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By Jaclyn Mann, Reef Check’s Southern California Regional Manager
The 2025 monitoring season not only marks our 20th year of kelp forest monitoring, but also has the added excitement of the completion of our 2,000th kelp forest monitoring survey! Since the beginning of the year when each region’s manager set their survey schedule, there has been a lot of anticipation around which region would be lucky enough to actually complete the 2,000th survey. As our seasons began and survey schedules changed, the date of the 2,000th survey would change as well and with it, the region that would get to complete it. Each week at our staff meetings there would be some ribbing amongst the regional managers about ways to get the 2,000th to coincide with a survey in their own region. Sabotage was often on the table.
Ultimately, the 2,000th survey landed on a day when Reef Check was scheduled to complete five surveys across three different regions: Washington, Central California, and Southern California. If all five surveys were completed, the last survey of the day would be the 2,000th. In Southern California, we were scheduled to be aboard a dive boat to survey three sites off Anacapa Island, which would make our last survey of the day the big one, number 2,000!
The night before our dive trip, I got a call that the 2,000th was going to be ours and I was ecstatic to surprise my volunteers with the news in the morning. I planned our celebrations and imagined how magical the next day would be diving off Anacapa. But as often happens in diving, things did not go quite according to plan.
The day of the 2,000th survey started out rough; immediately after leaving the harbor we were tossed around by rolling swell. Divers were seasick or soaking wet from the spray while they held on tightly to the boat to keep from being thrown around. It was big enough that I was waiting for the captain to cancel the crossing and head back to the harbor, dashing our chances of getting to complete the 2,000th survey before we even reached the island. Eventually we made it out to Anacapa and started our first survey, but with the swell slowing our crossing we were working against the clock to try and get our dives done before our cutoff time to head back to the dock.
When we finished survey 1,999 it was late enough in the day that if we were going to leave by our scheduled departure time we wouldn’t be able to fit in our final survey, which would push the 2,000th survey to a different day and a different region. At this point, nothing had gone as planned and instead of a magical day on the water we had to fight tooth and nail to get to this moment. But there was no way we were going to leave Anacapa until the 2,000th survey had been completed by our team!
We made our case to the boat crew and were so lucky that they allowed us to stay for one more dive before we headed home. We started the 2,000th survey by taking a photograph of the team with the number “2,000” written across their slates. By this time the swell was so big that as a wave would pass between me and the divers holding up the slates, I couldn’t even see them on camera any more. But we did it! Reef Check’s 2,000th kelp forest monitoring survey was completed at Cathedral Cove, which was first surveyed on June 23, 2006, and has been surveyed 13 times over 20 years of monitoring.
I am so proud of the SoCal monitoring team for working together and overcoming all of the challenging moments from that dive day. Our dedicated volunteers continue to amaze me time and time again. They are my favorite part of Reef Check and really the backbone that makes all of our work possible year after year.
