07/25/2026
I toured the Andrew Red Harris Foundation Bait and Snorkel Reef off the Jupiter Inlet Friday. This is where you see all the boats catching bait a half mile northeast of the Jupiter Inlet every morning. It's one of the fishiest spots in the ocean and a fun dive.
I saw a lot of interesting things, including a goliath grouper and a nurse shark resting side by side touching each other on the bottom at the NE corner, a circling school of 20 pound jacks, nurse sharks, turtles, goliaths, lots of snook and sardines and many other species.
Note the sand scouring from under the boulder next to the nurse shark at the east end.
I borrowed an undergun mounted Gopro for this video and will put a rubber band on the flopper next time. If you watch the video on a big screen you see a lot more detail.
We built this 300 ton reef in 2017 on top of an 800 ton boulder reef the county placed 20 years earlier. By 2017 there was only 6 inches of rock from the old reef remaining above the sand floor of the ocean. The rest of the boulders had the sand scoured from underneath them and settled to the underlying ancient bedrock 12 feet below the sand floor.
We hoped the old reef was done settling and it has!
And there is a big bonus- the current is interacting with our 10 foot high boulder reef and 24/7/365 scouring the smothering sand off the top of the old reef on the down-current north side.
The loose boulders sitting in the sand are re-exposed parts of the original reef. The piled boulders are what we deployed. You can see the scouring effect at the east end between the nurse shark and the boulder about halfway through the video.
For reference, the goliaths and nurse sharks are on the east end. The boulders in the sand are on the north side. The south and west sides have clear sand right up to the piled boulders.
AndrewRedHarrisFoundation.org
