Field Notes9 min read
Field Notes: Storm Season on Catalina
A Pacific storm season tests Tidewright's Catalina restoration site. Field notes on survey dives between swells, storm-torn kelp, and which Holdfast lines held.
Jack Callum ·
Project 3 · Northeast Pacific
Catalina Canopy
Santa Catalina Island, California · United States
A storm-season stress test: keeping Catalina’s iconic giant kelp canopy — and the dive economy built on it — alive through harder winters.
- Status
- Monitoring
- Launched
- 2022
- Hectares seeded
- 210
- Program target
- 260 ha
- Program lead
- Tom Okafor
Progress to target
81%
Illustrative program figures, part of Tidewright’s fictional record.
The program
The story so far.
Catalina’s leeward forests are some of the most-visited kelp dives on Earth, and they take a beating every big winter. The Catalina Canopy program exists to find out whether storm-tolerant seedstock and pre-winter reseeding can keep a canopy standing where lift and swell strip it bare.
Drifter vessels seed in the shoulder season, Holdfast nurseries supply genotypes selected for strong haptera — the gripping fingers of the holdfast — and diver crews from the co-op ground-truth every canopy map.
Species of the reef
- Giant kelpMacrocystis pyrifera
- GaribaldiHypsypops rubicundus
- California sheepheadBodianus pulcher
Partners on the water
- Catalina Dive Co-op (fictional)
- Channelfern Marine Lab (fictional)
Milestones
The record, season by season.
2022
Baseline mapping of 12 dive-site reefs with the dive co-op.
2023
Storm-tolerance seedstock trialled across 90 ha.
2025
Program moves to monitoring: canopy retention 38% better than unsupplemented sites (illustrative).
From the Journal
Field notes from this coast.
Work near this coast?
Councils, fisheries, dive operators and community groups — every Tidewright program runs on local partnership.
Tidewright is a fictional company created as a design and content demonstration.