Dive March 3 2003

Cedric Beust and I were both in Orlando (Hank was there too, but he had a meeting with customers) for BEA's E-World convention and of course we thought about getting a dive in. Orlando is actually about 45 minutes from the coast, and during the winter months the seas are churned up quite badly, so most people dive the 400 springs in the area. The main attraction is manatee, but we just really want to see what spring diving was like. We hooked up with an outfit that took us to Blue Spring State Natural Park.

Upon arrival your greeted by a caution sign:

Looking at where we were going to dive, you could see why. Har har, actually this was taken at Disney World's Animal Kingdom, there were no alligators hanging around the spring because at 72 degrees the water was too cool for their liking.

The surrounding area was very swampy. Before we dove we saw a mother raccoon and her 3 babies cross over the river on this tree.

This was the walk down to the spring entrance.

This is where the spring enters the St. Johns River.

Another view where the spring enters the St. Johns River, on the other bank we did see an alligator.

More swamp.

Here is the verbiage about the spring. The important bit of data is the amount of water flowing out of the spring. This means that when you swim down into the spring entrance you have to drag yourself down because the water flow is strong.

Here is a picture of how the spring is structured. We stopped at 67 feet, well before the rock. They don't allow lights on these dives, as they have found this encourages people to go deeper and get in trouble. The whole time your in the spring though you can always look over your shoulder upwards and see the sunlight.

This is the view from where you enter the river and walk near the bank up towards the spring.

Here is a picture of the spring entrance, its darkish hole in the center.

This is another angle.

The dive into the spring was pretty cool to begin with because of the high water flow, down inside there was a lot of limestone flumes and formations. The water was crystal clear, but the sky was a bit overcast so things were not so well lit up. Cedric was a bit nonplused, I enjoyed it, not a living reef, but something I had never done before. After exiting the hole, we swam down the river towards the swimming area. I loved this, the water was only 5-8 feet deep, but there was moss, and fish and turtles. It was like living a childhood fantasy of being able to swim down the rivers you played in as a kid. We weren't able to do the second dive (which was an exact repeat of the dive we had just done) due to timing issues which was actually fine. After haggling over refund we headed back to the convention.