SOUTH CAROLINA’S MEMORIAL REEF

During the blazing heat of the summer months, it’s typical to find multiple sport-fishing boats trolling a 4-by-6-mile area located just over 50 nautical miles from the rainbow-hued homes of historic downtown Charleston, South Carolina. While these crews are busy monitoring teasers, changing baits, hooking fish and making memories, a submerged city of South Carolina’s old infrastructure—swing bridges, barges and shipping containers—lies more than 300 feet beneath them.

Here, at the bottom of the ocean, you’ll find the Charleston Deep Reef site. But to those in the Lowcountry billfish community, this bluewater destination is more than that. It’s hallowed ground, and home to the South Carolina Memorial Reef.

A PERFECT PARTNERSHIP

The South Carolina Department of Natural Resources first selected the site as a suitable location to establish a deepwater artificial reef. Materials sunk in this sandy area could provide vertical relief habitat for deepwater snapper and grouper species, such as snowy and Warsaw grouper, which are managed by the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council, a body charged with managing fisheries in federal waters off North and South Carolina, Georgia, and the east coast of Florida. While the SCDNR successfully secured the appropriate permitting and designations with the council and other federal partners to establish the Charleston Deep Reef, it initially found it difficult to procure funding to purchase the needed materials. That’s where the