Fort Lauderdale Diving: Three Reef Lines, a State Shipwreck Preserve and 128 Sunken Reefs

Three reef lines run parallel to the Broward shore, and the far one is about a mile out

Broward County has 24 miles of coastline along the Atlantic, and the reef follows every one of them. It is not a patch field and it is not a wall on a distant drop. It is a set of long, low, shore-parallel ridges, and the whole day’s diving is decided by which line the boat stops on.

The county names three. The Inner Reef runs in 20 to 30 feet of water, the Middle Reef in 40 to 60 feet, and the Outer Reef in 50 to 100 feet. Inside all three sits a shallower nearshore ridge complex of coquina and carbonate sandstone, close enough to the sand to be swum to.

None of it is still growing. Upward growth of the outer reef stopped around 8,000 calibrated radiocarbon years before present, the inner reef around 6,000 and the middle reef around 3,700. What divers swim over here is a relict, veneered with living coral.

The tract runs well past the county line, from offshore West Palm Beach at 26°43′N south to offshore South Miami at 25°34′N, roughly 125 kilometres, all of it less than 3 kilometres from a built-up shore. Broward holds the middle slice.

Do not come expecting coral cover. Stony coral covers roughly 3 to 6 per cent of these reefs; octocorals, sponges and macroalgae do the rest. Two exceptions sit on the ridge complex offshore central Broward: a site of massive corals at about 16 per cent cover, and one with large Acropora cervicornis colonies at about 34 per cent.

The reason is latitude. These reefs sit above 25°N and behave as a high-latitude system, where winter cold fronts, occasional upwelling, heavy wave action and turbidity hold reef building back. The fish and the structure, not the coral, are what people come for.

Lauderdale-by-the-Sea puts three reefs inside 100 yards of the sand

The shore diving is not in Fort Lauderdale itself. It is at Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, the small town immediately north, where the town government publishes the beach portal at Datura Avenue and El Mar Drive and keeps a tank rack at it. The town states that three coral reefs lie within 100 yards off the beach.

Two marked trails run in 10 feet of water. The Anglin’s Pier Reef Snorkel Trail follows the reef beside the fishing pier. The Shipwreck Snorkel Trail, dedicated in 2002, is a deliberate arrangement of an anchor, five concrete cannons and a ballast pile, placed shallow enough to be read from the surface.

Two Florida rules govern that water and both are about distance. Spearing is prohibited within 100 yards of a public swimming beach, and within 100 yards of any commercial or public fishing pier or bridge open to public fishing. Anglin’s is a fishing pier, so the reef beside it is spear-free ground.

The second rule governs the flag. Under section 327.331 of the Florida Statutes the divers-down symbol must be at least 12 inches by 12 inches when displayed from the water and at least 20 by 24 inches from a vessel. On open water divers must make reasonable efforts to stay within 300 feet of it, and vessel operators to stay 300 feet off.

In rivers, inlets and navigation channels both figures drop to 100 feet, which matters at Hillsboro Inlet and the Port Everglades entrance. The device may not be displayed once every diver is aboard or ashore. Our shore diving list collects coasts that work like this one.

The SS Copenhagen is a state preserve, and three instruments keep it that way

The best-known dive here is not an artificial reef. It is a 325-foot steel screw steamer built at Sunderland by John Priestman and Co. and launched on 22 February 1898, official number 108,711, rated at 3,279 tons and driven by three triple expansion engines of 312 nominal horsepower.

On 26 May 1900 she ran hard aground on the Pompano Ledge carrying coal from Philadelphia to Havana. The wrecksite lies three quarters of a mile offshore south of Hillsboro Inlet in 16 to 31 feet of water on state submerged lands. The remains measure roughly 300 feet by 60 feet, stern to the north.

The bow is not with the rest of her. Salvage pulled it off shortly after she sank and it now rests 200 yards to the southeast in 27 feet, stem pointing nearly straight up. Anthracite from her bunkers still litters the bottom under the growth.

The state’s own site record explains the visibility in one line: water over the wreck averages 20 feet and is generally extremely clear because of the Gulf Stream. It also records what the United States Navy did with her. Fighter pilots training at Fort Lauderdale used the structure for target practice during the Second World War, which is why .50-calibre bullets turn up on the site.

For years locals dived her under the wrong name, calling her the Cumberland after an Army Corps hopper dredge wrecked off Fort Lauderdale in 1931 and also strafed. That wreck lies elsewhere; the coal settles it.

The preserve came out of a mail-out. In early 1993 the Florida Bureau of Archaeological Research asked for candidate sites, a Broward County charter boat captain nominated this one backed by the Marine Archaeological Council of Broward County, and in 1994 the wreck was dedicated as Florida’s fifth Underwater Archaeological Preserve. Two mooring buoys and a cement monument with an inset bronze plaque mark it.

Three state instruments hold it. Section 267.061(1)(b) of the Florida Statutes vests title to abandoned artifacts on state-owned sovereignty submerged lands in the Division of Historical Resources. Section 267.13 makes unauthorised investigation a first-degree misdemeanour and unauthorised excavation a third-degree felony. Rule 1A-31.0045 of the Florida Administrative Code, effective 20 July 2009, puts Underwater Archaeological Preserves outside any exploration or salvage permit the state can issue.

Federal recognition followed on 31 May 2001, when the wreck entered the National Register of Historic Places under reference number 01000532. The town estimates about 10,000 visitors a year, which for a site in 20 feet of water means snorkellers as well as divers.

What Broward County has put on the bottom since 1967, with dates and depths

The two available counts do not match, and both are worth having. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission files 128 deployments in Broward County in its state artificial reef list. Broward County says it has created over 150 artificial reefs since 1982. The state list also starts earlier: Erojacks off Fort Lauderdale in 25 feet and off Dania in 12 feet, both 1967.

The county’s most-told wreck has a mainland prologue. The freighter Mercedes grounded against a Palm Beach seawall in November 1984, was bought by the Broward County Environmental Quality Control Board and was blown down with 350 pounds of TNT on 30 March 1985. She sits in 97 feet. The state list gives 197 feet of hull, her registry 194.

The tugs sit shallower. The Jay Scutti, 95 feet of tugboat, went down on 19 September 1986 in 67 feet, inside recreational limits with time to spare. Dozens of barges, culverts and small vessels share that 65 to 75 foot band.

The deep end of the list is not recreational at all. The Rodeo-Lowrance, a 435-foot freighter, was sunk on 31 March 1984 in 200 feet. The Bud Krohn Reef, a 183-foot freighter, went down on 3 December 1989 in 458 feet, the deepest Broward entry the state records.

The modern flagship is the Lady Luck, a 324-foot steel tanker sunk off Pompano Beach on 23 July 2016. The state record gives her 2,557 tons, 70 feet of vertical relief and a depth of 130 feet; reports published at the sinking gave 126. A year later, on 19 August 2017, the 107-foot tug Okinawa followed in 70 feet, with 33 feet of relief and 305 tons.

Sculpture is a real category here, and it has coordinates. A Barefoot Mailman statue went in on 1 December 2016 in 38 feet, two steel statues joined the Lady Luck on 16 June 2020 in 94 feet, and 25 sculptures weighing 44.1 tons went off Hollywood on 1 November 2022 in 55 feet.

Not everything on the list is for divers. Limestone boulder piles, 969 boulders and 1,811 tons, went in on 13 June 2018 in 39 feet as mitigation, and Mount Deerfield took 500 tons in 65 feet in 2015 and 510 tons in 67 feet in 2016: replacement hardbottom, not attractions. The wreck diving list covers coasts built this way.

The tyre reef of the 1970s is still being taken back out

One Broward artificial reef went badly wrong, and the state has been undoing it for two decades. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection records that during the 1970s, between 1 million and 2 million tyres were put in the ocean off Broward County to create additional fish habitat. The state artificial reef list files the site as Osborne Tire Reef, dated 1977, in 64 feet of water.

They did not stay put. Tropical storms and hurricanes mobilised them, and the department records that their movement damaged nearby existing coral reefs. The scale of the removal has kept any single agency from finishing it.

The recovery has a paper trail with dates. The NOAA Marine Debris Program funded a reconnaissance project in August 2006, followed by a pilot to test diver retrieval, loading, transport and processing. Broward County filed project evaluation reports for 2007, 2008 and 2009, and the Department of the Army filed an after-action report for tyre removal at Fort Lauderdale in 2009.

It is still a live contract. Removal runs under agency contract SW348, renewed on 17 February 2023 and expiring 16 February 2028, and a second contract, SW349, executed on 2 September 2025 and running to 1 September 2032. The work sits under a Corps of Engineers permit issued on 18 August 2017 and reverified on 30 June 2022, and a state permit issued on 24 January 2020.

Lionfish were first recorded off Dania Beach, and Florida wants them taken

The lionfish invasion of the western Atlantic has a starting point, and it is in this county. The earliest United States record of the fish is from Florida in 1985, off Dania Beach. The arrival is attributed to the aquarium trade rather than to any storm.

What followed is measurable. Research summarised by the United States Geological Survey found recruitment of coral-reef fishes reduced by 79 per cent on reefs holding a single lionfish against reefs holding none, and native forage fish abundance down roughly 45 per cent.

Florida’s response is to remove the usual barriers. No recreational fishing licence is required when lionfish are taken with a pole spear, a Hawaiian sling, a handheld net or a spearing device designed and marketed exclusively for lionfish. Hook and line or a speargun still needs one.

The limits are as open as Florida gets. There is no minimum size, the daily bag is unlimited, the season is open year-round, and divers using rebreathers are permitted to spear and remove them. Where spearing is otherwise not allowed in state waters, the commission issues permits for lionfish removal specifically.

Coral disease arrived from the south, and the reef became an aquatic preserve in 2024

In autumn 2014 a previously undescribed disease was identified near Virginia Key in Miami, roughly 25 miles south of Fort Lauderdale. Stony coral tissue loss disease then moved north and south along the coast, reaching Martin County by 2017 and Dry Tortugas National Park by late spring 2021. Broward sits directly in the path it took north.

The state’s figures are blunt. Nearly 90 per cent of Florida’s Coral Reef has been affected, over 109,700 acres. More than 20 of roughly 45 Florida stony coral species are susceptible, and once a colony is infected it will likely die within weeks to months. The outbreak shows no seasonality and has not stopped.

Long-term monitoring across Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade put numbers on what that meant locally: across 22 sites, a loss of about 30 per cent of coral density and 60 per cent of live coral tissue, with disease prevalence peaking in 2016.

The legal answer arrived late but it is specific. The southeast Florida reef area was named the Kristin Jacobs Coral Reef Ecosystem Conservation Area under chapter 2021-107, Laws of Florida, after a Broward County politician. On 1 July 2024 it became the Kristin Jacobs Coral Aquatic Preserve, 240,782 acres running 105 miles from the St Lucie Inlet in Martin County to the northern boundary of Biscayne National Park.

Separately, the Florida Coral Reef Protection Act, section 403.93345 of the statutes, applies to the sovereign submerged lands holding coral reefs off Broward, Martin, Miami-Dade, Monroe and Palm Beach. It names the department the state’s lead trustee for coral reef resources and requires a grounded or anchored vessel to be removed within 72 hours, absent extenuating circumstances, in a way that avoids further damage.

Port Everglades is the pressure point. A sand bypass project beside the port began cutting a 10.8-acre borrow pit in October 2025, and dredging was suspended in August 2026 after the Corps of Engineers acknowledged it may have exceeded incidental take limits for threatened staghorn coral.

The Florida Current, the water temperature by month, and the storm window

The clarity on these reefs has a name. The Florida Current runs north past this coast and feeds the Gulf Stream, and NOAA has measured its volume transport since 1982 from a submarine telecommunications cable across the Florida Straits near 27°N, between West Palm Beach and Eight Mile Rock on Grand Bahama. The long-term mean is 32 Sverdrups, one Sverdrup being a million cubic metres per second.

For a diver that means two things. Most boat diving here is drift diving, the boat following bubbles rather than a line, and the shallow sites are often unusually clear for water this close to a city. Our drift diving guide covers the technique.

Temperature has one awkward detail. The only NOAA water temperature station in Broward County is 8722956, South Port Everglades, and its sensor sits inside the port channel, where readings run warmer than the reef. The nearest station on open Atlantic water is 8722670, Lake Worth Pier, about 37 miles up the coast.

Hourly readings there through 2024 and 2025 average 23.6°C in January, 23.8 in February, 24.2 in March, 25.4 in April, 27.5 in May, 28.7 in June, 29.8 in July, 30.4 in August, 30.3 in September, 27.7 in October, 26.6 in November and 25.3 in December. The coldest single hour in those two years was 20.2°C and the warmest 31.9°C.

That range decides neoprene. A 3 mm suit covers June through October comfortably; January to March is 5 mm weather, and a hood is worth carrying for a 100-foot dive in February. Our travel wetsuit guide covers the trade-offs.

The calendar has one hard boundary. The Atlantic hurricane season runs from 1 June to 30 November, a window covering about 97 per cent of Atlantic tropical storms and hurricanes, with the climatological peak around 10 September. Storms here do not only cancel boats; they move the bottom, which is exactly how the tyres got loose.

Florida licenses nothing here, and what the eight businesses on our list show

There is no state licence and no state register for a dive business in Florida. What the state regulates is the diving: the divers-down rule in Chapter 327, the spearing and harvest rules the wildlife commission sets, and Chapter 267 over the shipwreck preserve. None of those licenses a company, so no state list exists to be absent from. Which registers can be read sets out what each register returns, and on what date.

Our own list is short and uniform. The Fort Lauderdale operator list holds 8 businesses, read on 1 September 2026. All 8 are published by SSI in its register of affiliated centres. None appears in the IKO or VDWS registers, none is a Green Fins member, and all 8 publish a website in the register.

The towns the register files them under are the interesting part, because only one of them says Fort Lauderdale. Three are filed under Pompano Beach, two under Dania Beach, one under Sunrise, one under Lauderhill and one under Fort Lauderdale. The search term and the addresses barely overlap.

Two of those towns are not on the water at all. Sunrise and Lauderhill sit inland, west of the coastal strip, which tells you what kind of business is filed there: a shop and a school rather than a boat, meeting divers at a marina or sending them to one. The same filing habit runs on up the shore in the West Palm Beach list and down it in the Miami list.

One absence is worth naming. Green Fins, the scheme that sends a trained assessor to score an operator in person, has no member among these eight, so there is no third-party environmental assessment to read here. Hyperbaric cover sits outside all of it, which is what our dive insurance comparison is for.