7-8-10

Today, TISIRI’s Joe Kistel and Ed Kalakauskis are meeting with local fishing expert Rick Ryals to further discuss future large vessel reef site areas. Ryals is very familiar with the offshore NE Florida seafloor and is also very connected with the offshore fishing community. Future reef sites are considered based on variables such as proper depth, lack of existing reef or live bottom, and intuition on what areas might be most productive with an added artificial reef structure. Ryals’s offshore experience and available network of fishing professionals helps us to locate ideal future reef locations. With these locations identified we can start the permit process for future large vessel reef deployments.

This effort is the start of an enormous process to create a large artificial reef offshore NE Florida. By large we mean a reef on a scale similar to the USS Oriskany reef off Pensacola, Fl. This is one of our longer term goals that will take time and significant resources to accomplish. In the mean time we have several permitted sites already ready in place for our other artificial reef endeavors.