We are looking for a dive charter diving the wrecks. Any suggestions or recommendations?
Looking For Dive Charter Pompano Wrecks
- Thread starter Oldbear
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Jonah Kowall
Registered
Parrot Island Scuba, Dixie Divers, Aqualife, South Florida Diving HQ. I prefer the top three personally, but SFDHQ has more boats and thus has more wreck trips on the books.
Hands down, Hydrotherapy charters is my favorite. Capt. Nick and Landon are super knowledgable and you won't be diving with a huge crowd.
VsubT
Contributor
+1 for Hydrotherapy, especially for the deeper wrecks here. Captain Nick does a great job on hot drops + drift deco.
Bring a decent sized reel for your DSMB though, since the current can get sporty and some of the best wrecks are at 150-200’.
Lance
Bring a decent sized reel for your DSMB though, since the current can get sporty and some of the best wrecks are at 150-200’.
Lance
We are working on the site. There are a couple of issues we are waiting on resolution for, that are not on our end .
How are you doing, Michael? It's been a while.
I go to Pompano Beach every winter, and the situation has changed over the years and is still changing. Here are a couple of comments on the operators listed above.
SFDH has three boats, and it lists all three on the daily schedule. People sign up for whichever one they want. At least when I am there, they don't get enough divers to run three boats, and they often will end up combining the people they have signed up, often on one boat. That boat will then go to two sites. It will drop one group off at one site and then go to the other. This is often a drift dive and a wreck dive. I don't like the fact that if you have an emergency at one site and have to surface, your boat may be at the other site picking up passengers and won't even know you are having a problem. (And that happened last year.)
Parrot Island is a part-time business usually going out in afternoons. I used them a lot 20 years ago, but not since then.
Dixie Divers is pretty far north of Pompano Beach and tends to dive more in the north. It tends to like shallower reefs. Its ownership changed a few years ago, and I have not used them since then.
Aqualife has in the past dedicated itself to shallow dive sites, and that is according to the owner when I scouted them out a couple years ago. I had an interesting experience diving with friends this past winter. There were two of us in a boat, drifting and watching our diver (drift dive) in the water who was near the end of her dive. We were properly flagged. The Aqualife boat came up almost next to us and dropped a DM in the water. I said it looked like they were trying to hook onto a wreck, and my friend (the boat owner) said, "There aren't any wrecks here." A minute or so later, the DM came to the surface, bringing the mooring line. Nope, no wreck. The Aqualife boat picked him up as we were bringing our diver on board. At that point we were about 25 feet apart. The Aqualife boat took off. I have no idea what they were doing or where they went after that. That is my only Aqualife experience.
I am holding out hope for Hydrotherapy when I go this year. Landon, please make it work. Please.
An update....
As I mentioned earlier, when I talked to the owner of Aqualife a couple years ago, he said they focused on shallow wrecks and reefs.
I am on a South Florida FaceBook group, and Aqualife just made a post showing them diving the Hydro Atlantic, which is a technical diving site near Boca Raton, roughly 150 feet to the deck and 170 feet to the sand. They were tied into it, meaning that a DM dropped down and tied a float to the wreck.
This brings up two changes in the local dive scene.
As I mentioned earlier, when I talked to the owner of Aqualife a couple years ago, he said they focused on shallow wrecks and reefs.
I am on a South Florida FaceBook group, and Aqualife just made a post showing them diving the Hydro Atlantic, which is a technical diving site near Boca Raton, roughly 150 feet to the deck and 170 feet to the sand. They were tied into it, meaning that a DM dropped down and tied a float to the wreck.
This brings up two changes in the local dive scene.
- A local dive charter that used to specialize in shallow dive opportunities is offering deeper wreck dives now, including some at technical depths.
- They are tying in. That was Pompano Dive Center's procedure, and I think it was part of what made them so popular. They tied in unless the current was too strong, in which case going down a line would be too difficult. (Believe me, it can wear you out!) For the last few years, every tech dive done by SFDH (and anyone else) has featured a hot drop, where the captain guess the strength of the current and drops divers into the water where he thinks they will hit the wreck if they descend quickly enough. I have done that on the Hydro Atlantic twice, and both times we missed the wreck and were diving on sand.
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