“Yalla, let’s go!” A broad smile spreads across the face of Mohamed El Serji, the 63-year-old marine activist and director of the Sidon Dive Academy in Saida, Lebanon. Creases form within the sun-browned skin around his eyes as he takes to the wheel of his SUV, ready to navigate the 6am calm of this ancient Lebanese port town. The vehicle is jammed full of dive gear and 20-gallon water-bottles filled with boat fuel. 

But while El Serji runs plenty of recreational dives, today is not a fun dive day. Instead, we board a boat loaded with a team of installation divers. As we pull out of a small stone harbour lined with small wooden craft piled high with salt-crusted fishing nets, we fall in line behind a tug boat pulling a large barge, its deck filled with an incongruous collection of decommissioned aircraft. We follow them out to sea. Each of the craft are to be delivered to the ocean floor, a new artificial reef that, it is hoped, will boost both fish and dive tourist numbers to this corner of the Mediterranean.

Artificial reefs are man-made, underwater structures. The concept of a constructed reef is an ancient one. Humans have been creating them for millennia for a number of reasons, from coastal defences to the rebuilding of ecosystems. Today, artificial reefs, especially those built for marine conservation purposes, garner plenty of attention – as the fanfare around these particular drops showed – but do they really work, or are we simply dumping trash into the ocean?

I watch as a yellow crane begins to winch a Cessna airplane up from the barge, swinging it out over the sea and lowering it gently down to the surface of the water. I hit the surface rather less gently and the cold takes my breath away. As I descend it’s impossible to see the plane I am helping to sink from more than four metres away due to recent storms churning the water. I make out 35-year-old Amal Bittar through the gloom, working to unscrew the bolt from a clasp attaching the crane webbing to the plane chassis. Eventually she gets it free and we pull the webbing clear and head back to the surface with it. Amal shivers as she wrings water from her hijab, but is ready again when it is time to drop a helicopter an hour later.  

We spend around eight hours at sea. El Serji spends at least seven of those in the water, supervising the sinking of all three Cessnas, two Huey IIs and a small passenger plane. No mean feat when the sea temperature is 17 degrees Celsius and it’s mid-Ramadan, so more than half the crew is fasting. He works tirelessly to locate drop points, secure marker buoys, liaise with the crane lifting team on the barge, and direct his team of divers to help position the aircraft and detach them from the crane hoists. It’s clearly a labour of love for all involved. This community-wide effort involves everyone from the army and local government, to an NGO called The Friends of Alziri Island Association and the Lebanese Dive Association and, of course, El Serji’s Sidon Dive Academy. Even the Interior Security Forces bring out a boat-load of helpers. Everyone, it seems, is behind the project. There is a clear sense of pride in the local marine environment and, doubtless, they all want the economic gains brought by more fish and tourists.

Talk on deck centres around the benefits of artificial reefs attracting fish. From 13-year-old Ines, the youngest female member of the Sidon Dive Academy, to Kamal Kozbar, a local government member and Director of Friends of Alziri Island, everyone’s motivation for involvement in the project is fish. It is a well-known phenomenon – fish are attracted to underwater structures. Much like natural reefs, caves and caverns they offer shelter from predators and adverse sea conditions. They are, ultimately, viable alternate habitats. The stable, hard, intricate surfaces offer the necessary foundations to which algae, coralline algae, weed and invertebrates can attach, forming the basis of a food chain that can support fish species all the way up to apex predators. Research carried out into how artificial reefs affect local ecology and whether the aggregations of fish using them has a net positive or negative impact. Conclusions have varied, sparking an ongoing conversation known as the “attraction/production debate”.