-: Good evening.
We're pleased to have you join us
for our annual Seaside Chats Speaker Series
about ocean topics associated
with Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary
and the Gulf of Mexico.
We're also part
of the National Marine Sanctuary Webinar Series
and the NOAA Science Seminar Series.
During the presentation,
all attendees will be in listen-only mode.
You're welcome to type questions for the presenter
into the question box at the bottom of the control panel
on the right hand side of your screen.
You may also let us know about any technical issues
you may be experiencing
and we will monitor both for incoming questions
and technical issues,
then respond to them as soon as we can.
We are recording this session
and we'll post the recording
to the National Marine Sanctuaries
and Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary websites
at a later date
and we will notify registered participants via email
when those recordings are available.
And for those of you who are interested,
we have a document of links
to additional resources on today's topic
in the handout pane of the control panel.
Simply click on this item to download it.
My name is Kelly Drinnen
and I'm the Education Outreach Specialist
for Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary.
I'll be facilitating today's webinar from Dickinson, Texas.
Also with me today is Leslie Whaylen Clift,
our Constituency Affairs Coordinator,
and she'll be helping me
with the backend administration of this webinar.
In 1972, the United States ushered in a new era
of ocean conservation
by creating the National Marine Sanctuary System.
Since then, we've grown into a nationwide network
of 15 national marine sanctuaries
and two marine national monuments
that conserve more than 620,000 square miles
of spectacular ocean and Great Lakes waters,
an area nearly the size of Alaska.
These marine protected areas
are kind of like national parks,
they're just underwater.
The National Marine Sanctuary Act gives NOAA the authority
to designate special areas of the marine environment
as National Marine Sanctuaries.
It also mandates
that the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries
conduct research, monitoring,
resource protection, education, outreach and management
of America's underwater treasures
to preserve them for future generations.
In addition to being places for recreation and research,
National Marine Sanctuaries are also living classrooms
where people can see, touch and learn
about the nation's great lakes and ocean treasures.
This webinar series is just one of part
of that national education and outreach effort.
The Seaside Chat Series is hosted
by Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary,
the only national marine sanctuary in the Gulf of Mexico.
This sanctuary consists of 17 banks
or small underwater mountains that are home
to some of the healthiest coral reefs in the world,
amazing algal sponge communities
and deep reef habitats
featuring an abundance of black coral and gorgonians.
We invite you to learn more about us
by visiting the sanctuary website
at flowergarden.noaa.gov.
Today's presentation focuses on the early days
of Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary.
The modern history of the Flower Garden Banks
is a series of transitions,
the mystery era that lasted for nearly 30 years,
the discovery era in the 1960s,
the enlightenment era in the 1970s and early 1980s,
then the sanctuary era.
Steve Gittings was fortunate to be part of the last two,
working on the bank starting in 1980,
then being selected as the first sanctuary manager in 1992.
His mentor, Tom Bright, called it a plum job.
According to Steve, it was even better.
This evening, we'll let Steve take us back to that time
and tell stories about the best job he will ever have.
Dr. Steve Gittings is Chief Scientist
for NOAA's National Marine Sanctuary System.
Before that, he was manager
of Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary.
Dr. Gittings has worked his entire career
in conservation science,
characterizing and monitoring marine ecosystems,
assessing damage and recovery
following ship groundings and oil spills,
and applying science to management.
2023 marks his 50th year as a diver.
He has worked for over 40 years as a scientific diver
doing saturation missions on the Aquarius habitat,
operating ROVs
and working as an observer and pilot on submersibles.
Recently, he's been developing traps
designed to catch lionfish in waters beyond scuba depth.
If successful, the traps could create new opportunities
for fishermen to make money while doing conservation.
Welcome, Steve.
-: Thanks, Kelly.
Can you hear and see me okay?
-: I can see you just fine.
Let's make sure we can hand over the presentation here.
-: A lot of that bio stuff I haven't done for a while,
but it stays in the bio, thankfully.
-: (laughs) All right.
So just share your screen
and we should be good to go.
-: How's that?
-: Looks good.
-: Okay, we're good then?
-: Yes, we are.
-: Thanks for getting the technical stuff
worked out for me, Kelly.
-: You're welcome.
-: Yeah, I thought I'd better start
with the self-explanatory slide
and a talk title that really makes it simple for me,
but I changed it a little bit.
I think the Flower Gardens was the best job I'll ever have.
I'm not sure about that,
but I'll be presumptuous there and say so.
But this is not really a talk about a lot of science,
more the story of what I was fortunate enough to experience
and the history of the protection of the Flower Gardens
during the time that I spent down there.
I guess in a sense though,
it all started a bit before that
when I was a big "Flipper" fan,
while everyone else was a Jacques Cousteau in 1960s.
This came out I think 1964, the "Flipper" Show.
And I didn't wanna work with dolphins,
that's not what got me into this field,
and I didn't really wanna be the two kids,
Bud and Sandy there.
But I wanted to be the dad, Porter Ricks.
I wanted to be the guy who got in his boat every day
off his dock and went to work in his boat.
That's what I always wanted.
Okay, all right.
Try to advance some slides here,
there we go.
Am I advancing now?
Yeah. -: Yeah.
-: So my boating career, as it were,
started in 1970s on Lake Erie.
I grew up in Dunkirk, New York,
on the western side of New York state,
right on Lake Erie.
My first sailing race, I won the Tin Can Regatta
in the Dunkirk Harbor Junior Sailing Regatta back then
and it was a great time.
These were all my friends at the time
and all my fellow sailors
and you can see how excited we were (laughs)
to win or to be in that regatta.
And every once in a while,
I still have that can, I have it right here,
the Tin Can Regatta that I won back in Dunkirk
and even as now that I'm looking at it,
one of my little lifesaving things on it.
But I still have that can
and I pull it out every now and then
and reminisce about the good old days in Dunkirk, New York,
in the smoke of the Niagara Mohawk Power Plant,
looking at the pristine waters of 1970s Lake Erie.
Hmm.
And I figured if I was gonna be in boats,
I needed to learn to swim.
So I couldn't get enough of swimming courses
and water safety courses and to prove I could swim.
And I became a swimmer in high school and college
and in a little town like Dunkirk, New York,
you could be a big fish in a small town like that.
So I loved every minute of the swimming that I did there.
But it prepared me for this career
that I'm in now to some extent.
But honestly, the pivotal moment
was probably getting my YMCA Diving Certification in 1973.
And like Kelly said, that was 50 years ago this year.
So I'm celebrating this year.
In fact, Saturday, I'm heading down to the Cayman Islands
to do a little about three weeks of celebrating with diving.
But this is my old YMCA card.
I found it in a drawer one day
about a few couple years ago maybe
and it was all ratty.
And it must have been I carried around in a wallet
for years, it looks like,
but it's falling apart.
You can't even see Jim Wolfgang's name on it anymore,
he was the instructor.
And this card spelled my name wrong on the front
and you can hardly read the back.
There's not much left of it on there,
but presumably I'm a certified diver.
I'm not a hundred percent sure of that,
but if they spell your name wrong, who knows?
But four years after that,
I was fortunate enough to be off at college,
Westminster College in Pennsylvania,
and Dr. Clarence Harms was my first real mentor
in this field.
I didn't even realize, well, I said at the time,
but I signed up for a January course in the tropics.
He took us to St. Croix, St. Thomas,
St. John, Puerto Rico
for a tropical ecology class.
And Clarence is there in that pink shirt,
a wonderful, wonderful man.
I couldn't get enough.
Five minutes after getting off that plane
and getting on a ferry to St. John
and the feeling, that warm water on my face,
I knew what I wanted to do the rest of my life.
I really did, that was my moment,
but he made it just right.
We learned so much that month.
When I went back to Westminster,
I couldn't get enough of any water course that was given
or invertebrate biology or anything like that
that involved water.
So what a great experience that was
and a real life changer for me.
And I went off to graduate school
about three years after that
to Texas A&M University
and it was my first trip to Texas as well,
just like the tropics had been my first trip to the tropics.
And I remember being surprised
when I crossed the Texas border
and saw that there was grass in Texas.
I thought it was the rocks that I saw on the western shows,
but wasn't gonna be that at all.
But I will say at the time,
I had certainly never heard of Flower Garden Banks.
And one thing you do when you go to graduate school
is you try to find the right fit with the right professor.
And I truly hit a gold mine when I met Tom Bright
and we hit it off.
He was a big field guy,
loved being in the field doing field work.
And we hit it off immediately
and he offered me to become a graduate student
under his leadership
and I did that instantly.
And he's been a mentor ever since to me, honestly.
And he and I published 40 years ago our first paper, 1983,
and we just published another paper last month.
So 40 years between publications
and there were some in between there as well.
But I'm really proud to be able to say that,
that Tom and I have published together
over that period of time.
Tom's loved his motto,
and I used to question him about,
should I go on this cruise or should I not?
Because I've got all these classes
I have to test and whatever.
He said field work first, that was his motto,
and I still use that today with people I mentor.
But my time at the Flower Gardens was only a small portion
of the 100 plus years of history out there.
It was about 18 years during 1980 to '97 or '98.
And so, this talk I'm talking about or I'm giving today
is really a chronology of my time in that longer period.
But it was a critical period for the Flower Gardens
because it spent most of the time
that ran between the nomination
of the Flower Gardens as a marine sanctuary
and ultimately it becoming a marine sanctuary.
So I was fortunate to be there at a pretty critical time
in the life of the sanctuary.
And as Kelly pointed out,
the history of the banks went from this period
of no real recorded memory,
but fishing back in the early 1900s
to an era of geological research in the '30s, '40s, '50s,
as oil was going farther and farther offshore.
And then an era of what we call discovery,
when divers first went to the Flower Gardens
and showed that they were coral reefs,
that was the 1960s.
And then through the 1970s into the 1980s,
Tom Bright and his large team of graduate students
were conducting characterization work
all over the Northwestern Gulf on all the banks,
including the Flower Gardens.
So I call that the period of enlightenment
when we learned so much about it back then
and it finally became a sanctuary in 1992.
So I'm gonna talk about the area in yellow
there in the middle that says 18 great years.
That's what it was for me.
But on the first trip I ever made to the Flower Gardens
was with Tom and his team
and it was a submersible cruise
to characterize a place
called East Flower Garden Brine Seep
and I'll talk about that in a minute.
But Tom surprised the heck out of me one morning
when he asked me if I wanted to take
one of his subdives to the bottom
instead of him going down with Billy Green,
who was the pilot.
And before he came to his senses, I said, "Absolutely."
And I jumped up there and said, "Okay, what do I do?"
And he gave me instructions
on how to characterize the brine seep
and what I was looking for.
And so before you know it,
I was on my way to the bottom in the submersible
called the DIAPHUS at Texas A&M.
because of the generosity of Tom.
And my mission was to characterize this place,
which was a brine seep,
a pool of high salinity water, zero oxygen,
full of hydrogen sulfide,
about 10 inches deep or so at its deepest,
that overflowed out of that pool down through a canyon.
And because the water was so noxious and toxic
that nothing lived right inside the water,
but a lot of things lived all around it
because of the organic enrichment by a bunch of bacteria
that swarmed around the brine.
So my job was to characterize the fauna around the bank
and my job on this particular mission
was to collect rocks
that would become part of my master's thesis.
I was gonna look at the invertebrates
living inside the rocks.
So I collected all the samples I needed
for my master's on one dive at the Flower Garden Banks
thanks to Tom's generosity
in letting me have that single dive.
And at the time, I was, of course, in Tom's lab
in Oceanography Building at Texas A&M
and I heard him talk a lot
about this national marine sanctuary status
for the Flower Garden Banks,
which I didn't have a clue what that meant.
But our program started in 1972
and the Flower Gardens was nominated
in about '74 or so for the first time.
I arrived six years later
after it hadn't really moved all that far
through the process.
It was a slow process
and the program was very young at the time.
But in about 1980,
Tom was talking about how the Flower Gardens
was part of what they call a list of recommended areas.
But by the time I was done with my master's
two years later, '82,
it had been removed from that list
because of disagreements
about the amounts of protection that it needed
and some claiming and claiming appropriately
that the Minerals Management Service,
I think it might have been still called BLM,
I mean the Bureau of Land Management back then,
that particular part of it, but who knows?
But they had protections in place
to keep oil and gas activities
from impinging too much on the banks
and causing corals to be killed in any way.
So there were adequate protections through MMS.
And there was also a draft coral fishery management plan
for the Gulf of Mexico that was being developed
that was supposed to prohibit anchoring
at the Flower Gardens.
And that would've protected the place
from probably the biggest threat that it had at the time,
anchoring by large vessels on these banks
and that tore up the corals.
So they were removed in 1982
from that list of recommended areas
and the idea for sanctuary status was almost dead,
according to people at NOAA in 1982,
which was when I was finishing my masters.
And so by that time, I had become the brine guy,
the guy that knew about brine, salt, salt water.
And there was a project going on
in the Northern Gulf of Mexico
called the Strategic Petroleum Reserve Project.
And the essence of that is they pumped water
down into salt domes below land,
dissolve out large caverns
and put oil in these caverns as storage tanks
that we could get at whenever we needed it
for strategic purposes in the United States.
And you can still hear about the Strategic Petroleum Reserve
on the news fairly often
if you listen close enough to stories about gasoline prices.
But my job was to look at the effects
of the offshore discharge of the brine
that was produced when they dissolved the salt domes away.
And they sent it off through a pipe offshore
and shoot it up through a bunch of diffusers
and it mixes with the overlying seawater
and that's depicted with the red circle on this graph.
My job was to go out there
and look at the effects of that brine
on the hard and soft bottom invertebrates
that were offshore, Louisiana, where they dumped that brine.
And I started that in 1982.
So for about two years,
this is the visibility I got in all my diving off Louisiana
and it was only about 15 feet of water,
but this is exactly what it looked like
in the middle of the day.
So that's not a real picture,
it's just a color I found that reminded me of it
and it's close enough.
But monthly dives we had to make
and constantly going down to Cameron, Louisiana,
getting on boats and diving.
Meanwhile though, Tom was asked to chair a committee
to generate what NOAA was calling a site evaluation list,
was this next generation of candidate sites
for sanctuary status.
And Tom being chairman of the group
made sure the Flower Gardens was back on that list
and I'm sure a lot of other people did too.
But he was doing that work through 1982.
And then a year later,
a tug called the NICK CANDIES,
this shown here,
and it was towing about a 200-foot barge
anchored up at the East Flower Garden Bank.
Continental Shelf Associates was out there
doing monitoring at the time.
I assume it was probably Rusty Putt, Steve Viada,
who had been students of Tom's.
Dave Gettleson perhaps out there
doing monitoring of the coral reef
on behalf of or for an oil company
that was developing in the area
and were required to do so.
So those guys were doing work when this tug anchored up
and they took video of the incident
and the damage it caused.
So a month later, Tom Bright was at a meeting
in New Orleans with the Minerals Management Service
called the Information Transfer Meeting,
it was an annual meeting they had,
and he showed the video of this damage.
And a staffer for Congressman Solomon Ortiz
was in attendance
and was very interested in what had happened
and took that information back to Congress,
which was a very fortuitous happening
because of what it eventually led to.
But it raised the awareness about the threat
of anchoring at the Flower Gardens
because it had failed to be prohibited in the previous year.
But at the same time,
there was a rise in recreational diving
going on in the banks in the mid 1980s,
early to mid '80s.
Prominent among the group was Rinn Boats and Gary Rinn,
who was captain of the FLING at the time.
The boat looked a little different than this.
This is a later version of the FLING
after they added a sun deck to it.
But in the mid '80s,
it was operating regularly at the Flower Gardens.
And he and his parents ran that operation.
And these are his parents, Roland and Alvina Rinn,
and interesting people,
really wonderful salt of the earth folks.
They just passed away in 2021, like two years ago,
a day apart at 100 years old
and after 78 years of marriage.
So just interesting,
really proud to have known them.
But back in that time, 1983 we're talking about,
and around there,
the Fishery Management Plan came out.
I think it was 1984, it came out.
The Fishery Management Plan came out
without the anchoring prohibition
and in response, the Minerals Management Service at least
put out a notice to mariners at the time
to at least ask the oil industry vessels not to anchor up
and not become part of that problem.
So that was very helpful,
but it didn't ban anchoring by other vessels.
And at that time also, Solomon Ortiz and John Breaux
who was a congressman from Louisiana,
supported the nomination of the Flower Garden BankS.
So it had a little bit more momentum coming back to it.
And NOAA approved the addition of the Flower Garden Banks
as an active candidate to its Site Evaluation List.
So you could see it gaining that momentum back
that it had lost in the early '80s.
Well, about the same month
that this was happening,
a ship ran aground in the Florida Keys called WELLWOOD
and it was on Molasses Reef
and it caused extensive damage.
Tom was contracted by the sanctuary's office at NOAA
to do the damage assessment
and the recovery study using quantifiable methods
that NOAA didn't have in place at the time,
photographic methods we had used at the Flower Gardens,
to assess the damage and recovery for three years.
So that work started up,
we started going down there every month
and staying at Sunset Cove Motel for a couple years.
And the next year in 1985,
he became the Sea Grant Director at Texas A&M.
And so, he couldn't continue to do the fieldwork himself
and they eventually asked me to take over the field work.
George Dennis was doing the fish work,
I was doing the benthic characterization,
the corals, et cetera, and algae.
And we also had damage assessment
and a recovery study to do for the NICK CANDIES,
that tug that had anchored at the Flower Gardens.
So we're in the midst of these two big studies
and Tom asked me to take over those things
and I agreed as long as he paid me full-time
and double what a graduate student got.
So I was making $900 a month or something at the time,
double what most graduate students made.
Pretty good money for me.
But in 1986 also,
there was a public scoping meeting
in Galveston about the Flower Gardens
and NOAA committed to preparing
the draft Environmental Impact Statement
to get the Flower Gardens even closer
to sanctuary designation.
So that was a pivotal time for me
because it transitioned me away from all that muddy water
back into the coral reef environment,
which I was very thankful to do.
A couple years went by,
the sanctuary hadn't progressed all that farther
than NOAA was working on the draft EIS
and I was contracted by...
Or, well, Texas A&M was,
I was the Principal Investigator
for the Flower Gardens Long-Term Monitoring Program,
which started in 1998.
And Greg Boland was pivotal
in helping get that started
and running it for years with me.
And a lot of folks worked on that project.
You can see a couple of them here, Anne and David Bull,
and I think that might be Jim Kendall in the background
in the black wetsuit.
Anne and Jim worked for MMS at the time
and would come out as helpers and inspectors on the project.
But a lot of other folks did too.
But sanctuary status was pretty well expected in 1989 or so,
although it never did progress quite that fast,
but it was anticipated to happen.
When 1999 finally rolled around and it didn't happen,
some frustration started to creep in
among the dive community
because there was this anchoring activity
going on out there,
there were no places to tie boats up,
so you didn't have to drop anchor.
And Gary Rinn started a group
called the the Gulf Reef Environmental Action Team, GREAT,
along with several of us others.
And we all sat on the board
and the idea was to generate money
so we could install our own mooring buoys
before it ever became a sanctuary
so that we could help solve this anchoring problem.
And that's exactly what happened a year later.
We were able to raise money
and NOAA sent Billy Causey and John Halas out to help.
They worked for the sanctuary program already,
came and helped us install the mooring buoys.
They had the expertise to do it
and we had a bunch of muscle.
So they came out in 1990.
We put in these buoys,
I mean the anchor bolts and then the buoys.
And you can see how we drilled side-by-side holes
and put the U-bolts in, cemented them in place,
and then tied the buoys to them.
And to this day, we use this same technology.
A lot of the U-bolts have worn out
and have had to been replaced,
but they lasted a good long time.
And that same year, 1990,
the Mega Borg exploded off the Texas coast
and that was an important event in my life
that I wouldn't really understand
until a bit later how important it was.
But I was on a ship
with the Geochemical Environmental Research Group
in the vicinity of this when it happened.
So we stayed out there
and did work on water quality studies
and I was hired by them to do some work
on bioremediation testing
and then was able to at least witness
dispersant use for the first time in my life
and how these spills are dealt with.
So that was a good experience for me
that would come back and help me later on.
And also, that vessel had been lightering (indistinct).
Oops, sorry about that.
It looks like I messed up on...
Anyway, so here's some dispersant addition
occurring right on that spill.
So it was the first time I'd been able to see this happen
and I learned a little bit about dispersants,
a little bit about bioremediation,
a little bit about lightering
because the ship had been offloading oil
to another ship when it exploded.
So I learned a little bit about what lightering was
and how prominent an activity that was
in the Gulf of Mexico.
And that would come back to help me
manage the Flower Gardens,
eventually work on the Deepwater Horizon spill later on,
much later on.
Also happening in that busy time
was Sylvia Earle was the Chief Scientist of NOAA
and she commissioned a new map for the Flower Garden Banks.
We hadn't had a really high quality map made for the banks,
but with the new side,
I mean, multi-beam mapping technology that was available,
Sylvia wanted that done at Flower Gardens
and it was done pretty quickly in that year, 1990.
And then, she brought a ship out, the MOUNT MITCHELL,
and wanted to go diving on these banks
and asked Tom and me to come with her
and show her around the Flower Gardens
since we were among the experts about the site.
So we did that.
I don't think she quite realized at the time
that they weren't gonna let us dive
because we weren't NOAA divers,
we worked for Texas A&M.
But we were allowed to snorkel and free dive.
And I was still Tom's lackey at the time,
so guess who got to show Sylvia and her dive team around
by free diving with them while they were on scuba?
That was a treat.
And I got through it,
it was a lot of fun.
I got to know Sylvia
and I've worked with her quite a few times since then.
Really enjoyed the times I've spent working with her.
Amazing person.
So yeah,
last but not least,
1990 finished with a bit of a bang.
So Jennifer Lang and some other sport divers
who were on the FLING
called one day and said they were out the night
or a couple nights before
and had seen what they called smoking corals.
And they said, "What was that all about?"
So I didn't know for sure, but I said,
"Sounds like maybe they were spawning."
And we had never seen spawning of corals
at the Flower Gardens.
And frankly, it hadn't been seen
in the lab or on the Caribbean,
but in the field, mass spawning of any type
really had never been observed among the corals,
even though it was known from the Western Pacific.
But that might have been what they were seeing.
So a year later, we timed a cruise to go out
at the exact same time they did
relative to the moon phase
because that's what seemed to trigger spawning.
And we went in and on the same day
past the full moon in August
at the same time, nine o'clock at night,
and witnessed exactly the same event that they saw and more
because we had more people looking
for a longer period of time.
And we were blown away by the mass spawning
of multiple species of corals in 1991
for the first time observed in the Atlantic
and published on it.
And for years after that,
well, first of all, the event itself
was just spectacular to watch.
All these bundles, little BB-sized bundles
would come out of these corals
in waves across the reef and just fill the water column
sometimes to the point of zero visibility.
And just we started calling an underwater snowstorm,
an upside down underwater snowstorm.
It's exactly what it seemed to be.
And it was a energetic event among it.
We were all screaming underwater and wonderful time.
And for years after that,
we did various kinds of experiments on the corals
to see if we could get them to self-fertilize
or cross-fertilize or settle on plates
or could we raise them in the lab
and then transplant them back out to the field
to use them for transplantation or for restoration?
And it turned out we could do most of those things.
It was quite easy to work with these corals
and it's a technology that still could easily be developed,
I think, into a way to promote restoration
of reefs in some places
and probably should be looked at pretty closely.
In 1991, the year after this,
well, the same year we went out
and observed the coral spawning
Texaco proposed to put a pipeline that was gonna lay
between the East and West Flower Garden Banks.
The line that goes between the banks on this image
is not the proposed pipeline.
That's just a line pointing to something,
but it's something like the Texaco pipeline would have done.
And it became a PR nightmare when it got into the media
that they were gonna cut through the banks.
That's the quote that was used in the paper,
"cut through the banks" to put this pipeline.
Nightmare for Texaco
and they eventually did the right thing.
They moved the pipeline,
rerouted it around the outside of the banks
to where it posed less of a threat
and it cost them a lot of money.
And it was done with for the time.
They took their licks, paid the money
and then got past it.
But they did the right thing.
Later on, it was determined that between those two banks,
there is enough unstable bottom
that it could actually have been a threat
to the pipeline itself
had it been laid in the original position,
but not quite as much as the press made it sound.
So at the end of 1991,
NOAA finished up the Environmental Impact Statement
for the designation of the sanctuary
and it was imminent.
It was definitely gonna happen right near the...
And so, they interviewed for their Sanctuary Manager job.
I applied, I always wanted to have a job like that
ever since 1964, as you can remember.
And I literally had an envelope
that I wrote down all these little ideas
of things I would do if I was managing that sanctuary.
It was a wide open book.
Like Kelly said, Tom called it, "a plum of a job"
because he knew that I'd be able to do
almost anything I want
to develop the ideas that we had for that sanctuary.
And having him around and a bunch of other advisors
gave me tons of ideas
and I had written those on an envelope,
and interviewed with that envelope in front of me
and got the job.
So that was a wonderful experience.
Of course, my first real permanent job started in 1992,
right at the beginning when it was announced
at a big dive show in Houston
that the sanctuary was designated, done, signed,
and introduced me.
And I was at the dive show with my new big display
that the Sea Grant had helped me build.
Tom was director of Sea Grant, as I said before,
and having him there
got all kinds of things done for the sanctuary.
It was really helpful to have him and his generosity there.
But one of the most interesting things
that happened to me at that show was after all the ceremony,
I was at my little booth
probably in shorts and a t-shirt
and three guys in fancy suits
were walking down the aisle towards me.
And it turned out all three of them
worked for one company or another in the oil industry,
one for Texaco Pipeline,
and they wanted to take me out for dinner.
And I thought, oh, this is getting weird already.
One day, my first day on the job
and I talked to my superiors
and they said, "Go with them.
See what they have to say and get to know them
because you're gonna be working with these kind of people."
And I said, "Okay, thank you."
So I went to dinner with them
and their message to me was,
if anything like this pipeline thing comes up again,
any incident like that that could be construed wrongly
or taken the wrong way,
don't go to the press, call us.
Here's our phone numbers,
here's the president's phone number,
here's the president of the company,
that president and so forth."
And they were honest about that.
Give them a call rather than go to the press
and maybe we can get things worked out and avoid problems.
And that's the way they wanted to operate,
that's the way I like to operate.
So I took it as principle
and that's the way I operated for years with them
and other people that became partners of the sanctuary,
whether they were in NOAA or MMS or oil or the Coast Guard,
academic organizations, dive clubs, everybody.
I put together a working group
that was kind of like a Sanctuary Advisory Council nowadays.
We didn't have those back then,
but I had a advisory group of people
representing different types of organizations
that advised me as sanctuary manager
and gave me advice on things to do.
So, that was a good lesson learned
when those folks invited me out to dinner.
I was glad I did that
and thankful that NOAA let me do it.
Well, I had a small budget, $29,000,
and a lot of leash.
NOAA gave me a lot of leash.
I could be the requesting official
and the authorizing official,
the approving official for all my purchases.
So I could have gotten away with murder.
Well, $29,000 worth of murder, that was my budget.
But I was too dumb, so I played it straight.
But they gave me a lot of leash
and I really appreciated the flexibility and so forth
and my job and how I handled it that NOAA gave me.
The first thing I did was put together
a mooring buoy maintenance contract
so that we would always have mooring buoys in place
for boats to tie up to at the Flower Gardens
since anchoring was still our priority concern out there,
along with a bunch of other things
that didn't cost nearly as much money
as maintaining those buoys.
But that was my priority at the time.
And Tom had interns working for him
that he allowed to serve as research coordinators
for the Flower Gardens.
And Derek Hagman was the first.
Ken Deslarzes came after Derek as research coordinator.
So they were my first, quote unquote, employees
for the sanctuary program.
And then I started contracting for them later,
but at first, it was Tom's, again, generosity
that allowed me to have
any kind of staff support at all here.
And those were my first two folks
that worked for the sanctuary, besides myself.
Quenton Dokken, in the blue jacket here,
worked for the Texas State Aquarium
and then the Gulf of Mexico Foundation later on.
He set up something called the Flower Gardens Fund
inside that nonprofit
so that there would be a place for people to put donations
or for us to put money from sales of products.
It'd give us spending money basically
for things that were too difficult to purchase
through federal acquisitions
and allow him and others to help
get money flowing through the system
to support the sanctuary
without it having to go through the federal system,
which at the time was very cumbersome to do.
So, Quenton was very helpful in that regard.
One of the nice things we did each year
was something called Night On the Flower Gardens
and it was a chance for us to recognize people
for the volunteer support that they gave us
and the effort that they put in
to help manage that sanctuary,
to help support the sanctuary.
You can see Jesse Cancelmo here.
He did a lot of photography for the sanctuary.
Gene Boyer, a ton of field work.
Of course, Gary Rinn donated a lot of boat time
over the years
and allowed us, graduate students,
to come out and do their studies
if he had any space available.
So a lot of that was donated time.
It would've cost a lot of money otherwise.
So we did that every year and we had cocktail parties
and some kind of events of some sort or another.
Usually a special speaker would come in.
It was a great event, I really enjoyed that.
In 1994, about two years after I started,
I was able to finally hire my first federal employee,
Shelley DuPuy, who was the Education Coordinator.
And Shelley stayed there for many years
and retired from the Flower Gardens Sanctuary
just a couple years ago.
And she was a great person to have around,
real level-headed and did so much good hard work for us
on the education front.
She really took it to a new level.
And that same year, Christy Pattengill showed up,
later, Christy Semmens.
Christy Pattengill wanted to do fish work
at the Flower Gardens
and we didn't have anybody
doing active fish survey work at the time.
And she brought a new survey method
from the Reef Environmental Education Foundation
to the banks and actually got me interested in fish.
I had no interest at the time in fish until she was there
and taught me how to identify the fish.
And then I started realizing
just how important they were ecologically.
So Christy did her PhD at A&M.
Bryce Semmens came along with her.
They were later married
and then Bryce went off to graduate school
at Santa Barbara and then the University of Washington
and now he's a full professor at Scripps,
so they've really soared in their careers.
Christy's still the chief scientist
for Reef Environmental Education Foundation,
is also a co-executive director for that organization.
Emma Hickerson comes along as a graduate student
wanting to study turtles
and we started catching and tagging turtles
and looking at how they moved around.
Really great fun field work.
And Emma eventually became Research Coordinator
for the sanctuary as a fed
and lasted many years there as well.
Everybody who started working for the Flower Garden
seemed to stay for a long time,
Emma and Shelley in particular.
And Emma just recently, like a couple years ago,
headed back to Australia
'cause her parents were aging
and is now back in Australia.
And she was a wonderful employee as well,
super hard worker.
She did a lot of work over the more recent years
on characterizing many other banks in the Northwestern Gulf
to the point where they could become
added to the Flower Gardens Sanctuary.
And now the sanctuary is something, I don't know,
three times larger than it was
when I was manager down there.
And we did all kinds of product development at that time.
Newsletters and research reports
and brochures and calendars.
And Joel Hickerson, he was an artist,
he made that nice logo up in the upper right hand corner.
And yeah, full disclosure,
I don't know how that classified document
got left at my house,
but I found it lying around the other day.
I'll turn it in, hopefully it won't be a problem.
But that was the long range plan I did,
wasn't really classified.
So this was 1995
and a lot of divers were recognizing
another bank, Stetson Bank,
that the boats often went to
as being a really wonderful place.
A lot of them liked it better than the Flower Garden Banks
and expressed interest in making it a marine sanctuary.
And there was a guy named Chris Ostrom
who was the liaison for me at the headquarters.
He worked for the sanctuary program
and loved coming to the Flower Gardens
and loved playing Sequence as you can see here.
But Chris also had a lot of congressional experience
and he wanted to help Stetson become a sanctuary
or be added to the sanctuary if that was possible.
He invited a guy named Terry Schaff down
to go out on a trip with us
and Terry worked
for the House Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee
and Solomon Ortiz was the chairman at the time.
And he had all the smarts it would take
to add Stetson to the sanctuary
if that's what the public wanted.
So he talked with divers and dive clubs in the area
and strategized with them
if they really felt strongly that Stetson should be added
and what it would take to do it.
And eventually, Terry ended up writing the legislation
that it would take to add the sanctuary
or add that bank to the sanctuary
and proposed these boundaries.
And those boundaries were literally
me and a couple other people
riding around in a zodiac with a depth finder
and trying to get a square
that would encompass the entire bank at the time.
And so, it wasn't quite as square as it looks on this graph,
but we got it done.
And Terry wrote the legislation.
The next thing you know,
a year or so later,
it became part of the Flower Garden Sanctuary.
So it went from two banks to three banks in 1996.
And then, perhaps the most interesting thing
that maybe I've ever done
was living for a while in what we call Gene's world.
And Gene Dries is the guy in the upper left hand corner
of this slide with the long hair
and standing next to none other than Bob Marley,
which should tell you a little bit of something
about Gene's life and what an interesting character
and interesting life he's led.
He worked for Warner Brothers Records,
Warner Records at the time,
and Lad Akins in the lower left worked for REEF.
He was the executive director for REEF.
Laurie Wilson was doing PR for REEF.
And then this group, Little Texas,
all these folks thought,
hey, wouldn't it be cool if we could get Little Texas
who had a lot of hits at the time,
wouldn't it be cool if we could get them
out to the Flower Gardens diving
because several of them were divers?
And then just, would it be neat?
So Gene made the arrangements,
he knew the guys from Little Texas
and he was very familiar with them.
And he and Brian Huff organized a trip out there
and we all ended up taking Little Texas
out to the Flower Gardens.
And here's the three guys that went with us.
There's Dwayne O'Brien, Del Gray, Duane Propes,
the guys with the long hair,
and then Chris Ostrom and me on the FLING
holding a NOAA flag.
And we had a heck of a good time out there,
partly because we also had these two guys,
Greg Bunch and Tony Sebastian who were from New Orleans
and nothing but fun,
they're just life of the party type of people.
And the whole three-day cruise became a joke fest
between them and the guys from Little Texas.
And boy, I don't know if I've ever had
so much fun on a trip.
When we got back, Little Texas was offered
to do a benefit concert for us at Sea Space,
a big dive show in Houston in 1997.
And they did that, they pulled off a great show.
We made something like $80,000 in tickets and other sales,
whatever you call it,
by people buying guitars,
raffles and all that kind of thing.
So they made a lot of money for the sanctuary and for REEF
and had a heck of a good time doing it.
They had guitars made,
Gene had these commissioned and painted up
and decorated for the times and sold them.
I bought one,
I bought the one that's in the inset here.
And I noticed just a couple years ago,
painted on my guitar is this lionfish.
Well, if you think about the time, this is 1997.
This was three years before lionfish
even took off in the Atlantic in their abundance
and became a problem
and about 14 years or something
before they showed up at the Flower Gardens.
So this prophetic guitar
was looking into the future
and telling us to look out for lionfish I guess.
But I bought that guitar during that auction
and I still have it down in the basement.
And it was Gene Dries made it all happen, he is magic.
And I still stay in touch with Gene
and try to visit him now and then.
Wonderful, wonderful guy.
And all good things must come to an end.
And people have asked me over the years there
how long I was gonna stay as manager,
what was I gonna do next?
And I always said,
because I had never seen a whale shark
at the Flower Gardens,
even though other people had.
For 18 years, I never saw one.
I said, when I first see a whale shark,
then I'll know it's time
to start thinking about doing something else.
In 1997, I saw three of them.
So it didn't take a two by four to the head
to realize, hey, maybe I ought to start thinking
about is there something else
I should be looking forward to?
And literally, I had done most of the things
that I had written on that envelope.
I had checked off most of those things
except for a couple.
I really felt like I had done most of what I could
for the Flower Gardens Sanctuary
in its birth and its early days.
So coincidentally, I was offered a position at headquarters
as the Chief Scientist for the Sanctuary Program
and they hadn't had that position before and I accepted it.
And I started doing that late that year
and ever since, honestly.
I've been there now, gosh,
25 years as Chief Scientist for...
Is that true?
Something like that, it's getting close to that.
So that was the end of my time at the Flower Gardens
and heading off to headquarters.
But I still get back to the Flower Gardens pretty often
or as often as I can.
I worked a lot with Emma over the years
and Tom gets back there as often as he can
to help out with things.
So you can see the loyalty that happens
among people that work at the Flower Gardens.
And honestly, it's been in good hands,
has been for a long time.
G.P Schmahl became Manager a year or so after I left
and has been there over 20 years now,
well over 20 years I guess.
And since Emma left,
there's a new Research Coordinator in town,
Michelle Johnston.
She's currently Research Coordinator at the Flower Gardens.
And their staff has grown substantially.
This is not exactly the current staff
and I think this picture might be a couple years old,
but a lot of these folks are still around on staff
and much larger than it was when I was there.
I still go back, but this is what I do when I go back.
You'll find me looking more like this
than bossing people around.
Most of us are very proud of the place
partly because of this blue line.
That's the coral cover at the Flower Garden Banks.
And you can see over the long term,
the Flower Gardens has been a very, very healthy ecosystem.
If anything, the coral cover's gotten higher
since the early days of measuring it
back in the 70s and 80s.
So we're all a little bit nervous now
about the arrival of a new disease
or maybe multiple diseases
increasing in frequency out there,
maybe it's gonna be hitting the corals,
but for now at least, the Flower Gardens are still
about as healthy as it ever has been
and we're all very happy about that.
I thought I'd just finish with a picture
of a very good friend I made along the way,
Randy Widaman, who's not with us anymore,
but he was a Captain,
one of the captains of the FLING in the SPREE,
the two boats that operated so much out there that we used.
And Randy, he was short one leg,
but he made up for it with a lot of heart.
A wonderful, wonderful guy, Randy Widaman.
So thank you, Kelly, for giving me the time
to do this talk.
I really appreciate it
and I'm very happy to answer any questions I can.
-: Thank you, Steve.
Folks, if you do have questions for Steve
about any aspect of the presentation
or the Flower Garden Banks,
please type them into the question box
in the control panel there
and we will share them with Steve.
If you had your hand raised or you had a question mark,
list it next to your name,
Please make sure your questions are in the question box
because we're not gonna unmute people to ask questions.
We'll just take them from the question box.
Steve, our first question on the list is,
how deep did you free dive
while you were out there with the NOAA folks
and Sylvia was diving underneath you?
-: I went all the way to the bottom
in the shallowest part of the banks,
so that was like 60 feet I guess.
But I didn't stay long.
I wasn't a very good free diver
and there were a few times when I wondered
whether I was gonna make it back to the surface.
But like I said, it was tough but I made it.
But I tried to get all the way down just to show off.
-: I'm impressed.
60 feet more than I would do free diving.
All right, next question.
Could you please discuss how the Flower Garden Banks
and the oil industry coexist?
-: I didn't catch that exactly what you said.
-: Please discuss how the Flower Garden Banks Sanctuary
and the oil industry coexist.
-: Oh, coexist.
Well, regulations help.
Having a strong government agency like, at the time,
Minerals Management Service was
who would be diligent about doing drills
to put the oil industry folks on the spot and say,
"Hey, imagine you just had a spill out there,
respond to it."
And we did that on the day before Thanksgiving
once with one company
and they had to call in all their troops
to respond to this imaginary oil spill.
So that's one example.
But having strong regulations in place is really helpful.
And having scientifically-based advice
being provided to an organization
like the Minerals Management Service
allowed them to put restrictions in place
for operations that were really meaningful,
things that required them to shunt their cuttings
and fluids down to certain depths
so that they wouldn't impinge on the banks.
So protecting the banks ahead of time
rather than in a reactionary way.
Being proactive in those kind of protection measures
was really helpful.
And then, the open door policy
where the oil industry was willing
to take phone calls and answer questions if I ever had them
when it came to me evaluating permit requests and so forth.
It's all relationship building,
but behind the relationship building
has to be a strong agency with a commitment
to establishing and enforcing the rules
that it puts in place.
-: Steve, several of the people
that you've mentioned in your talk tonight
are actually online
and one of those, Ms. Emma,
would like to know, how many dives have you done
at the Flower Garden Banks?
-: Oh gosh, I don't know.
It had to be probably I'd say 1500 or something like that.
I never have added the numbers up, to be honest with you.
That'd be my guess though.
Not as many as some others.
I'll bet Emma's done a bunch more than me.
I'll bet Greg Boland's done a bunch more.
I think there's probably a lot of people
who have done a bunch more.
The dive masters, my gosh,
they've probably done tons.
But I feel good, I feel satisfied, no question about it.
I got a lot in out there.
-: All right, next question.
You're one of the folks that know best
the amount of resources, people and effort
it took to build the sum total of East Flower Garden Bank,
West Flower Garden Bank
and Stetson Knowledge that we have today.
What's your assessment of the likelihood
we will see that same level of effort
from the newly-added banks?
-: Hmm, wow, good question.
It's gonna be really hard to come up with the resources
to mount the number of cruises that are needed
to do really good work on those other banks.
And most of them, well, all of them are deeper
than those three you mentioned.
So it's not easy diving,
you can't just send scuba divers down.
You're gonna have to have technical divers,
you're gonna have to have ROVs and the like.
But we do have access to those kinds of platforms.
There's also emerging market for autonomous vehicles,
whether they're above water or below.
So we could do a lot of work with autonomous vehicles
that we were never able to do before.
So, I don't know, I guess I'm optimistic in that respect
that there's potential to do good work on those banks,
even though there's gonna have to be done differently
than the banks were done in the past.
But honestly, having the good records that we had
from the days of Tom Bright doing his work there
and all the incredibly good descriptions he provided
for each of these banks
is gonna give us the ability to track change
on each one of them if we want to
just by going back and reading through his records
and comparing that to what we're seeing now
with visual surveys and so forth.
So we have a really good strong baseline
of information I think to work from.
And of course, all the characterization work
that Emma and G.P. did throughout the 1990s and 2000s
in preparation for the growth of the sanctuary.
All that's really reliable
and it's good, strong information
to support science out there.
-: Thank you.
So folks, we are coming to a close.
We haven't been able to hit all of the questions yet.
I'm gonna do one more question with you, Steve,
and then we're gonna have to wrap up for the evening.
We'll continue looking through the list of questions
and see if there are things that we can answer
and maybe we'll pick Steve's brain
for a couple of the other ones.
I see some that are a little more personal in nature.
We'll pass those along to Steve.
Last question, why is it so expensive to maintain buoys?
-: I'll say relatively speaking, at the time,
I think the contract I put out was maybe $20,000.
That's 20,000 out of $29,000 budget that I had.
So it's not a horrible number to maintain buoys.
Maybe I misled you on that.
It's not all that expensive,
but it must be done for public safety
and for ecosystem safety.
It's a critical element of sanctuary management
in places like the Flower Gardens, the Florida Keys,
and other reef-based environments
where you really don't want anchoring.
So it's not horrible price to be honest with you.
-: Well, thank you, Steve.
That's gonna wrap up our question and answer session now.
Like I said, if we have a chance,
we will continue to answer questions after the fact
and if that happens, we will email those out to everyone
who has been online this evening.
So let me just switch back over to my screen here
so we can wrap up with a few slides.
Steve, if you'll hang out with us
for just a few more minutes.
-: Yeah.
-: All right, are you all seeing my screen now?
Looks like you are, okay,
So everyone, this year Seaside Chats
focused mostly on our past.
As you heard from Steve,
he was part of that building up
into it becoming a sanctuary.
So from the early days of exploration
in the Northwestern Gulf of Mexico
to the beginnings of the sanctuary
to fossil reefs found hidden under our modern reefs,
that's the history part of what you're gonna see
in Seaside Chats this year.
But we'll also be looking at current research
and what it can tell us about organisms
in the deeper, less explored part of our sanctuary
we call the Mesophotic Zone.
So please plan to come back and visit with us
for our three more Seaside Chats we have coming up
on February 1st, 8th...
Tonight was February 1st, excuse me.
February 8th, 15th and the 22nd
and you can find all the information you need to register
for each one of those webinars separately
on our Seaside Chats page on our website.
And depending on the number of questions remaining,
as I said, we will attempt to get them
answered after the webinar
and then email them out to everyone.
Please also remember to check out
the links we've shared with you
throughout the presentation and in the handout.
Now would be a great time to stop down
in that handout panel,
the pane of a control panel and download that handout.
You'll find some more helpful links there.
Thank you for attending this Seaside Chats presentation
on The Best Job Ever.
This is the first in the series of four,
as I said, so please join us for the rest.
And as always, we welcome your feedback and questions.
You can submit input by replying
to the follow-up email you'll receive after the webinar
or by emailing us at flowergarden@noaa.gov.
Today's presentation has also been part
of the National Marine Sanctuaries Webinar Series
and while Seaside Chats last just one month,
our National Webinar Series continues throughout the year
to provide educators with educational
and scientific expertise
and everyone with resources and information
to support ocean and climate literacy.
Be sure to check the website for recordings
of our past webinars
and the schedule of what's to come.
And as a reminder, we will share recordings of this
and our other webinars
probably about a month after the fact up there
on that National Main Sanctuaries Webinar Series page
and we also have links to them from our website,
our Seaside Chat page as well.
Following this webinar,
attendees will receive a PDF copy
of a certificate of attendance
that provides documentation
for one hour of professional development
for today's presentation.
This includes our Texas CPE provider number
for those of you who are Texas educators.
And if you're an educator outside of Texas,
please use this certificate
to help get your hours approved in your district.
If you require additional information,
I'm happy to help with that.
Please contact me at flowergarden@noaa.gov.
There will also be a short evaluation
following today's presentation.
Please complete this survey
immediately after signing off the webinar.
It should only take about three minutes to complete
and we greatly appreciate any feedback
you are willing to share.
Thanks again to Steve Gittings
for a great presentation about The Best Job EVer
and thanks to all of you for taking the time to join us.
This concludes today's webinar.
Steve: Thanks, Kelly.