Gulf Jackson Clam Lease Expansion Parcels

GFY was selected by 49 individual clients who were awarded clam farming leases within the new Gulf Jackson Expansion Aqua Culture Use Zone. During the initial lease award in April of 2018, a GFY representative attended the meeting and personally spoke to all of the lease winners, and provided a detailed scope and Q&A discussion. This level of personal involvement gave the applicants a confident and comfortable first impression of the contractor who will be performing their survey. Each lessee had the freedom to select any licensed surveyor to perform the work; each one of them selected GFY by the week following the lease awards. Our team has performed all lease staking in Cedar Key since mid-2000 giving us unparalleled experience with the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services Division of Aquaculture, surveying/platting standards, qualified sub-consultants, and the characteristics of the environment where work was performed.

These projects are always unique and provide plenty of unknowns; the lease parcels require 2” diameter PVC pipes with reflective tape and a lease ID number at each corner, and the PVC pipes are 10 feet in length. Our team found the most efficient way to set the pipes in by hand using a fence post driver. In some instances, the bottom consists of a small layer of sediment on top of a solid karst bed, during this scenario 6’ galvanized pipes were driven to refusal and the marked PVC was placed over top. The lease areas are set up with predetermined acreages and boundaries, GFY’s responsibility was to orient the desired lease configuration into a known coordinate system, mark the leases appropriately in the field, then prepare a final plat for recording along with individual specific purpose surveys of each lease block. All of this was made possible and drastically simplified with the use and implementation of Global Positioning System receivers (GPS), the GPS units allowed our crews to work from vessels and accurately establish each point on the seabed; this allowed us to accomplish the fieldwork with only two team members for two days.