Key's Diving

[DSimp]

Coming from Colorado to the Key's in the spring or early summer. Is there good diving in Key West or is the best Key Largo? Are there any charters you can ge tto dive in Binimi?

 

[ReefHound]

Coming from Colorado to the Key's in the spring or early summer. Is there good diving in Key West or is the best Key Largo? Are there any charters you can ge tto dive in Binimi?

Don't know about Bimini, probably too far away.

Is the diving in Key West any good? Compared to Colorado, or Texas, it's awesome. Compared to the rest of the Keys, it's below par. In my opinion.

So if you go to Key West and have no transportation or time to go elsewhere in the Keys, you can go diving there and you likely won't go home feeling like you wasted your money. You'll see corals and fishes. But if you're going all that way, it's well worth driving up to Looe Key or Marathon for better (and cheaper) diving.

 

[mike_s]

Most people will tell you that the diving in other parts of the Keys is much better than Key West. I also wasn't impressed with the diving around Key West and prefer the other parts also.

Blackbeards is the only operation that runs routine dive boats to Bimini, out of Miami. However, they are relocating their fleet to depart out of Freeport (Bahamas) starting in 2006.

For day trips, it's not really cost productive to run to Bimini to dive. At 15 knots, it would take you 4 hours to get there and 4 hours back, so 8 hours total travel time. You'd have to clear customs coming and going. The Bahamas also up'd their customs fees a couple years ago to $300 per boat, instead of $50-$85. Also any trip over 12 hours would require paying two captains instead of one. So a lot of travel time and $$ and not a lot of time left for diving.

 

[cleung]

There's okay diving off Key West but I would think that most people would say that the Key Largo area would be better since there's more dive sites and it's in a protected marine park. I think one of the ways you can tell is where most of the scuba shops are located in. There's probably a reason why they call Key Largo the dive capital of the world. I have an article about Keys diving in the Articles section of ScubaBoard.

 

[KeyLargoBrent]

Coming from Colorado to the Key's in the spring or early summer. Is there good diving in Key West or is the best Key Largo? Are there any charters you can ge tto dive in Binimi?

Near Key West, the best diving IME is up the road about 20 miles (and offshore about 5) at Looe Key National Marine Sanctuary.

Key Largo is often touted as the "Dive Capitol of the World". Dive both ends, and the middle (Marathon) if you can. Key West is better topside, and Key Largo is better below. The Upper Keys tend to have better visibility, on average, than the Middle & Lower Keys. Other than that... it's all good!

Unless you're on a live-aboard or cruise ship, Bimini is best dived out of Bimini. Enjoy!

 

[DSimp]

Thanks for all the replys. Looks like it Lorgo, Marathon, and Looe for me. Thanks again

 

[100days-a-year]

KW by far has the best diving,you just have to travel 20 to 100 miles West.Few day trips will make it that far.Quite a bit of the vis around KW is impacted by the cruise ships stirring up the bottom.Since the prevailing currents are to the NE we head SW to the Marquesas.The diving around American Shoal to Marathon is also very good.Looe Key,while small is the standard by which other areas in the Keys are judged.As far as biodiversity,vis and opportunity to see large animals.I've been diving down there over 20yrs with well in excess of 1500 dives from Key Largo to West of KW and never get tired.