West Palm Beach Florida

Author: Floyd Newman

“It was a dark and stormy night.” That’s how our Palm Beach diving experience began, except that it wasn’t night. Just as we pulled into the marina parking lot, the heavens opened, and we loaded our gear onto the boat in a torrent of rain. I remember hoping that it wasn’t an omen. After a good soaking, the rain stopped, and we met our shipmates. There were 14 of us from Richmond, and about 8 others, on the 40 foot "Seacure”. I reassured my son and daughter that dive boats were not always this crowded, as we threaded our way through the huddled masses to find an unclaimed tank for our first dive. But, it was a beautiful Sunday afternoon, now that the rain had stopped, and I was looking forward to my first ever Palm Beach diving. This was also Tiller Jr.’s very first ocean dive, and he was nervous. He had done quite well in his OW checkout dives in the quarry, but that had been over a month ago. My son is a cautious soul; unlike his sister, who tends to be too relaxed and confident. There are, of course, advantages and disadvantages to both kinds of personalities. But I knew that my son’s mind was churning away at all of the unknown terrors that awaited him beneath the placid surface of the sea. The only thing I could tell him was that the nervousness would decrease with experience. Besides, a little nervousness is a good thing. It makes you more careful. After a 45 minute ride, we arrived at our first dive site: “Bath and Tennis”. We were split into two groups, with a dive master for each group to carry the marker buoy, and informed that anyone diving tables would have to surface after 30 minutes, while those diving computers would have to come up after 40 minutes (or 750 psi). Well, neither of my kids have computers, because I want them to fully understand the tables before they go digital. So I resigned myself to diving the table profile during the coming week. The diving procedure on the “Seacure” is a little awkward. You have to gear up, put on your fins, navigate the passage to the back of the boat, and step off a barely adequate wooden platform that is half-submerged in the water. After the first day, I started putting my fins on after entering the water, which seemed to make a lot more sense. The water was nice and warm. And clear. We could easily see the bottom 40 feet below us. I gathered my kids around me, and we began our descent. I was watching Tiller Jr. as we sank to the bottom, making sure he was clearing his ears, and exchanging a lot of OK signs with him and his sister. Then we were there: the reef, the fish. I spread my hands to say to my kids “this is what it’s all about”. Within seconds of hitting the water, my son’s nervousness was washed right away, and he swam up to me with a double thumbs-up. At first I thought he needed to surface, but at my puzzled look, he corrected himself and changed it to a double OK. Since there is a current, all of the diving in the Palm Beach area is drift diving, which is my favorite kind. There’s nothing like drifting effortlessly over the reef like a hawk in flight. The current was usually not so strong that you couldn’t easily swim back against it if someone upstream found something interesting. And there was plenty to see. I was reminded of the Florida Keys, with some interesting differences. There were the usual angelfish, parrotfish, and cowfish varieties, pleanty of butterfly fish and schools of grunt, but not as many barracuda as I usually see in the Keys. In their place were quite a number of Trumpetfish (which I had seldom seen) and a very healthy population of stingrays, including the biggest I have ever encountered. And there were more Spotted Morays than Green, which, (in my limited Florida experience) was the opposite of what I would have expected. The dive masters knew the reef well, and introduced us to several of the inhabitants. The first was a very large Green Moray, who was not at all intimidated by the divers clustered around his hole, and suffered himself to be stroked by the braver members of our group. Tiller Jr. was not one of these. Well, OK; neither was his father. I’ll pet a moray some day. Honest. It turns out I didn’t need to worry about the 30 minute table limit, since Tiller Jr. sucked his tank down to 750 in about 25 minutes. He was scooting over and around the group like a guppy, and although his small size made him quite efficient under water (and fast as a barracuda), the effort, coupled with his excitement, made for some serious air consumption. Both my son and daughter were wildly enthusiastic about the second dive of the day. During our surface interval, we enjoyed the ice cold drinks provided by the dive boat, and I tried to explain to my son how to take it easy down there and stop working so hard. His sister, I’m proud to say, couldn’t be more comfortable under water, and her air consumption roughly equaled mine. But she has the advantage of two years of experience on her younger brother. I’m also proud to say that by the second day, they were rigging their gear and changing tanks between dives without being told (and doing it properly, too!). The second dive, on the “Flower Garden”, was much like the first, with one major exception. In all my (15) years of diving, I have never had the pleasure of seeing a sea turtle in the wild. Well, during our stay in WPB, I made up for lost time. We came upon a huge Loggerhead on the reef who swam right across in front of us before gliding off into the blue. A couple of remoras had apparently become dislodged from the turtle, because they were swimming frantically around regarding each of us as a possible new host. We were to see at least one turtle every day (mostly big Loggerheads, but there was one dinner-plate size Green). Encounters with creatures like that are why I love diving. There were 10 dives over the next 4 days (2 each day plus 2 night dives on Tuesday), and I did them all, although each of my kids sat out one dive apiece. The dives were mostly on reefs (“Flower Garden”, Paul’s Reef”, “Ron’s Reef”, “Breakers”), and each was as incredible as the first (except for the very last one, when the dive master missed the reef in the current, and we learned that there is a LOT of naked sand down there). Tiller Jr. got better on his air consumption with each dive, and on the last one we reached 30 minutes BEFORE he got to 750 psi. Each dive had some surprises. We dove the “Mizpah” and her sister wrecks, one of which had a nice little swim-through (which I did but was not comfortable letting the kids experience). Tiller Jr. swam right over a Southern Stingray that was bigger than he was. On another dive, my daughter spotted a beautiful Goldentail Moray swimming across the reef, and on another day we found an uncommon (according to Humann) Goldspotted Eel slithering along the bottom, looking much more like a snake than an eel. On one of the later dives I saw an exquisitely beautiful little fish that I didn’t remember ever seeing before. It was a small black Angelfish with vivid yellow vertical stripes, and neon-blue pectoral fins. Thanks (again) to Humann, I now know that it was a juvenile French Angelfish, and it is now right up there as one of my favorite reef fish. I think my kids would agree that the night dives were among the best. We dove “The Trench”, which is a narrow sand channel between coral ledges. Turtles use the Trench as their bedroom, and we saw several with their heads poked up under the coral sound asleep. Someone said it was like a turtle parking garage. One coral hole was the home of the Arnold Schwarzenegger of crabs. This fellow was HUGE (his claws were as big as my hands), and he was not at all afraid of us. He kept pacing back and forth in his home, daring us to mess with him. Nobody did. I managed to gently catch a groggy little Baloonfish, which puffed up into a spiny ball about the diameter of a saucer. The kids laughed when I released him and he tried to swim still inflated with those tiny fins. However, I did NOT touch the Spotted Scorpionfish. Just finding one was thrill enough. It was a tired bunch who boarded the plane for the trip home on Thursday. Tired, but with memories to last a lifetime. And, for Tiller Jr., new confidence and enthusiasm. It was a great dive trip, and I will return some day with the rest of the family (my wife and soulmate was recovering from surgery and couldn’t come along, even as a non-diver, and my youngest daughter stayed with her).

Two technical notes. I have a Sherwood Minimus octo, which has been criticized on this board as unacceptably hard to breathe at depth. I tried it out myself on our deepest dive, and it did perfectly fine at 90 feet. Although it was not, of course, as silky smooth as my Oceanic Delta II, it is certainly acceptable as a secondary air source. I also own (and love) a Princeton Tec Shockwave, which was “supposed” to leak like a sieve below 60 feet. Not a drop of leakage at 90 feet and after about 12 dives. Conclusion: I will continue to recommend both highly.