Pacific Dive Adventures

My dive history would include dives all over Florida  where I was certified (I lived there 15 years) including places like West Palm Beach, Key Largo, Ft Pierce, Blue Springs, Ginnie Springs, Ponce de Leon Springs, Peacock Springs, and Orange Grove Sink.  It’s hard to give a complete list as my old logbooks got tossed by my ex-wife (no it’s not the reason she’s my ex )

One of the highlights of diving in Florida that I remember was my first trip to the Florida Keys.   It was one of those spur of the moment things.  The first year I was certified.

I was sitting around with Jim Dunn, one of my buddies on a Friday night talking about what to do that weekend.   Jim was from Michigan had never dived outside the Great Lakes.   I had been after him for several months to go diving with me before he left (he was only in Orlando temporarily to attend a school).

He was leaving in less than 2 weeks.  I reminded him that he was leaving and that he still hadn’t dived in Florida.   He replied that he had no gear.   By this time I had acquired 2 sets of gear and told him no problem, I’d loan him gear.   He asked where would we go, and I said the first thing that popped into my head…. “lets go to the keys”!  He said, “lets do it!”    We grabbed the gear, threw it in the car, and a little more than 6 hours later we were in Key Largo.

We parked out by US1 near a sign that read Captain Slate’s and slept in the car (the things we do when we’re young and don’t have a lot of money )  When the sun came up, we followed the directions on the sign to the dive shop and were the first ones there that day.   We were told that the weather was rough, and maybe they wouldn’t go out that day.  We told them we had driven all the way from Orlando, we were in the Navy, and my buddy was leaving soon.  They decided to take us out for two dives.

John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park was formed back in the 60’s and was the first underwater park in the United States.  As a protected area it was teeming with fish.    The water was indeed rough that day.  Even in December on a bad day though the visibility was easily 75 feet plus.   One of the things that really stood out in my memory were the huge schools of barracuda.   Perhaps because at one point on our second dive, Jim who had never dived in salt water started to approach one of them trying to touch it!   Of course while I was frantically trying to get Jim’s attention, the barracuda just swam away.   When we got topside, I asked him what he was thinking swimming up to a barracuda like that.  He looked at me and said, “oh… was that a barracuda?   I just thought it was a pretty fish.”   I replied, shocked, “Didn’t you see all those teeth?”!

The following week we got directions to Blue Springs, a place that was near to Orlando, that I had heard you could dive.  We geared up near the run, walked into the water and started making our way up the run.  First swimming, then wading as the water became shallower.  As we neared the spring itself, we ran into a man coming down who we talked to for a few moments.   He asked if we had dived the spring before and of course the answer was no.  He recommended that we not go all the way to the bottom.   He also told us that if we looked, we might find fossilized sharks teeth that were sometimes washed up from deeper in the limestone.   We turned our dive at around 80 feet and began searching the bottom as we worked our way back up.   Sure enough we found a tooth at 70 feet!   The many times that I dived there after, I never found another tooth

Blue Springs is near Orange City, Florida and was one of the closest dive destinations to where I lived in Orlando and became one of my favorite dive sites. A cavern dive, you could penetrate at a slight angle down for over a 110 feet, before the flow of water coming out became to great to go any deeper.

At around a 90-100 feet, it became a cave dive at certain times of day because of the loss of surface light.   It also started opening up into a chamber here.  The cave actually went much deeper.  I had heard people from the park had dropped weighted lines down and that it went over 300 feet!   People had drowned by swimming across the flow of the spring and being pushed up into the top of the chamber where they became disoriented and couldn’t find their way out.    We often saw manatees in the run from the spring down to the St. Johns River.   I did the first part of my Cavern Diver course here in 1987 before traveling to North Florida to finish it.  It was considered to be a very safe cavern dive since as long as you didn’t to anything stupid, there was really only one way in and out.