MRDF took over the site of a burned out restaurant/marina complex in 1985.  We turned a boat storage barn into dorm rooms and offices, used a restaurant building for a cafeteria and turned a tiki hut into an outdoor meeting area.  We also made use of a floating home, tearing down interior walls, to create a lecture area.  These facilities, primitive as they were, supported the MarineLab Environmental Education Program and the MarineLab Undersea Laboratory with little trouble for 15 years. 

In 2000, we attempted to get permission to construct a large dorm/classroom complex on the site of the one of the burned-out restaurant buildings.  However, local land use planning regulations prohibited us from adding such a large building to our current density.  So we turned our energies instead toward renovating what we had already.  Since then, we have:

• Turned our chickee hut into a permanent, white-metal roofed structure known as the "Pavilion";
• Renovated the oldest building to bring it up to code and included two rooms for visiting scientists;
• Replaced our old houseboat with a new "Floating Conference Center," complete with two classrooms and state of the art LCD projectors;
• Gutted and renovated one of our two labs;
• Renovated bathrooms behind the cafeteria.

We are currently renovating the second lab and also replaced one of the docks in our MarineLab program boat basin.

In addition, we have replaced our single hull Privateer boats with catamaran hulled Twin Vee boats for added comfort for our MarineLab students.