Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, Florida · 26.1906° N, 80.0953° W
Thirty feet down, red light is gone from the water. And when a reef dies, it doesn't bleed red — it bleaches white. Both losses are invisible from the beach. We work where you can't see.
Red Ocean funds, dives, and documents reef restoration on Florida's Coral Reef — starting with the shore reef a hundred yards off our own town.
Begin descent ↓The only nearshore coral reef system in the continental United States starts at the St. Lucie Inlet and ends past Key West. It passes directly in front of Lauderdale-by-the-Sea — close enough to swim to from Datura Avenue.
Decades of heat stress, disease, and water quality decline have stripped away the living coral cover. What's left is structure without builders: rock that shelters fish today but is slowly eroding with nothing growing back fast enough to replace it.
Restoration works — nurseries in Broward County are growing corals and returning them to the reef, and engineered reef modules are rebuilding lost structure. What restoration needs is what it always needs: money, trained divers, and people who won't look away.
That's the gap Red Ocean exists to fill, in one place, done well: our reef, our town, our watch.
We raise money and direct it into permitted reef work in Broward County — county artificial reef deployments, coral nursery outplanting, and monitoring. We don't put anything in the water that isn't permitted; we make permitted work go further.
Volunteer dive teams for cleanups, surveys, and citizen-science monitoring. If you're certified and local, there is a job for you on the bottom — and if you're not certified yet, that's a fixable problem.
The reef's decline is easy to ignore because nobody watches it happen. We record it — photo transects, before-and-after restoration imagery, and plain-language reporting the whole town can read.
| Site | Lauderdale-by-the-Sea shore reef |
| Access | Shore entry, Datura Ave & El Mar Dr |
| First reef line | ~100 yds out · 8–15 ft |
| Second reef line | ~¼ mi out · 15–25 ft |
| Nearby wreck | SS Copenhagen (1900) · underwater archaeological preserve |
| System | Florida's Coral Reef · Kristin Jacobs Coral Aquatic Preserve |
Lauderdale-by-the-Sea is one of the only places in Florida where you can walk off the sand and be on a living reef in five minutes. That accessibility is the whole point: this reef made our town a dive town. The debt runs seaward.
Every dollar goes to permitted restoration work, dive operations, and monitoring on Broward County reefs. Every diver gets pointed at a real task.