Mermaid

When Christopher Columbus came to the new world 600 years ago, he spotted what he thought was a mermaid and wrote that they were not quite as beautiful as the paintings he had seen. You have to wonder what was going through the poor man's mind.

Well.............................duh Chris, I think you spent too many days on that ship.

This was my first time in Florida waters in SCUBA gear...but first, let me plug Rachel and Don Domingo and my friends at Maui Dreams Dive Company in Kihei, Maui, HI. Maui Dreams is where I consider my birthplace in diving therefore everyone else will always be compared to them.

Looking for a manatee dive, I was plugging around on the internet and found American Pro Dive Shop in Crystal Springs and was more than pleased with my experience. It seems you don't SCUBA with manatees but snorkel. Since this was summer and the waters are warm (73 degrees) there weren't very many manatees to spot but we managed to locate a couple. We slipped into the water pretty early before the other shops had arrived. Captain Keith dropped anchor in pretty shallow water and we approached the manatees. Most of my experience has been in salt water and the green algae and less than pristine visibility took some getting used to. The manatees were easily approachable and we spent quite a time photographing and just hanging out. After about 30 minutes we left the area and went out further to the caverns. The caverns were much clearer and we dropped into the hole where some of the fresh spring water was coming from. Our depth was eventually around 50 feet and saw several blue crabs, blue catfish, shrimp and a gobe or two. I would advise you to book your dives early because they fill up fairly rapidly.

There's this marker in the entrance of the cavern that seems to be a prophecy of sorts. In the mid 80's, manatees were down to 1,500-2,000 in the USA. According to the dive masters at the dive shop, populations now could be somewhere between 6 and 8 thousand. They've now become "protected" as opposed to "endangered".


Here's a montage of my dive with the manatee.

Click here.