[Coral-List] Serial fish video at Dodge Island sea-port

[Eugene Shinn]

Dear Colin, I appreciate your situation at Dodge Island. I do hope you 
can keep your serial fish video equipment humming. This is an area I 
know very well or I or should I say I used to know very well back before 
there was a Dodge Island. I go back to when there was just a series of 
spoil bank islands populated by Australian pines. As a child I used to 
camp on the eastern most island we called Sand Key. There was a small 
cabin there that belonged to a friend of my Father. In those days my 
Father used to rent a small boat at Bayfront park and we fished for 
grunts and mangrove snappers just south of that string of islands. Years 
later as a young high school teenager I learned to spearfish around the 
north Jetty at Government Cut and under a pier on south beach just north 
of Government Cut. That pier is long gone. Years later after attending 
the University of Miami and working as a Shell Oil researcher for 15 
years I joined the U.S. Geological Survey (dept of Interior) and 
established a research lab in one of the old Customs buildings on Fisher 
island. I maintained a lab and office of 5 researchers there from 1974 
to 1989. Dr. Robert N. Ginsburg who had converted me to a geologist in 
the 1960s had his U.M. office and taught students in the larger 
Administration building next door. I first met Bill Precht when he was a 
Ginsburg student next door on Fisher Island. The U.M. gave up those 15 
acres and the buildings and we all vacated the island in 1989. The 
Customs buildings have been replaced by large condo-size buildings. 
There was a also a covered boat house where we kept our boat and a small 
pontoon ferry boat we all used to cross Government Cut every day. The 
conversion of those spoil island had begun and a bridge was built to 
what became Dodge Island. The rest is history. It is worth inspecting 
all this on Google Earth.

      At our Fisher Island station in the mid 1980s we hosted a graduate 
student from Texas A and M who was doing a study of drilling mud effects 
on corals. We installed an intake PVC pipe in 30 ft of water in the ship 
channel off the boat house and used a water pump to bring in clear sea 
water during high tides. The water was for growing corals in large 
aquaria. Unfortunately corals would not live in that water. Once a week 
our student would take our boat offshore and fill plastic garbage cans 
with clear Gulf Stream water. Corals grew quite well in that water so he 
could perform his experiments. The student completed his PhD and 
published his results. At that time there were many tropical fish in 
Government Cut including large schools of snook and there were abundant 
lobster but no corals. We assumed poor water-quality was due to the 
sewer outfall less than a mile offshore. We could usually smell it 
during a SE wind. Eventually the outlet was extended out to 114 ft of 
water where many people fished around the sewage plume. (That is another 
interesting story for later)

There had been some dredging in the ship channel in the vicinity of the 
Cruise Ship base back in the 1970s. In fact one of the dredges sank and 
blocked the port area for several months. This all happened well before 
the more recent major dredging and widening of Government Cut that 
occurred long after we vacated Fisher Island. Bill Precht was put in 
charge of the coral reef monitoring during and after the dredging and 
widening of the channel. Because I had dived the area since the 1950s I 
can say there were few live corals there before the dredging which 
exposed an extensive Holocene Acropora reef. Bill Precht as a frequent 
contributor to the coral-list may want to verify what I observed.

I suppose the big question now is should the serial photography of fish 
along the Dodge Island sea wall be continued. I see no reason why it 
should not be continued. Of course the fish life is there because of the 
concrete sea wall and man-made rubble. As for corals it is clearly not 
suitable for extensive coral growth. All I can say is it is clear the 
entire area including the Dodge island complex is entirely artificial. 
Also the water quality is better than what I remember from the 1950s 
when Miami sewage was pumped directly into the bay. I remember the odor. 
Gene