The Coast Guard, in partnership with the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP), is scheduled to deploy worn buoy sinkers to an artificial reef off the coast of New Jersey on Saturday.
The Coast Guard cutter Juniper, a 225-ft. buoy tender homeported in Newport, R.I., will be adding a total of 10 buoy sinkers weighing approximately 16,000 pounds each to the Axel Carlson Reef site located approximately six miles from Shark River Inlet and four miles from Manasquan Inlet. The area of the reef is four square miles and sits at a depth ranging from 66-ft to 80-ft.
The concrete sinkers, recently taken out of service by the Coast Guard, will provide a hard substrate for fish, shellfish and crustaceans, fishing grounds for anglers and underwater structures for scuba divers.
Buoy tenders make ideal deployment vessels for artificial reef material placement because they are able to place materials with an accuracy of plus or minus three yards from the target area.