Boynton Beach & Key Largo Florida

Author: Don W

This is a dive report for four dives that we did on Sunday (5-23-99) and Tuesday (5-25-99) in south Florida. Its long, but I always enjoy reading other peoples long dive reports. We usually do more diving when we travel, but we were in town for a family wedding, so we had a lot of other things going on as well as the diving.

Sunday (5-23-99) Splashdown Divers (Boynton Beach Fl)

Splashdown Divers runs a single dive boat out of the marina at Ocean Avenue and 6th street in Boynton Beach, Florida. We arrived at the dock at 1:00P for a 1:30P dive. We have all of our own gear, but were using their tanks. They had both air and EANx36 available, but we elected to use air because of the shallow dive (50' max), and additional cost of the Nitrox ($11/bottle vs $6.50/bottle). Nancy and I are both Nitrox certified, but for this type of dive we are almost always limited by Nancy's air consumption instead of bottom time considerations. Most of the other divers elected to use nitrox.

The dive boat is medium sized with room for a maximum of 24 divers. On this trip there were only 8 divers, so we had a whole quadrant of the boat to ourselves. We picked the quadrant with the snacks and drinks :) BTW, they provided animal crackers, pretzels, crackers and cheese, water, and soft drinks on the boat.

The reef we were diving was only about twenty minutes from the dock, so we were in the water by 2:00P. This reef is several hundred yards offshore from Boynton Beach in about 50' of water. There is plenty of boat traffic, so it would probably not make a good beach dive. The reef itself is between 30 and 150 yards (substitue meters if you're not familiar with yards) wide, and drops to deeper sand on the ocean side, and shallower sand on the beach side. It runs North/South parallel to the beach as far as I could tell.

There was about 2 knots of S to N current, so each buddy pair was given a surface float, and a line to tow it with so that the boat could keep track of them, and they wouldn't be hit by other boat traffic. This was our first experience with drift diving, but it turned out to be very easy and natural.

First dive: We dropped directly onto the top of the reef, and then zig/zagged from the beach side to the ocean size, and back several times to get a feel for the reef. It appears to be a healthy reef, with lots of living fan, barrel, and staghorn corral. We also saw what appeared to be living black corral, but I'm not an expert on corral so could be mistaken. Visability was about 50' (17 meters).

Shortly after entering the water, we saw a large turtle swimming away from us. Later, we drifted right over the top of a larger turtle that was sitting on the bottom. It was larger than six feet (2 meters) in diameter, and allowed us to drift right over it before rising from the bottom and swimming away--an awesome creature.

There was a lot of fish life on the reef, and we saw lots of yellowtail jacks, angels, as well as puffers of many colors and markings. There were also spiny (Florida) lobsters and the turtles. My computer shows 52' max depth for 43 minutes. We did our safety stop drifting under the buoy.

2nd Dive: After a surface interval, we were back in the water, and drifting over the reef again. The current had picked up noticeably and we were now moving across the reef at a good clip. Same fish and coral as before, but this time I noticed a strip of monofiliment on the bottom and wound it around my hand before putting it in my BC pocket. It had a weight on it, but no lure or hook. A little while later, I noticed a long string of nylon anchor line lying on the bottom and followed it to a good sized yacht anchor stuck on the ocean side of the reef. Curious, I followed the line to the other end, and found a boat cleat with the line wrapped around it laying on the bottom :) The cleat had two long screws still in it so it was obvious that someone had gotten their anchor stuck and pulled the cleat off of the boat trying to free it. The anchor line was shiny and new, and couldn't have been there very long.

I wound the line around my arm, and pulled myself back to the anchor and freed it from the crevice it was stuck in. I had to be careful to avoid breaking any of the coral that the line was draped over.

I now had a nice new anchor and ~200 feet of line lying on the bottom at 50 feet. The problem was that I didn't have a lift bag with me, and the anchor was too heavy to lift with my BC (yeah, and thats also a no-no because you could drop the anchor and rocket to the surface with all that air in your BC--I had AOW too).

What I should have done is to tie my safety sausage to the cleat, and send it to the surface. However, I didn't think of that. Instead, I started unwinding the line from my arm, and ascending under our drift float. You'd think that this would work pretty well. After all, I had 200' of anchor line to work with, and the surface was only 50' up there. Did I mention the current? Oh yeah, pretty soon, Nancy and I were doing our safety stop at 15 feet, with about 200' of anchor line strung out on an angle behind me. I'll bet the dive boat guys thought it was pretty odd that our float had stopped moving while all of the other floats were drifting along at 3-4 kts. Anyway, we finished our safety stop and starting swimming the line to the surface. I inflated my BC, but could only get about 3 to 4 feet of the line above the surface. The current was strong enough that I had to fully inflate my BC just to do that.

The dive boat came over to get us and Nancy let go of the line to go to the boat. She was immediately swept 10 to 15 feet away by the current, but grabbed hold of the line behind the back of the boat which was there for that purpose. I couldn't let go of the anchor line without dropping it to the bottom, so the boat had to make another approach to pick me up. I tried to hand off the anchor line to a crewmember, but she couldn't reach it and instead tossed me a line from the boat. It wasn't long enough to tie to the anchor line, and meantime the boat was being swept away by the current. In a couple of seconds, I was holding onto two lines and trying to decide which to let go of. I couldn't hold the boat in that current, so I dropped the anchor line and swam to the boat. Oh well... Anchors aren't that expensive. The dive boat captain marked the place so that they could come back later to get the anchor. Of course, if I'd been thinking better at the bottom, we'd have had a nice sausage floating at the surface with the line tied to it and we could have retrieved it at will. Like I said... Oh well. The computer shows max depth of 51' for 43 minutes.

Nice people and we had a good time. I would definitely go out with them again. (And may later in the week.)

Tuesday (5-25-99) Key Largo Fla.

We chartered a 50' sailboat for the day from Morning Star Charters in Key Largo (http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/rwsail/page/index.html) Our charter was scheduled for 12:00p to 8:00p which was good because we were actually staying in Boca Raton, and had to drive down to the keys. Boca Raton to Key Largo is almost exactly a two hour drive via the turnpike, so after breakfast and a trip to the grocery store (You have to bring your own food and drinks), we showed up at the dock right on time at noon.

Rick and Amy live on the sailboat and charter for a living. They can take as many as six people out at a time. They both have US Captains licenses, and PADI Divemaster certifications. Rick has been chartering out of Key Largo for the last 14 years.

Since we had the boat to ourselves, we could go anywhere that we wanted to, but we let Rick and Amy pick the dive sites since we had never dived off of Key Largo before.

Dive 3 - Molasses Reef

The sea was nearly flat calm on the way to the dive site. There was enough wind to make it worth putting up the sail, but the seas were only about one foot swells--calmer than most days on Lake Travis back home. We motor-sailed out to the reef at a leisurly pace of about 4 knots. Definitely different from your typical dive boat.

Molasses Reef is a shallow reef off shore from Key Largo. It is in a protected area, so there are mooring buoys for the dive boats. Anchoring and fishing are not allowed within the protected area. As it turns out there is a NOAA weather station tower on the reef, so you can look it up on the internet and get real-time weather reports right from the reef. It is a popular dive and snorkel sight, and there are also glass-bottom boat tours that go out there from Key Largo. Between dive and snorkel boats, there were quite a few boats tied up to the mooring bouys, but Rick said that on weekends they often have all of the bouys occupied and multiple boats tied to each bouy!

Rick told us that there was a tame moray eel pretty close to our mooring site, and also wreckage from an old shipwreck from the 1890's.

We geared up and hit the water to find an area of relatively shallow coral heads with sand channels between them. The coral heads rose up to within a few feet of the surface in places, but the sand channels were in 30+ feet (10 Meters) of water. There was a little current running, so our plan was to go find the wreckage first since it was up-current, and then come back and explore the sand channels around the boat. Apparently we headed off on a little bit the wrong angle because we never did find the wreckage. The closest we came was an old piece of hemp rope buried in the sand.

The visability was not quite as good as it had been off of Boynton beach--it looked like about 40-50 feet vis. Also, the coral was pretty distressed, probably from the dive traffic, and its proximity to the surface. There was a LOT of fish there though. As we came back to the boat and started exploring the sand channels, the first thing we ran into was two 3-4' long nurse sharks swimming the other way. They were cruising round and round through the channels, and we ran into them and another one several times. There was also a small beat-up looking barracuda swiming around looking for lunch. There were a lot of fish hanging around under the coral outcroppings and we found more lobster back in the crevices. The dive was shallow enough that we could have stayed a long time, but eventually boredom got the better of us and we headed back to the boat. As we were hanging out by the boat, we saw another couple of divers teasing a moray eel out of a coral head nearby. It was a smallish moray, but seemed to be pretty tame. One consideration here is that the tops of the coral heads are close enough to the surface that you need to be careful not to get hit by one of the boats if you go over the top of them. We had a boat go right over the top of us when we were at 15 feet. Its prop was probably down 5 feet, so there was ten feet of clearance, but it was kind of a funny feeling watching that prop turning from that close.

We came up right beside the sailboat and showered off. While we were fixing lunch, Rick put up the sail and headed for the next dive site. The computer shows 30' for 48 minutes. I came back with 1500 PSI left.

Dive 4 - Wreck of the Benwood

The Benwood is a WWII freighter that sank due to a collision with another boat while trying to avoid submarines. According to Rick they were both running without lights and collided off of the coast the other boat made the harbor, but the captain of the Benwood ran it into shallow water to save the cargo. The boat sank there and was partially exposed and a hazard to navigation so the Navy and Army Air corp used it for bombing practice during the war. As a result, the wreck is pretty well broken up, and lies in about 40 feet of water.

There are mooring buoys around the wreck site, but this time we had the whole site to ourselves for most of the time we were there.

Amy tied onto one of the mooring buoys, and we geared up and hit the water. The first thing we noticed were metal plates scattered around on the floor, but after following the debris trail for a little ways we came to the main hull. The visability at the site was the same as molasses reef--40 to 50', and we quickly lost sight of the sailboat in the haze.

The cargo deck of the freighter is still intact, but the hull plates have been mostly scattered around by the bombing. The stern is gone, but the bow is mostly intact. We swam down one side of the freighter and around the stern, then back up the other side. There are a lot of fish hanging around the wreck, and it has become an artificial reef.

As we got to the bow, we could see a big school of large angel fish hanging out in the deeper water about 30' from the wreck. We were down on the sand coming around the bow when suddenly a cloud of yellowtail and other fish darted around the bow right over us.

We were interested to see what had frightened them, so we swam on around the bow to find two medium sized tuna and three or four groupers swimming around. The groupers didn't pay any attention to us, but the tuna took off. Soon we were surrounded by clouds of yellowtail, angels, and other fish. There was a fairly large grouper hanging around that the other fish didn't seem to like very well, and a couple of juvenile grouper that they didn't pay much attention to.

We swam on around the bow, and up over the side of the wreck, and then back over the top of the bow. As we came over the top of the bow, there were a lot of fish hidden in the hollow areas in the bow, and I could see the tail and part of the body of a huge moray eel. After swimming around a little bit I finally got to where I could see all of the eel, and it was BIG. Its head was peeking out of a hole in the bow, and its body wound back into the bow and around a couple of steel plates. It looked like it had found a pretty good hiding place where it could feed at will, because all of the fish tended to hang out right around where its hiding hole was. I'd guess that this eel was around 7 feet long, and 8 inches to a foot in diameter. Of course, I didn't have a tape measure, and things look bigger under water so it might not have been that big. It was still the biggest eel I have ever seen.

We swam down the deck of the freighter, and I found a scorpian fish camoflouged along the north side. I pointed at it, and even shown my light on it, but Nancy didn't see it until I went right up to it and made it move a little. Until then, she had probably been wondering what the heck was so interesting about that piece of rust and coral. Scorpian fish look a lot like stone fish that you see in French Polynesia, and they are also venomous according to Rick. When we were in Moorea, a guy from New Zealand told us that people often died after stepping on stone fish. This after we had seen a couple of them on a little stone jetty right off of the main swimming beach in about two feet of water!!

As we were swimming back to the boat, we saw another diver standing on the bottom by the wreck watching us. He was stirring up a little silt from where he was standing. I always wonder why people stand on the bottom when with a little practice they could just hover. Over time Nancy and I have both learned to do this because in Lake Travis the visability goes almost instantly to nil if you kick up silt from the bottom.

With the haze, we found our mooring line and didn't even realize it. from the bottom, you couldn't even see the sailboat up on the end of the mooring line and we swam right past it thinking that it wasn't the right one.

Fortunately there wasn't much current, so I ended up deploying my saftey sausage and we did our saftey stop under it. We ended up with about a 25 yard surface swim back to the boat. My computer showed 43' max for 47 minutes.

Once back aboard we put our dive gear out to dry on the bow of the boat and kicked back. We did a leisurely sail back to Key Largo and watched the sun go down from the ocean. We got back in at about 8:30PM and got some dinner before heading back to Boca Raton.

Thoughts on the sailboat vs traditional dive boats:

Rick and Amy charge $55 / person for four hours, or $110 / person for eight hours. Since most of the dive charters we talked to were charging around $50 / person for a two-tank dive, it is a little more expensive to charter the sailboat, but to us it was definitely worth it. If we had wanted to, we could have gotten in four dives in the eight hours we were out, and then it would have been roughly cost equivalent with doing a morning two-tank, and an afternoon two-tank. As it was, we spent a lot of time just sailing along, kicked back and talking so we spent about double for our two dives, but we had the boat all to ourselves and could go wherever we wanted to. This is a pretty cool way to dive and I'd definitely go back in the future. I think next time I might consider going out a little earlier in the morning and trying to get three or so dives during the day instead of just two. Also, I'd pick a deep site like the Duane for the first dive and then come back to the shallow sites towards the end of the day.