pfeiffer@uwvax.UUCP (Phil Pfeiffer) (01/18/86)
My wife and I just came back from a two-week trip to Florida. [ My
advisor was giving a paper at a conference in Tampa, and I felt duty-bound
to hear his presentation .... ]
We crammed our dive gear into two suitcases and a carry-on, and spent
seven days diving and snorkeling in northern and central Florida, including
three days at West Palm Beach, three days up around Branford, and a day at
Crystal River. The diving was both more and less than what we'd hoped for.
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West Palm Beach.
Linda and I were sitting in a restaurant in West Palm Beach when I
started complaining about how deep the diving was in the West Palm Beach.
So my wife said, "You've changed since we've started diving. You're the one
who always wanted to go deeper."
Well, maybe I have changed. I still enjoy deep diving, but I also want to
get my money's worth of bottom time once I've gone to the expense of
chartering a boat. In the Florida Keys, there are plenty of good dive sites
at shallow depths, and, if you find a good operator who doesn't shoo you out
the water after half an hour, you can burn off two full tanks of air at a
leisurely pace in half a day's dive. Once we were out on a day-long
three-full-tank dive with a shop on Key Largo, but that's another story ....
Since diving is supposedly iffy in the Florida Keys during the winter --
can anyone confirm or deny this rumor??? -- we decided to dive the reefs of
West Palm Beach. We heard about WPB because a local dive shop was touting the
visibility (not to mention its dive package). Since the Gulf Stream runs right
off the coast at WPB, we did, in fact, dive in relatively clear water while we
were there. Visibility in the Gulf Stream proper was as high as 100'.
That's the good news. The bad news is that the good diving at WPB starts
at 50' and goes down from there. Oh, there's a site or two closer in to
shore -- we dove at a place called "Cable Crossing", in 30' of water -- but
there was a lot of sand in the water, and not really much to see (in
comparision, say, to Looe Key Marine Sanctuary).
The famous $25,000 Mercedes-Benz that was dumped in 80+' of water off of
West Palm Beach last September to promote the local artificial reef program
already looks like a rust bucket. The barge that was recently sunk not too
far from the Mercedes is worth the dive, but, here again, you're fighting
limited bottom time.
Another word of advice about WPB: like anywhere else, perhaps, there are
cattle boat operations there as well as shops that run charters with fewer
passengers; we found that it was worth the time to shop around. Also, since
most Gulf Stream diving is drift diving, you should ask whether you and your
buddy will control the dive (i.e., hold the float), and, if not, how the
dive leader plans to manage the dive. On one dive with operation A, we
managed our own float. On one dive with operation B, someone from the shop
managed the float quite well: took his time, stopping to point out sights
along the way. On the third drift dive, the leader was off to the races.
Miserable dive. I could have kept up with him, maybe, but Linda can only
swim about half as fast as me, top speed ....
Also, be careful about operations which nickel and dime you to death.
$5 per person for weights, with our without belt, is not uncommon in WPB.
The same thing, incidentally, holds true for the Keys.
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Branford and the Florida Springs.
My favorite part of the diving this trip. If you've never been diving
in the springs, I think it's worth the trip. A limestone aquifer underlies
northern and central Florida. The springs are, for the most part, sinkholes,
breaks in the aquifer filled with fresh water. Depths range from, say, 10'
to 80' and deeper. The water is crystal clear at this time of year. To my
mind, the springs have it all over swimming pools.
A NECESSARY WORD OF CAUTION is in order here. Some of the springs have
entrances to submerged caverns and caves. If you haven't been told to
STAY OUT OF THE CAVES when you're diving the springs, YOU ARE SO ADVISED.
Special equipment and training are required for cavern or cave diving.
A high percentage of SCUBA diving fatalities happened when untrained divers
wandered into the caves without proper equipment and couldn't get back out.
Anyhow, this warning about not going into caves is as much of a matter
as common sense as anything else -- something on the order of, "Don't wander
around Yellowstone looking for grizzly bears unless you're prepared for the
consequences."
There's a lot of good snorkeling and free diving to be had in the springs.
As a matter of fact, we only used tanks for one dive the whole trip.
Ginnie Springs is a privately-owned tract of land with a number of springs
and a dive shop on the grounds. Ginnie Spring proper is a twenty-five-foot
deep sandy bowl which ends in a large cavern extending back to a depth of
fifty-five feet. The cavern at Ginnie Spring IS, as of the time of this
writing, the one cavern that I know of which is considered safe for diving
(this during the daytime only) without special training. There are permament
rope lines in the cavern proper, and gratings to prevent access to unsafe
places. You can get more information from the dive shop at Ginnie. We
went down into the cavern with tanks on, and burned off only about 1000 PSI
seeing all that we wanted to see.
I would venture to say that, if you're not a cave diver, and if you can
free dive even just a little, you can see just about everything worth seeing
in the area without tanks, Ginnie Spring excepted. Not using tanks is a lot
less cumbersome, I think.
We also drift-dove the Ichetucknee River in just our wet suits (a little
underweighted to permit us to float easily, but enough to let us free dive
to see an occasional turtle). This is a good time of year to drift-dive the
Ich, since it's the park's off-season. There are four drift-dive starting
points in the park. The first point requires is on the other side of the
park, and requires about eight miles' worth of walking or a second vehicle to
get to. The other three points are spaced out along an easy two miles' worth
of trails. There's a shuttle which services the lower three starting points,
but it doesn't run at all from November through March. The river is QUITE
pretty: average depth of maybe 10', crystal clear, lots of fish.
There's a dive shop in Branford, which gives out a good map showing where
area springs are located, free. Ned DeLoach's book is an invaluable reference
as well.
----------------------
Crystal River.
When we got to Crystal River, a shop owner told us that visibility was bad
this year, because the hurricanes pushed a lot of salt water back into the bay
and killed about 90% of the vegetation. Well, he was right. We dove King's
Spring at Crystal River, and saw no manatees, just a bunch of divers in
training falling all over each other. The visibility was a foot, maybe, in
the bay, and maybe 20'-30' in the springs proper. Oh, yes, the Florida
Wildlife Patrol watched the manatee preserve next to King's Springs like
-- well, Linda's comment was "like the Gestapo". I know that saving the
manatees depends, to a large extent, on the vigilance of the local authorities,
but, gee, that doesn't make it any more fun to dive with a police boat hovering
over you.
Again, you should probably plan on snorkeling Crystal River instead of diving
it, if you have a little skill as a free diver. Also, plan on renting a small
power boat while you're there diving. They're not too hard to operate,
fees are reasonable, and you need a boat to get to most of the springs.
-----------------------
Gulf Diving.
We avoided diving the Gulf of Mexico because Ned DeLoach's book,
"Underwater Florida", states that visibility in the Gulf tends to be poor
during the winter, and currents strong. My grand-uncle said much the same
when we stopped by to see him while in Tampa; he said that the water is
clearest during July and August. A woman at a dive shop in West Palm Beach
recommended diving a wreck west of Venice in about 110' of water, saying
it was worth the three hour boat trip. Personally, I thought that a six-hour
boat ride was a long way to go for 15? minutes' worth of bottom time.
There's supposed to be good spearfishing in the Gulf, but neither of us
have taken up spearfishing.
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Unrelated Parting Shot.
On an unrelated subject: my impression of the diving community is that
that there are precious few divers who write books about their experiences.
I mean, this net hasn't been a live wire for dive information, and many of
the books which are on the market are technical rather than experiential
in nature. Why don't divers write? Any thoughts?
--
-- Phil Pfeiffer
...!{harvard,ihnp4,seismo,topaz}!uwvax!pfeiffer
(608) 263-7308