Dream Team Mooring Project

mooring:"...a device or structure that is permantly atached to the bottom [of the sea] that is used to help hold vessels in place..."
Anchor:"... a part of vessels that is temporarily droped to the bottom to hold vessels in place..."

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Anchors kill reefs

Each time an anchor is dropped onto a reef it breaks, crushes, over-turns, and kills the hard and soft corals that it lands on. This is sad and it is all too common. It is for this reason that the Dream Team has started the Dream Team Mooring Project.

These moorings are not free, however. The moorings are made to hold the largest of the boats that use our moorings (about 100 feet long). This requires heavy duty lines and hardware (shackels, swivels, chain, etc.) There is also the intrinsic cost of floats to keep the line off of the reef and also to mark the spot on the surface.

This is of course just installation cost. Lines wear out, floats are caught in propellers and destroyed or lost, hardware corrosion is endless, anti-corrosion cathodes (zincs), etc. This is truly the costly part.

What can you do? The first thing is to make sure that any boat that you go on uses moorings. There is a simple way to do this...ASK! Let your dive operator know that it is NOT ok to drop anchor onto wrecks or reefs. We have many boats in the area (including other research vessels!!!) that consistently drop anchors on our reefs and wrecks. Many times they will do this even when there is a mooring availible on the site.

It is our hope that through leadership and education that we can convince other dive operators in the Bahamas and around the globe to follow suit and just say no to anchors!