URAGROUND: Satellite Beach and Tortoise Island

What's this all about?

Not to be used for navigation! This is a reference and education tool only and is not in any way to be used to pilot any watercraft.

This site can help you find out the depth of the water at marinas as well as behind canal-side homes and docks along the east coast of Florida. Within this site are depth sounding surveys of private and public canals and waterways that are all navigable from the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway (AICW). For the areas surveyed, NOAA charts are outdated and provide limited or no coverage at all--we try to include the relevant government chart 'snippet' with each survey posting so you can see for yourself.

Some areas inside the Indian River Lagoon portion of the AICW are not tidal and the depths shown are based on US Army Corps of Engineers datum. For areas that do have daily tidal flucuations, all soundings reference a known tidal station for that time and date as well. Date shown at the top of the posting is the actual date of the sounding survey, and each and every spot sounding is also time stamped--just click on the associated colored circle next to the depth that's displayed in the embedded Google Earth KML viewer and a label will pop up with the date/time stamp and tide reference. To see these depth soundings overlaid on a map you'll need to have the Google Earth plug-in installed in your browser.

The color code for all soundings are: depths 4.9 feet and shallower are RED; depths 5.0 to 6.9 feet are GREEN; and depths 7.0 feet and deeper are BLUE--a variation of the old rhythm "Brown brown, run aground, green green, nice and clean, Blue blue, run right through." I've substituted red for the brown as I think in this case the color red does a better job of alerting to shallower waters.

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