The Summer Solstice Great Greased Watermelon Grab will be run this Saturday. In this terrific family fun event, relay teams compete to retrieve slippery melons from floating patches on Buttonwood Sound and return them to the club beach.
Posted: Friday, June 26, 2009 09:42 AM EDT
A proposal for Florida Bay management offered by marine sanctuary advisors tries to balance protection with local concerns over boating access, say members who worked on it.
Posted: Wednesday, June 24, 2009 12:04 PM EDT
An officer with the Monroe County Sheriff's Office's marine unit checks a boat during a previous sport-diving lobster season. Agencies are increasing enforcement efforts with the summer season reaching its peak.
With the peak of summer boating season at hand, marine organizations and agencies are ramping up events to keep Florida Keys waters as safe as possible. And nowhere is the need for boating safety more critical: Monroe County had more significant boating accidents (98) and deaths (seven) than any other county in Florida last year, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
Posted: Wednesday, June 24, 2009 11:00 AM EDT
Find a lionfish. That was the mission of the day.
Posted: Friday, June 19, 2009 11:00 AM EDT
John Halas (left), Upper Keys regional sanctuary manager, inspects a nonnative lionfish removed from the Key Largo reef by Lad Akins of the Reef Environmental Education Foundation.
When a boater hooks up to a mooring buoy at the Florida Keys reef, he uses what John Halas describes as the embedment anchoring system. Nearly everyone else calls it the Halas Mooring Buoy System.
Posted: Friday, June 19, 2009 09:46 AM EDT
A piece of live rock, as seen in Neal Novak's personal aquarium, sports the purple-colored coraline algae.
Neal Novak's financial future lay on the ocean floor not far from Alligator Light: 150 tons of rock slowly transforming into a prized commodity -- Until 300,000 pounds of aquacultured live rock vanished. "They stole my livelihood," Novak, 51, of Miami said Tuesday. "This is devastating to my whole family."
Posted - Wednesday, June 17, 2009 08:00 AM EDT
This is the entire group that went out. The visitors and the locals had plenty in common -- their love of the oceans and hopes to find cooperative ways to protect them.
When divers headed out on June 8 to clean the Middle Keys reef of trash such as fishing line and the like, they returned to shore with not much to show for it. And that's a good thing.
Posted - Wednesday, June 17, 2009 11:00 AM EDT
The Summer Salstice Great Greased Watermelon Grab, originally scheduled for this Saturday, has been postponed.
Posted - Friday, June 05, 2009 10:21 AM EDT
Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission Officers Joshua Greenier, Mike Milillo, Tiffany Davis and Racquel Daniels recently graduated from FWC’s academy in Tallahassee and have been assigned to patrol the Keys. (Photo by Officer Bobby Dube, FWC)
Posted - Friday, June 05, 2009 10:17 AM EDT
