Florida - Bear Cut (Miami)

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Part of the regional summary: USA - Florida

Country

USA (Florida)

Date(s) visited

2019-05-08

Coordinates

25.7350, -80.1550

Approximate position.

Coral cover

—

not yet measured

Observations

None tagged; see Stressors below

Heat stress

Most recent heat load record

28.6°C 9.6°C-weeks

26 Oct 2026 · NOAA alert that day: no stress (water now below the bleaching threshold; 9.6°C-weeks built up over the last 12 weeks)

5-year thermal stress load

5-year mean max. degree heating weeks (DHW)

9.4°C-weeksⁱ

2021–2025

NOAA Coral Reef Watch — Southeast Florida virtual station

i 5-year mean max. DHW is the mean of the annual maximum DHWs over the five complete years named above, not conditions today.

More info

Southeast Florida (NOAA CRW virtual station)

Site summary

Bear Cut is an urban tidal channel used as a shallow checkout dive, not reef structure; no coral-cover survey or photographs exist, though Anderson's own log notes a very large tarpon cruising the channel despite poor visibility.

Max. depth dived

5.5 m

Water temp. during survey

29.0°C

+1.6°C vs the 2019 mean sea temperature (27.4°C)

Bottom time

32 min

in at 12:55

One independent survey station shown with the program’s logo — click one to see how far it is from this site.

Three other CRD dive sites with their own pages within 5 km shown in orange — click a marker to open its page.

Site description

Setting

Bear Cut is the tidal channel between Key Biscayne and Virginia Key, off the Rickenbacker Causeway in Miami — an urban tidal cut rather than a reef.

Coral cover

No coral-cover survey has been done here and no photographs were taken on the dive, so there is no cover value.

Stressors

As regional context only: this stretch of the Florida reef tract sits inside the Miami urban fringe. None of that is an observation at this site — Bear Cut is a shallow channel used as a training site, not reef structure.

Comparisons with other data

We found no other surveys at this site as of 2026. Within 5 km, one independent station, NOAA NCRMP Florida at FLK PSU 1010-1, 4.35 km away, read 0.0% in 2024.

Dive record

Anderson dived it once, on 2019-05-08, entering at 12:55 for 32 minutes, to a maximum of 5.5 m and an average of 3.66 m, with an average water temperature of 29.0°C. It was a shallow checkout dive; Anderson's own written log for the day notes the dive buddies, poor visibility, and the fish seen, and those notes are the only account of the dive that exists. The log calls out a very large tarpon cruising the channel; Anderson also saw stingrays and angelfish, despite terrible visibility (1.5-2 m; 5-7 ft in the log).

Independent surveys nearby

Within 5 km, 1 independent survey station recorded hard coral cover in 2024. One survey since 2021 recorded 0.0%.

Collected by other programs using different methods (NOAA rows come from NOAA monitoring programs (NCRMP, PIFSC, NCCOS), and each row's method is in its hover text), so these are context for the figures above, not a like-for-like comparison. Where a station was surveyed more than once, the cell shows either the range of its values or, as a single value, the mean of surveys made in one year. Station names are not dive-site names.

Independent survey data near this site
Agency	Site / location	Date	Hard coral cover (%)	Distance	Link
NOAA NCRMP Florida	FLK PSU 1010-1	2024	0.0%	4.35 km	NCEI 0306238

Data & links

Data on this page are from Coral Reef Diagnostics (the dive record) and the organizations named in the data sources above; Coral Reef Diagnostics has no coral cover estimate of its own at this site.