ORANGE BEACH, Ala. – Last month’s deployment of 30 super reefs off the coast of Alabama brought the number of artificial reefs deployed by the state this year to 286.

David Walter of Reefmaker and his crews deployed 30 of 20-ton reefs at spots in the Gulf 18 to 35 miles off shore and in depths of 75 to 140 feet deep after the state made a request for 25-foot tall reefs.

“We designed one and built it,” he said. “It ended up weighing about 20 tons so I had to go buy a big barge and a 110-ton crane to lift them with. They just deployed 30 of them. This is further out in the reef zone because these are so tall.”

Additionally, this spring his company deployed 220 six-foot tall reefs three miles off shore and in waters 34 to 44 feet deep.

“They were put in clusters of three very close to each other and then each cluster is about 350 feet apart from one another,” Alabama Chief Marine Biologist Kevin Anson said. “You can anchor up to one cluster and leave space so that it wouldn’t mess up the other folks that maybe want to fish on the other.”

Also deployed were 36 “low-profile” reefs Anson hopes will attract younger fish where they can grow to catch-of-the-day size.

“We’re hope for juveniles, fish that aren’t of any legal size but we’re hoping that because of the low profile they will act as a habitat for juvenile fish whether it be snapper, sheephead and that kind of thing,” he said.

Coordinates for the reefs will be available on outdooralabama.com as soon as some technical difficulties with the website are resolved.

The super reef program coast just more than $400,000 and the deployment of the 256 smaller reefs cost $374,000, all paid for post-storm grants and taxes collected on oil and gas rigs.

“For (the super reef) contract, we’ve got two main sources of money one of which is the Emergency Disaster Recovery Program which was congressionally appropriated to the Gulf states to improve fisheries after the hurricanes of 2005,” Anson said. “The other portion came from CIAP, Coastal Impact Assistance Program which is taxes that are placed on oil and gas producers, federal taxes that are then redistributed back to the states that have oil and gas production off of their respective coastlines.”

Anson said the bulk of money for the smaller reefs also came from the Emergency Disaster Recovery Program.