Fish For Tomorrow

This artificial reef deployment that you see in this video has quite a journey before it finally comes to rest on the ocean floor.

The material is donated to us by inland precasters. The only cost that we ( Fish For Tomorrow ) are responsible for is the transportation of the material to the State Port in Wilmington. This is made possible by one fund raising event each year…” Flat Bottom Girls ” flounder tournament.

Last year we had 11 sponsors and 11 boats that fished the tournament. This year we hope to have more sponsors and more boats fishing.  Last year we raised enough money to get  loads from Old Castle Precast in Garner, NC. The city of Wilmington also donated material from storm drain replacement programs, and  Barnhill construction donanated material as well. The material is loaded onto  flat bed trailers, chained down, and delivered to the state port. At this point, Division of Marine Fisheries, (DMF)  unload and carefully stack and store the material until the deployment barge is available.( Most of the year, the deployment barge is used for recycled oyster shell deployment. ) Next, the material is carefully loaded onto the deployment barge and transported to the deployment site. A bouy is droped over on the “target numbers” and the captain of the barge maintains position while the (on deck) crawler/loader unloads the material  overboard to it’s final resting place.

We would like to take this opprotunity to reccognize DMF for all of the planning and hard work from the crew of the Artificial Reef Division. Jim Francisconi and his crew are seldomly thanked for all of thier hard work. Yes, there is ALOT of hard work that is unseen.

This year’s “Flat Bottom Girls” flounder tournament starts the process all over again. (this is not a “ladies only” tournament)  The name is a “spoof” on an old Queen song…”Fat Bottom Girls”  Why you might ask ???  (because, all large flounder are females. ) Male flounder only reach 13-15 inches in length.

This tournament will be held on Sat. Nov.1st (daylight to 5 p.m.)

Captain’s meeting will be Fri. Oct. 31st @  the Triangle Lounge (Wrightsville Ave. and Geenville Ave.)  5-7.

The (live) fish are donated to UNCW (aquaculture dept.) for brood stock.

Come out and support the sposors and donate some fish , and make deployments like this possible for next year.

Capt. Tim Barefoot
For more information please visit fishfortomorrow.org