Manatee Springs

[jj1987]

From my last dive there 2 weeks or so ago that I had commented on how shocked I was at the flow, the flow/siphon is way down in catfish, but manatee is still very strong. I took a look around the siphon side with no real fear that it was sucking me in, very very tame today (you could notice it, barely, certainly not the system that I decided to avoid 2 weeks ago).

All in all 3 very good dives. For some reason the manatee side intrigues me more than the catfish side, but it makes a turn really fast and kills the cavern zone, I'm going to revisit the site after my intro class.

Viz was average for this system, maybe 100ft, but my light was killed by dark walls and floating debree, so at times it didn't seem like it.

We had a "dive master" ask my dad and I to dive with us in the parking lot, proclaiming he had several cave dives, but didn't see the need for a even a cavern class due to his experience. I told him I didn't feel comfortable diving with him without at least a cavern card (since we were doing a cavern dive), but he seemed to think I was being rude. I finally had to blame the park's light policy to get him to leave me alone and let me finish gearing up, I'm not sure where some people go about missing the basic healthy fear of a cave. Hate using that reason, because it makes the state parks sound like the bad guys, but that's the best idea I could think of.

For the last dive I had a board member recognize me from some pics I had posted and join me on a short dive over in catfish, always nice to meet new dive buddies.