Dania Beach Erojacks | Project Baseline Gulfstream Chapter

Lat 26 06.2903 Lon 80 10.8149 – 26°3’46″N 80°6’28″W

A few hundred yards North of Dania pier and almost two miles south of the Port Everglades Inlet hundreds of concrete Erojacks are placed as an artificial reef in very shallow water. They are stacked and run from about 100 yards offshore to the first reef line. This makes a great snorkeling or diving location as the depths run from 20ft in the sand to 16ft to 14ft on top of the Erojacks as you go East.The structures run east and west terminating into a shallow (12ft) reef that runs north and south.This spot is a good snorkel only spot.

This is a huge rocky area with thousands of holes, blocks and ledges and it starts very close to shore so it’s easy for beginners and non-divers who wish to participate in Project Baseline Gulfstream.

The concrete Erojacks create a home for a multitude of sea life and an advanced life ycle has developed within the long pile.You will find many invertebrates corals and sponges along with many fish that protect themselves from the ocean currents in the nooks and crannies. Shellfish, hydroids, barnacles, corals and sponges are prevalent. Fish feed on them and hide in the crevices. There are quite a lot of small fish and inverts that live inside the reef, large Tarpon there, a variety of small and school fish, and several poached lobster shells, as well. Angel fish, parrot fish, nurse shark, lobster are permanent residents and snook, tarpon and turtles are occasionally seen.While this is an excellent shallow beginners’ reef with interesting marine life and low currents, visibility is often only fair.

The attraction is the EroJacks, jacks like the child’s toy but 4 feet tall and made of concrete. The Erojacks were put in to control beach erosion and have become a popular artificial reef dive site. There are hundreds of jacks piled in a long groin/jetty running perpendicular to shore. The jacks run a few hundred feet our from shore. Offshore, the reef terminates at the first natural reef line (parallel to shore). The reefs are less than 20 feet deep.

The Dania Beach Erojacks make for a great Project Baseline Gulfstream monitoring site due to its ease of
access and shallow depth. It attracts a lot of divers and we hope that a lot of them will help us in monitoring the site, supplying their dive reports, temperature readings, visibility measure and not least images and videos

Here’s a number of images Global Underwater Explorer diver Mikkel Pitzner took for Project Baseline
Gulfstream. All these images were from the August 2010.

Again Project Baseline Gulfstream invites and encourages all divers to participate in monitoring this site on an ongoing basis, by supplying information of temperature, visibility, dive reports, fish counts and importantly images and videos. Do not worry if you only have a few of these items, they are still useable for our collection purposes.

By collecting material and making it available here on this website for all over time, we are hopeful that
it will help us in generating clear data and visuals that can demonstrate any evolution of the state of health of the water, marine life etc. of this location.

Please contact us if you have any questions as to how to get started.