Gray's Reef National Marine Sanctuary,
a beautiful underwater
haven teeming with life,
lies just off the coast of Georgia,
about 19 miles east of
Sapelo Island.
Gray's Reef is a jewel
in a sanctuary system comprised of 14
national marine sanctuaries and two
marine national monuments.
The National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration's
Office of National Marine Sanctuaries
serves as the trustee for this network
of underwater parks.
NOAA's mission of science, service,
and stewardship reaches
from the floor of the ocean to
the surface of the sun.
The sanctuary protects a vibrant
hard bottom area,
and the reef's rocky outcroppings, which
can rise six feet up from
the ocean floor,
provide homes for an
abundance of marine life.
Crabs, lobsters, soft corals, sponges,
sea stars, and other animals form a dense
carpet of living creatures, covering the
nooks and crannies of Gray's Reef
and giving it the name "live bottom."
The reef attracts more than
200 species of fish,
including black sea bass, snappers,
groupers, and mackerels.
Loggerhead sea turtles,
a threatened species, forage and rest
year round at Gray's Reef,
and the reef is within the critical
habitat and only known
winter calving ground
of the highly endangered
North Atlantic right whale.
The 22 square mile sanctuary is the only
protected natural reef
in the Atlantic Ocean between
Cape Hatteras, North Carolina
and Cape Canaveral, Florida.
It's a really unique environment. There's
nothing else like it.
As an undergraduate, I started working
summers here, running small boats and
driving the bus back and forth.
Sam Gray was the
taxonomist here, collecting
samples and identifying them.
He was very diligent and
had a huge collection in the attic
over at the lab there.
Well, Sam Gray was at the marine biology
laboratory at Woods Hole,
and he was there for about 50 years and
he was a collector,
he was a taxonomist, and scientist,
and actually he was a key person and
that institution couldn't have operated
and had the reputation it did
without Sam Gray. Well when he retired,
Dr. George Lauff, who was the director
here, he asked Sam Gray to come
down here permanently,
which he did in the '60's,
early '61 or so.
Everybody was so honored to have him here.
Anybody that was ever
here during that period,
whenever you say Sapelo,
they think of Sam Gray.
There's a group in Washington called
the Board of Geographic Names that
officially names
features, physiographic features
both on land and offshore.
They require pretty stringent
justification for naming a feature.
Dr. Henry and I
discussed it at length, we thought that,
you know rather than a generic
name for a live bottom area,
that it should be
given the proper designation
of a proper name and
Sam Gray was the obvious choice. I mean
he knew about it before
anybody else did, and collected on it for
years and years. We started referring to
it as Gray's Reef
from the time we discussed it.
Easier to say than Sapelo Live Bottom.
[Laughs]
Early in my career, we learned about the
Sapelo Live Bottom and so a number of us
biologists that were stationed in
Brunswick
decided to go out there and dive. And so
my first dives on the coast of Georgia
were at the Sapelo Live Bottom.
Not long after that, we learned about
Jesse Hunt's work,
and learned about the proposal by Jesse
Hunt and Dr. Jim Henry
to rename it after Milton Gray, and call
it Gray's Reef.
And so because of that, we just adopted
Gray's Reef as the name
for the Sapelo Live Bottom.
We had proposed the name,
filled out the paperwork.
They take a while to review
and I think it was '75 or '76,
the Georgia Department of Natural
Resources in Brunswick
got behind it and showed their support
for it and then it became
Gray's Reef officially. Amongst the
office staff, the biologists in our
office in Brunswick,
we said, you know there's a national
marine sanctuary program
and Gray's Reef would be an excellent example
of a live bottom area off the south Atlantic
to be representative and become a
national marine sanctuary.
So I sat down and got the nomination
form and wrote the nomination
for Gray's Reef to become a
national marine sanctuary, and thanks to
people like Jane Yarn who were personal friends
of President Jimmy Carter, she was able
to convince Jimmy Carter to sign the
bill that designated Gray's Reef as a
national marine sanctuary.
U.S. President Jimmy Carter approved the
designation of Gray's Reef
National Marine Sanctuary on January 16, 1981.
It was a great experience. I had
worked up at the headquarters office in
Washington D.C. for
12 years. The opportunity came up
to work at a field site
and I just thought that would be the
best thing possible.
And I had been working with folks down
here at Sapelo and
and Gray's Reef that were doing some
contract work, so I knew
what an amazing place this is.
It was a great
opportunity to build a network,
a community, folks that wanted to
work on Gray's Reef and be involved in
the sanctuary.
It is one of the largest near shore live bottom
reefs in the southeast.
You'll find other similar formations
further offshore
in much deeper water, but this is an area
that's accessible by a lot of people and in
diving depths as well. 60 to 70 feet.
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We need to protect representative parts
of the marine environment.
That's what the marine sanctuary program does.
All the marine sanctuaries around the
country are all unique
in their own way and so it's, you know, I
think it's really neat to have
those and to have people recognize those.
It just highlights how important these
areas are to, to the nation.
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