Ah Jeep Beach. A time for jeeple of all walks of life to congregate at Florida’s hog crankin’, oval racing, meth taking crack hole on the coast: Daytona Beach. Every end of April, the great migration of around 25,000 Jeeps occurs, and for a weekend, this is Jeep city. Parties, music, vendors, auctions, and of course, Jeeps being driven on the beach. Which means that Jeeps get stuck on the beach.

And when the tide comes in… well…

This year, a record number of Jeeps have not only been getting stuck in the sand, but have actually been swept out into the Atlantic. According to the Daytona Beach Police Dept, over 3600 Jeeps had gotten stuck on the beach, but not all could be saved in time.

“That’s at least 50 Jeeps an hour”, said DBPD Sheriff Christopher J. Ohm, “we brought in help from Volusia County and Port Orange but eventually our equipment started to fail. We… we just couldn’t save them all”.

Tragic, really.

Of the 3600 or so Jeeps reported to have gotten stuck, around 1570 have been swept out into the Atlantic. This includes some high profile Jeep builds, such as two Gladiator based Apocalypse G 6x6s, “Beast”, “Coronado”, three Jurassic Park themed jeeps and “Stranglehold”. Due to the large amount of Chrysler developed metal now in ocean, the EPA, FWS, and NOAA have conducted a joint study on how best to address the sunken cars.

“We looked at fishing them out, but that was too costly. Then we offered the Jeeps up as target practice for the Navy, but that too was vetoed because of the risk it posed to the wright whales in the area”, said Mike Hunt of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Ultimately, they’ve decided that the 1500 odd cars will become an artificial reef, once a team of salvage divers hired by the local LKQ junkyard have removed harmful and valuable parts from the totaled cars.

We at MSIMA can’t wait to see the tourist benefits that the Jeep Reef (Jeef) will bring to Daytona Beach, as well as the certain improvement that 1500 sunken Jeeps will have to our local marine ecosystem!