The mourning period for the late Bug Light is beginning to come to an end. A new artificial reef, four years in conception and planning, is almost ready for construction off the southeast shore of Key Biscayne.

The location is 2.25 nautical miles north-northeast of where Bug Light — popular nickname of the Biscayne Channel marker — for 85 years marked the ocean entrance to the channel running alongside the southern shoreline of Key Biscayne. It’s the same distance due east of the beach at Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park. The water there is about 23 feet deep. The top of the reef should be 15 feet b elow the surface at low tide.

Can there be a suitable atonement for the sneaky total desecration of Bug Light? It was akin to a shrine, standing 16 feet tall, flashing its red light every two and a half seconds. There, fishing pilgrims prayed for and were given gazillions of baitfish between its commissioning in 1929 and its demolition in 2014.

A moment of silence, please, in its memory.

Amen.

Charter captains, baitmongers and individual anglers wept, wailed, gnashed their teeth and rented their garments. If they had known ahead of time, it might have made a difference.

Maybe not. Eighty-five years is a long life for any channel marker. Bug Light’s rusty, barnacled legs were in a state of advancing deterioration when the Coast Guard had it brought down and hauled off with hardly any notice. Early attempts to replace it at the same spot began at once and failed.

Everybody got mad. Bruce Marx did too, but then he got going and created the Bug Light Shoal Artificial Reef Project. Marx is the Miami maritime lawyer whose further crusades would prevent destruction of the Bent Range Marker (another great bait site) in 2015 at Government Cut, establish the South Florida Marina & Boat Watch group this year on Facebook to fight theft and then start a related movement to make marine electronics manufacturers thief-proof their devices.

Marx said Miami-Dade County’s Department of Environmental Resources Management (DERM) was preparing in late October to start a contract bidding process. Federal, state and local permits had been obtained. A 125-ton load of donated concrete pipes and scraps was stockpiled.

That’s to be surrounded by a box-like border of lime rock, 300 feet by 300 feet on a bottom about 23 feet down at mean low water. The top of it will be 15 feet or lower below the surface
Marks said the cost of building it looks like $30,000 to $40,000. The money’s already in hand, as excess from fund-raising to repair vandalism at the Bent Range Marker project.

No one can know for sure if the new Bug Light reef will attract the schools of pilchards, threadfin herring, speedo and other baitfish that the true Bug Light used to harbor. And there’s no plan to stand a lighted marker on it, so bait hunters will have to use the GPS coordinates to find it. The center is at north latitude 25.40.765 and west longitude 80.06.765.

With no light, will Bug Light still be an appropriate name? Why not? We often name things — money, for example, and courthouses and highways, after something or someone we admired in life and remember fondly.

There is no guarantee that the new reef, named or not, will live up to its generic name — Fish Attracting Device, or FAD. It likely won’t right away, but if and when it does we can decide what to call it.
Probably then, its name and the reason behind it will be well documented so that 85 years in the future it can be written about authoritatively. We are tempted to assume now that Bug Light earned its nickname as a good spot to find lobster, which are nicknamed bugs, but beware of assumptions. When published, they are bound to be wrong.

We asked Marx if he knows, but he is more activist than historian.

“That is a very good question,” he answered. “I don't know where that came from.”

To keep up to date on the Bug Light Shoal Artificial Reef Project, enter its name in Facebook or by direct link: https://m.facebook.com/groups/232549957391204.