Looe Key coral reef divers
— the shallow reef the divers come back for.
Not only on a wall.
Looe Key coral reef divers, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“Looe Key is not really a key. It is a spur-and-groove coral reef about six miles off Big Pine Key, inside the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. The water sits between five and thirty-five feet, clear enough on a calm day to see the bottom from the boat. Mooring buoys mark the dive sites so anchors don't touch the coral. Each July the Lower Keys Underwater Music Festival broadcasts to divers below. — from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Looe Key is a submerged spur-and-groove coral reef about six nautical miles south of Big Pine Key in the lower Florida Keys. Named for HMS Looe, a British frigate wrecked here in 1744, it has been designated a Sanctuary Preservation Area within NOAA's Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary since 1981. The reef rises from a sand bottom of about thirty-five feet to within five feet of the surface in places, with parallel coral ridges separated by sand grooves.
Looe Key is one of the most accessible reefs in the continental United States. Visibility on a calm day runs 60 to 100 feet. Resident species include elkhorn and staghorn coral, brain and star corals, parrotfish, yellowtail snapper, southern stingrays, and the occasional nurse shark or green sea turtle. Like most Caribbean reefs, Looe Key has lost significant live-coral cover since the 1980s to bleaching and stony-coral tissue-loss disease; the Coral Restoration Foundation and Mote Marine Lab maintain active outplanting programs on the reef.
Access is by boat only — most divers leave from Looe Key Reef Resort on Ramrod Key or from the dive shops on Big Pine and Summerland Keys, all about a fifteen-minute run. Mooring buoys mark twenty-plus sites; anchoring on the coral is prohibited. The Lower Keys Underwater Music Festival each July broadcasts music through underwater speakers to draw attention to reef conservation. Conditions are calmest from June through August; winter cold fronts can shut the reef down for days at a time.
