ORANGE BEACH, Ala. (AP) — An Alabama teen has earned his Eagle Scout badge by accomplishing an unusual service project: Sinking a shrimp boat in the Gulf of Mexico.

Garrett Ard is the son and grandson of fishing captains in Orange Beach, where multiple boats have been sunk offshore to attract fish for anglers. So Ard raised $25,000 to purchase an old, 50-foot-long (15.24 meter-long) steel shrimp boat named Southern Heritage and sink it in 90 feet (27.43 meters) of water.

Ard said the project was in memory of his late grandfather Glovice Ard, a charter boat captain.

“I grew up … in this marina, riding on boats and growing up on the water, and the idea of making a reef, that just kind of made sense,” Ard told WALA-TV. “My grandfather passed away in 2009, and doing a memorial reef just seemed like the right thing to do.”

Eagle is the highest rank in the Boy Scouts of America, requiring a significant service project to attain, and the sunken boat will be 13 miles offshore on the bottom of the Gulf for years.

“That was the most exciting part …. This is a reef that I can take my kids to. It’s going to be hopefully a huge part of the fishing industry down here and something I can say when I’m an older man and say this is something I did when I was your age,” Ard said.

The city of Orange Beach, the Gulf Coast Reef Foundation and family friend Buddy Guindon, a commercial angler from Galveston, Texas, helped fund the project.