witness the event.

It's taken a long time to get it off the ground, but here we are.

12 miles north, the 140 foot barge with six cement culverts turned the corner at Bowditch Park Point on Fort Myers Beach and motored out into the Gulf at a measured speed of five miles per hour.

The GPS coordinates were set for the future site of Kimberly's Reef.

Dane Kelly makes the process sound simple.

Then there'll be a buoy marked ahead of time.

Get into position, check GPS coordinates, drop down the template, then drop three box culvert, move to the next location and do it all over again.

Dr. Parsons provides a little more detail as the culvert is prepped to become the first to establish the artificial reef complex.

So right now they're positioning the barge and they have pilings on the barge.

Those two long poles, and they'll be sticking those in the ground to stabilize their position.

You'll see there's white buoys that are around in the water.

So that will be basically the center point of where they'll be putting each of three culverts.

Workers on the barge connect cables from the crane to metal hooks on the 20,000 pound culvert.

Once secured, the crane slowly swings its arm over the side of the barge, lowering the culvert to waiting scuba divers.

It silently slips beneath the surface without a splash and without much fanfare.

The divers then guide the culvert to its precise GPS coordinated resting site below.

The process is repeated five more times that day, creating two reef modules.

Each one of those white buoys marks what we call the module.

So three of them will be placed at module one.

The other three will be placed at module four.

And then they'll will go back to the dock, get more culverts, and come back out at a later date.

The weather is not going to be good tomorrow, so and they could only do six in one day.

So we'll see when the next set of modules go out.

In fact, the other 12 culverts went out in May.

Helen Noble, outreach coordinator for FGCU Vester Field Station, and Eric Rieseberg, whose daughter was the inspiration for the reef's name, took a boat out to see the completion of the reef modules.

It was great to see.

It was exhilarating to see also how how quickly and efficiently Kelly Brothers worked at getting them in the water, getting them on chains and lifted down.

It was certainly a a dream come true.

I was actually at peace.

I think that was the the best term.

We had finally done it.

With the Kimberleys Reef complex, finally in place.

The FGCU scientific research was about to begin.

Major support for Kimberly's Reef, is provided by Bodil and George Gellman who believed the human spirit is behind every scientific discovery.