On Tuesday 6/19/12, twelve volunteers from the New England Aquarium's Live Blue Ambassadors group made the journey from Boston to Beverly on a sunny, breezy morning. The group arrived around 8am at Lynch Park to help prepare the work stations and begin weaving eelgrass into burlap discs or "tortillas".
Volunteers worked throughout the morning at a great pace, finishing enough discs to get the divers in the water around 11am for their first planting dive off of Woodbury Point. Plants were transferred from the beach to the dive boat via DMF biologist Devon Winkler in a small Lund motor boat.
DMF Divers Wes, Tay, Mark and Jill completed two 1+ hour dives to plant 260 discs (2,600 plants) in 5m x 5m checkerboard plots at pre-determined intervals along two transect lines. Dive conditions were excellent, with great visibility and low current, but enough flushing to keep suspended sediment from clouding the work area.
With the help of our beach-side volunteers on both 6/12 and 6/19, DMF planted over 6,500 eelgrass shoots in Salem Sound. We look forward to monitoring the sites in the coming weeks and months to evaluate success, as well as performing additional plantings. If the Fort Pickering and Woodbury Point plots are both successful, we can expect a total of at least 0.5 acre of new eelgrass habitat to be restored to Salem Sound.
Our special thanks to:
Lucy Indge, Lindsay Beene and the Live Blue Ambassadors from New England Aquarium (Amanda Bartlett, Sabrina Tirachen, Ashley Hamel, Bree-Anna Nicoletti, Rose Fantozzi, Alannah O’Brien, Grace O’Brien, Catie Blair, Clayton Mears, Lucy Fitzgerald)
Barbara Warren, Susan Yochelson and volunteers from Salem Sound Coastwatch (Lynn Atkinson, Dawn Paul, Marilyn McCrory, Susan Purser, Ewa Newman, Albert Levesque, Peter Phippen, Geoffrey Walker, Connor Hilfinger, Vanessa Zendejas)
DMF staff Matt Ayer, Elaine Brewer, Devon Winkler and Chris Wood
Beverly Department of Parks and Recreation
Salem's Winter Island Park staff
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