Blue Grotto

Today we are diving at the blue grotto another cavern located about a mile from our cabin, we get there and the outside part of the site is not as nice as the other place and Mr.Grumpy is in charge of the place, The briefing is a very nicely made video with emphasis on not touching the bottom. This cavern is deeper it goes down a chimney to a depth of over one hundred feet, to deep for the certification level of Sebastien and frankly to much for my comfort level. So we will stay in the first part that is delimitated by a line at 60 feet, actually on both dives there we did not exceed 55 feet. There is a nice turtle swimming at the surface.

The entry from a floating dock is easy and as soon as we go down spectacular. Once again there are some underwater platforms for gathering and our mandatory 3 minutes safety stop at 15 feet. The cavern is vast and with no pass-trough. There is even a diving bell feed with compressed air that I find cool but Sebastien does not like it. So we swim around taking pictures.

At the end of the last dive as we are waiting on the platform during our safety stop there is a lot of small fishes that are so close that we could touch them. Also as we exit there is one big catfish near the platform. It was a very nice dive indeed, now we pack up our dive gear for a long time and start our drive to the north.

We had great dives on this vacation a total of 14 and a lot of fun. We bring back memories an a few thousand pictures as well as some videos.

Devil's Den

After the manatees snorkeling we drove 45 miles to the cabin I had reserved at the Devil's Den a popular site for diving in a cavern environment with a depth profile not exceeding 52 feet and with most of the cavern allowing to ascend easily to the surface.
The cabin is perfect for our needs with 2 beds one on the main floor and the other one on the mezzanine. It's got a kitchen with stove and fridge and an outdoor grill for charcoal BBQ, there is a big covered porch perfect for hanging our gear to dry after diving. No internet in the cabin but we have access to a slow one at the dive shop. So we went and did a basic grocery so we can eat most of our meals at the cabin. There is a couple of divers in the cabin next to ours and they are very nice.

There is no fixed time to dive the cavern, we are allowed togo in any time between 9h00 and 17h00 so we have breakfast, do a morning dive, have lunch at the cabin and then do an afternoon dive. They fill up our tanks during the surface interval. We have to put all our gear on except fins and mask at the surface and then enter the cavern going down at least 50 steps and trough an entrance carved in the stone. At the bottom of the stairs there is a platform with stairs that goes down in the water where we can do our final set up. Under the water there is 2 or 3 more platforms, the first one at around 10 feet perfect for assembly of the team and buoyancy adjustment. There is a platform at 17 feet perfect to do our 3 minutes safety stop on the ascent.

So we start our first dive and first circle the cavern to get a better understanding of it's submerged configuration, we look for fossils that are present in that cavern but we can't find any, probably because of our lack of knowledge on what we are looking for. We go trough some passthrough but only the bigger ones because with the camera and flashes it's a bit awkward. So we end up this dive a bit before our air is all used up because Sebastien's is cold and the water being at 69f and he's wearing is shorty, it is understandable. We will go for lunch and he will wear his full wetsuit for the afternoon dive, also I wont bring the camera so that we can explore more of the narrow tunnel passages.

On our afternoon dive as we are getting ready a lone diver ask us if he can buddy with us, we agree and we are 3 to dive. We know that in the cavern there are some dead end tunnels that can be dangerous to dive trough, it was explained in the briefing, the good thing is that they are clearly marked, also before entering a tunnel we close our lights and make sure that there is daylight at the end of it. We go trough some pretty long and narrow ones, the longest I go trough is about 40 feet long and I have to rotate in order to squeeze out of the exit. By the time we surface we both agree that we had enough of cavern penetration and that would not be a diving specialty that we will take.

Tomorrow we go diving another cavern about a mile from here, but that will be another posting.

Crystal River

Again this year we decided to go and snorkel with the manatees in Crystal River, so we left West Palm Beach at 6h00 and drove about 250 miles North-West across Florida and got there around 10h30. We checked in with the operator and went for lunch, we had to be back at 12h00 for the briefing. As the balance between the ecologist movement who would like to stop this activity and the operators and the locals who benefit from the influx of money brought in by the tourists the rules changes, the activity is monitored by government officials onboard kayaks and fines can be given if the rules are not followed. So the operators and everybody that would like this activity to continue abide with the rules. This year one of the change was that we were not permitted to wear our fins the argument being that it made it easy for some people to chase the manatees, the other change was that we are no longer permitted to do flash photography as it disturbs he manatees. Both changes were fine with me, the no fins gave me a good swimming workout especially going upstream in the little river to get to the source of the spring and the no flash is not that much a big deal and it made it easier to swim without them.

The delimitation of the sanctuary were much bigger then last year and there were fewer manatees because of all the warm weather during the past weeks, when it is warmer they tend to stay in the Gulf of Mexico. So at first it was a bit disappointing since we swam the perimeter and only saw one manatee in murky waters, we then decided to swim up river to he source of the spring and there the water was crystal clear and there were 4 or 5 manatees in there. At first there was a bunch of morons lifting all the sediments from the bottom and destroying the visibility so we moved to the other end of the spring where there was fewer people and started taking pictures. The spring sources are around 30 feet deep in crystal blue water and there was a manatee on the ledge about halfway down waiting for me and my camera.

After the bunch of morons had left we returned to the other spring source to look for more and we found two I think it was a mother and baby, although it could also have been a couple. Anyway here it was another opportunity for pictures. We spent around an hour and a half in the water and then got back to the boat 10 minutes before the time limit. By then everybody else was back on the boat, out of their wetsuits and waiting for us.

When we got back on deck, we packed up and drove the 45 miles to the cabin we rented at the Devil' Den in Williston Florida, but that will be part of my next posting.

Sombrero Reef in Marathon, Fla

Today we are doing our last ocean dive with Tilden dive center, the outfit in Marathon where I got certified. I want to return to Sombrero Reef where I took my first dives, it was so beautiful that I had promised to return, the first time I was in the process of passing my certification so I had lots of exercises to concentrate on so I ws not allowed to bring a camera either and on top of it I was afflicted with Seasickness so severe that I could barely dive. So it will be nice to return in a more relaxed setting and enjoy the scenery. Just in case I took two dramamine pills and had a very light lunch, half a salad without the chicken and very little vinaigrette while Sebastien is devouring a Baconator Burger in front of me. At the dive shop they tell us that the seas are 3 to 5 feet so I brace for the worst.

We get our gear on the boat the "Leisure Lee" and I quickly proceed to get my bcd and regulators hooked to the tank while we are attached to the docks and waiting for the two other divers diving with us today to arrive. By the time we get on our way I'm all setup so I can concentrate on relaxing. The two other divers have dove at Sombrero Reef the day before so we are going to make the first dive at another location called Lobster Hole and the second one at Sombrero Reef.

We get to the first dive site and I'm ready to dive first and since I'm also the closest to the platform and that the dive-master knows that I'm prone to seasickness and would like to spend as little time on the boat as possible, more especially when we are at the dive site with the motors off bouncing around at the pleasure of the waves, they get me in the water right away so I can hang on the tag line trailing at the back of the boat while waiting for Sebastien to join me. He does and we dive down together.

The diving spot is nice but there is a strong current that keeps me deviating from my compass heading, also the visibility is not that great 25 feet at he most and the water greenish. Nevertheless we make the most of it and I even find nice Hogfish to photograph. With the current the swim to the boat is confusing and difficult, I have to surface 4 times to get a visual on the boat. The sea is rough enough that we have to take our fin off while hanging to the tagline because we need both our hands to hold to the steps as they move in every directions including up and down while we are climbing aboard. I got to my seat, untied myself from my gear, leaned over the side of the boat and fed the fishes.

We consume more air then the other divers team so we have to sit on the boat until they come back and get onboard, the Captain then takes us to he secondary location for us to do our second dive, in the meanwhile we have to remove all our gear from the empty tank and put it on a full one. I'm so sick, still vomiting over the side that I cant't deal with the tank change so I asked the dive-master and he did it for me. I managed to stop vomiting before we got to the second site so when we got there I geared up and dove in. I decided not to bring my camera on this dive and to concentrate on the dive, Sebastien is taking some pictures anyways and I don't need the extra burden of my big camera.

So he meets me on the tag line and we dive down on that wonderful site of perfectly clear blue-waters with amazing visibility. The sea life is diverse and plentiful, with nothing to do but appreciate my surroundings and concentrating on my diving it is a perfect dive, well until about 30 minutes into the dive that is. I start feeling queazy so I signal Sebastien "something wrong + stomach" he asks me if I want to surface. I think about the last time on that exact same spot when it happened to me and I surfaced and barfed everywhere and that my instructor had told me afterwards that it was possible to do it trough he regulator. So I signal Sebastien "no to surface, ok to stay here" and according to him thats when I became surrounded by a cloud of chunks and particles, I grabbed my secondary regulator to breathe from while I cleaned my primary and we were able to continue the dive until we finished our tanks. We got back on board and I lied down on the big mattress in the middle until the other divers got back on board. Even if I'm sick every time I go to this place,I still want to return, it is so beautiful the nicest site I ever been to.

Diving in the Keys

So here we are in the keys more precisely in Key Largo we decided to come here to do some ocean diving on the reefs. We got here on Tuesday morning and we managed to get access to the hotel before the diving so we got setup and then proceeded to go to John Pennekamp to register for the afternoon dive, unfortunately they were going to the Spiegel Grove, a dive to deep for Sebastien my buddy who is not certified advanced open water. We went with Ocean Divers instead, it was a big boat we were 24 divers on board. We went to molasses reef where we dove 2 sites, the aquarium and the winch hole.

On the first dive I had problems with my mask leaking but the site was wonderful, a big sand bowl filled with fishes. It was a nice 25 feet profile but I forgot to turn on my flashes so my pictures are on the blue side, my navigation to get back to the boat was pretty accurate, enough to lower Sebastien's anxiety about being lost at sea far from the boat.

On the boat during the surface interval there was a lady that was starting to be seasick, it was her first time on a dive boat and she was snorkeling, felling myself a bit queasy I could relate very well to her predicament so I offered her some ginger to chew on and lavender essential oil to put behind her ears and offered her some tips on avoiding feeding the fishes. After a while we got back in the water for our second dive, I had fiddled with my mask while onboard and now it was leak free. This dive however presented Seb with a greater difficulty since the bottom was deeper then the capability of the camera so he needed perfect control of his buoyancy in order not to exceed 33 feet he did great with his maximum depth at 34 feet during that dive. I had also fixed my flash problem but in the middle of that dive I ran out of space on my memory card. That swim back to the boat was also dependent on navigation and I was pretty happy with the result.

Yesterday unfortunately when we went to the dive shop we learned that the waves were 4 to 6 feet high, making it impossible for me not to puke my guts out and very dangerous for both of us to handle the ladder on boat reentry so we did other activities instead. Today we are doing an afternoon dive from Marathon to Sombrero Reef.

Skorkel at Peanut Island

I took some friends of my mom snorkeling at Peanut Island today, although they come here to spend their winter every year they did not know of the place existed.
It's a very nice place, first it's an island that can only be accessed by water, in our case since none of us owns a boat we used a water taxi, it's only $10 per person and they even come back to pick you up. I took them to force-e my favorite dive shop in that sector to get fitted with rental gear; wet suit, mask, fins, snorkel for $35 per person.

Being subjected to the tide, we got in the water around 15h00 and snorkeled for an hour and a half. It was warm enough but with cloudy passages and when we got out it was raining but they have some gazebo we were able to get under to get dry and put our gear away. All in all we had a good time and now they know a good spot to go snorkeling when they have friends and family coming down south to visit.

A week of diving at the Blue Heron Bridge.

Funny enough this week the Bridge was voted #1 diving location in the US for photography by a big diving magazine. For us it is an ideal location, just a short drive way and with the dive shop just beside it where we can rent those big 100cf tanks for just 15 bucks, park the pickup with the tailgate as a nice place to get ready and walk 100 feet on the beach to get in the water. Also did I mentioned free parking and an outside shower to rinse all your gear.
The dive time is set by the tide, we can dive 1 hour before until 1 hour after the high tide giving us a 2 hours dive window. That time changes everyday advancing by 45 minutes, this week being the best times in the month, Monday the high tide was at 10h00 and tomorrow Saturday it will be at 14h00.

This week we managed to go diving 3 times so far, one day I couldn't because I was to congested with the cold and another day because again my sinus were blocked and I had a sore ear, also Sebastien my son and diving buddy had a sore back. Today Friday we decided to take a day off from diving so I could try to rest and get rid of my cold and for him to get his back better.

The main goal of our dives at the bridge are Photography and practice, so we both are taking pictures, Sebastien with my small point and shoot Canon D10 and me with my Sony Nex-5N in a 10 Bar housing with 2 Sea & Sea strobes. It's taking me some time to get used to my new camera system and using flashes a new thing for me, so much so that on the first dive Sebastien's pictures are better then mine, as the week progressed I got better and got some great shots. We also took some videos during the dives some of them we posted on facebook and some on my Youtube channel that can be found easy either by searching for bigphotodan on Youtube or by following he link on my website under the contact tab.

Of course we had a few adventures as always the case, one of the things that happened is that on monday at the end of the dive as we were almost on shore our dive flag that is installed on a small raft became untied and started floating away, pretty fast because there was strong wind and current, lucky for us I noticed before it disappeared from our visibility range and darted after it swimming as fast as possible it took me at least ten swim cycle before I could grab the end of the rope and drag it back to shore. You see the raft has a small compartment in it where we store the car keys while we dive so it was quite essential to retrieve it. I have since this incident made modifications to the attachment of the cable to the raft and let me assure you it will not happen again.

The reason diving at the bridge is well known in the diving community is the diversity of small sealife to photograph and we saw some interesting ones indeed. There was for instance this big Hermit Crab that live in a Conch Shell the size of a football, I noticed it and started taking pictures after a few shoots the current had carried me past it so I decided to swim a circle in order to get back to a better position, when I got back in position the water had gone cloudy with a lot of matter in suspension so I was not to happy with myself assuming that I had not been careful with my fins and had lifted all that matter from the bottom, but after observing the Crab it became evident that he was the one creating the dust storm on purpose in an effort to better camouflage itself. Sebastien even got it on video, I managed to take some of my best photos so far using my new system.

We've been seeing those big spider like crabs, after some research I learned that they are known as Yellow Stripes Arrow Crabs so on our last dive I spotted one that was in a good position and was able to observe it for a while, during that time I took some good pictures and also a video.
We plan to go back diving at the bridge tomorrow Saturday and maybe on Sunday.

Next week the tide times are not as good so we plan to go diving in the Keys for a few days.

First dive at the bridge

There was an opportunity to dive at the bridge today but it was late in the day because we are dependent on the tide and today the only option was before the sunset. So we left around 15h30 and got to the dive shop conveniently located minutes from the dive site around 16h00 to rent the tanks, we then had to stop to buy a bathing suit for the one of us who had forgotten his at home.

We started to setup and part of it was to assemble our diving flag, after 15 minutes of fighting with it with minimal results I decided to read the instructions. To make a story short it took u a while to get in the water and there wa not much sunlight left. So it was a short dive but it was fun and it got us in the spirit of things.

Driving down to Florida

On the 4h we went to pick-up the trailer at U-Haul and drove to Dunham to load my mom's car, the plan is to sleep there and leave from here the next morning. The drive to there is a little tricky due to road conditions, snow drifts and a partially covered road with winds makes the empty trailer easy to sway. However my main concern is to be able to do a turn around with the trailer on the one lane street in front of her house. Let's say that I was able but it took all that my truck could give on the 4 wheel drive in the low gear to get in and out of the snow bank.

Once we had everything in position we were then able to load the car on the trailer and all the luggage, diving gear etc.. In the truck and car. By sundown we were all packed up and the rest of he family joined us for supper and we spent the evening together.
So the next morning it was faster to get going. Since we left from Dunham we had to take a country road all the way to Lacolle, it was still a bit slippery so we took it slow, that night we slept somewhere in Maryland and the next night near Savannah, we got to the U-Haul rental center in West Palm Beach around 17h00 and that evening we went to the restaurant with friends of my Mom.