Late summer diving

Well I have had a few diving excursions to wrap up the summertime diving calendar. Let’s dive in.\

Key Biscayne, FL - August 21st-23rd

This dive weekend required driving down to Miami which took about four hours. The trip down was uneventful and the time flew as I was accompanied by my dive buddy Darren. We got down to the hotel and I had forgotten my valet key and they had valet only parking. The valet ended up letting me park my beast but I had to be escorted in and out of the valet area. Come dinner time I walked about 40 minutes, in flip flops, to find an eatery that didn’t have a dress code but I did have a very good burger.

The next day we gathered at Diver’s Paradise on Key Biscayne (which I learned is actually one of the Florida Keys is not part of the Florida Keys). The first day of diving was two dives on wrecks. The first wreck was the Princess Britney and was about 85 feet to the sand. The water temperature was a very warm 84F. The second wreck was the Rio Miami.

On Sunday we dove a couple of very shallow reefs. Again it was very warm but there wasn’t much interesting about these shallow reefs.

ScubaLab - Blue Grotto, Williston, FL - September 10th

This was a very new experience for me. My dive club, the Orlando Reef Divers, has worked with ScubaLab, part of Scuba Diving Magazine, in the past to help test various pieces of scuba equipment. I’ve always wanted to participate but when I was working I was not able to as the testing always happened on a weekday and I was always working, out of town, or both. So, I finally had an opportunity so I jumped right in.

This lab was to test out dive computers, which there are many in the market, to see how good they are for typically diving. I drove the two hours up to Williston, FL to the Blue Grotto Dive Resort where I met up with the other divers participating in the testing. I believe I tested nine different computers of different styles and price points and there were definitely some that stood out. Of course I can’t say anything until the article comes out but it was an interesting experience.

I had dove at Blue Grotto once before and I believe it has changed ownership a couple of times since my last visit. The facilities were pretty nice. The dive site was okay but as a spring-fed hole in the ground it was chilly. I wore my wetsuit which helped out immensely. There were catfish and a huge school of crappy that looked like piranha schooling around. There was also a decent sized softshell turtle named Virgil that had no fear and would come right up to divers.

Goliath Groupers - Jupiter, FL - September 11th

On the live-aboard that I did last year in Belize I met up with two guys out of Washington state, Jaron and Peter. In chatting with them about the diving in Florida the topic of Goliath Groupers (and sharks) came up. Well, earlier this year they reached out to me and my dive buddy Darren about joining them to see the Goliath Groupers. Darren would be unavailable but I said that I’m in.

Well, we met up in Jupiter at the dock where the Jupiter Dive Center launches from and went for a three tank trip to see some Goliaths. The first dive was at the Wreck Trek which is three wrecks that you can drift to in one dive. Well we dropped down on the Zion where there were about 10 Goliaths hanging about as well as about 6-10 lemon sharks coming in from just out of visual range. By the way, the visibility was pretty crappy but at least there was very little current. I saw Jaron and Peter (J&P) heading towards the next wreck and so I went along with it. I figured that they were just wanting to get there ahead of the whole group. We got to the Miss Jenny but there wasn’t anything significant on this wreck. So we continued to the Esso Bonaire. Except we never found it partly due to messed up navigation but mostly due to poor visibility. We were visited by the school of lemon sharks but they left quickly because we didn’t interest them. After a bit of time swimming above the sand we called it and surfaced. The next two dives were typical drift dives on reefs (Tunnels and Scarface). The captain had attempted to get us onto another wreck but there was another boat sitting right over it. I did see a Royal Sea Goddess nudibranch which was really awesome!