Reeling in tourists with underseas attractions
Deerfield wants to highlight reef life
You already know how beautiful South Florida’s beaches are, so now Deerfield Beach wants you to get acquainted with how amazing the undersea part is.
Buoyed by the popularity of its underwater camera that’s hooked tens of thousands who watch a live streaming view of fish under its pier, Deerfield plans to increase the camera’s visibility.
The city will try to reel in more
visitors by:
Displaying the fishy feed on the Deerfield International Fishing Pier.
Adding a page in the next few months to the city website that features video footage of some denizens of Deerfield’s depths — part of the third-largest underwater barrier reef ecosystem in the world.
“You can come to Deerfield for more than just the beach, you can also explore the offshore as well,” said Patrick Bardes, the city’s coastal and waterway coordinator.
Deerfield is midway between the Boca Raton Inlet and the Hillsboro Inlet, so it’s ideal for boats seeking open sea from the Intracoastal Waterway, Bardes said.
The city also has plans to add undersea attractions for those walking off the beach: a near-shore recreational underwater trail just east of the city’s main parking lot. That should be in place by next summer, Bardes said.
The water might look open and flat, but undersea,
a host of features await, including a “wall.” Divers describe it as an undersea mountain that rises like a 60-foot building, surrounded by sea life.
“It’s a dramatic, sheer wall,” said Jim “Chiefy” Mathie, Deerfield’s former fire chief who has been diving in the Bahamas, throughout the Caribbean, and near Hawaii. Some of the other places he’s been have clearer water, but no place has a reef like this so close to the shore with varied depths nearby, Mathie said.
“You have a feeling like you’re superman, flying along a building,” Mathie said. “It’s really kind of cool.”
It’s all because of the Florida Reef Tract, which is 360 miles long. That’s the biggest barrier reef ecosystem apart from the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and the Belize Barrier Reef, said Dalton Hesley, a senior research associate in the Marine Biology and Ecology Department at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.
The reef forms an arc around the Florida Keys, with its northern end at Biscayne National Park. Patch reefs of the same system lie off the coast of Greater Fort Lauderdale and extend to Martin County.
Hesley called his first look at the reef “mindblowing.”
“There are not many places where you can see an ecosystem like this,” he said, calling it “a rainforest of the sea” teeming with life and color.
There are 500 species of fish that live in Florida’s reef system, he said.
“It’s pretty breathtaking and the great thing is, regardless of where you go, it’s going to be a living wall of life,” said Hesley, who is part of an effort to save the reef.
Sue McNeal Hasson, 64, a Deerfield Beach insurance adjuster, gets a glimpse of the area’s undersea riches sitting at her computer and clicking on the tab that shows the live-streaming view beneath Deerfield’s pier.
It’s her kind of clickbait, she said.
“I could get lost in it — it’s just mesmerizing,” she said. “When I am stressing out, I click on it and I’m in a trance.”