Blue Springs (Orange City)

I talked the parents into coming up for easter to visit me this weekend. My dad and I dove Blue Springs today for the first time. Very cool site, one of the most impressive caverns I've seen (and I could barely see it). Vis was about 40ft.

3-4 manatees hung out in the spring run all day, poor things kept following people and all the people had to avoid them due to park rules (no closer than 50ft). They were at a theme park and are being reintroduced, so they want you to feed them, and have no fear of humans. The rangers kept pushing people back and forth all day from the river to the spring and back trying to avoid them having human contact. It reminded you of the fat kid on the playground in grade school that wanted a friend, but everyone avoided him :smt081 It was my closest manatee encounter, as one cut me off and came within 10ft of me, they're MUCH bigger in person.

The cavern has a unique layering of the rocks unlike anything I've ever seen before. Vis was OK until you got to the bottom, and for some reason it sucked down there, got worse as you got further back. There was a guy snorkeling past the cave warning sign with an HID light, made me nervous while tying off that I'd block him in. It was an overcast day, which limited light penetration, so our cavern dive was short, which wasn't a big deal. We spent the rest of the day practicing following a line through the trees in a high flow area without a mask (trying to prepare for the cave class), and I was learning to get used to a bat wing style BC.

Good dive, a nice change from the springs we've all done 100 times, I'd recommend it, but it won't be a dive we do every weekend. I met a group of divers who are local, which was awesome, since I haven't met many divers since moving to Orlando, at around 4:30pm, we had about 10 of us divers who were all within the 20-25yrs old range (my peer group), traded contact info, so hopefully we'll be getting some more diving in here in Central Florida. What made it even better is that everyone I met appeared to be competent divers from seeing them in the water, people you actually want for a dive partner. If it were just for the networking, today was a good day.

I have gone to Blue Spring four times over the past two weeks with my students, and we were denied entry one time as the manatees were in the head spring.

The other times the manatees were asleep in the run, but as jj1987 said, they are insistently curious of humans and approach divers and snorkelers, much to the dismay of the park rangers who now spend most of their day trying to herd everyone away from them. The official rule is that you must do all you can to maintain at least a 50ft distance away from them. Blue Spring State Park now also has the majority of the river (the drift dive section out), sealed off as a manatee sanctuary, so its a long walk up and BACK after your dive.

We had to cut our diving short and exit the water on two occasions as they were not going to leave us be :roll:

One of them developed quite a "thing" for one of the students....see below :)

Was closed to divers today 3-26 because of 55 manatees in the run, three at the boil. Better call before going. They let me stand at the gate for 1 hour 15 minutes while they counted them and then canceled any diving.

None of this makes sense to me. I recently snorkled with Manatees at Crystal River. There you are allowed to touch them if they approach you. There were divers in the immediate area who were not allowed to touch the manatees, but the snorkelers were swimming all around. You were instructed not to approach them, but that was not an issue, they were immediately and literally in your face, rubbing againist you, they like their belly scratched.


Why the big difference at this location???

BS is a State Park and CR is a Federal Sanctuary. I watched a film a couple of months back that will really open your eyes to the problems at CR. I am not a manatee hugger by any means but this film is disturbing. Baby Duck might be able to contact to the guy and see if it is up on the Web anywhere. I think the guys name is Mike Santa Maria