sipidanbg
Registered
The wife and I are just back from West Palm Beach (actually, dove out of Boynton Beach) - all-in-all, a good trip. First time in the water since getting back to the states (really miss the diving in Malaysia).
We dove Deeper Sat and Monday, SplashDown Sunday. Both were OK, but I must say, I felt a bit rushed on SplashDown. The surface interval just wasn't long enough to suite me and I had a shorter 2nd dive than I would've liked. Also, I found Capt. Leo (Deeper) very knowledgeable and personable. So much for the commercial -
Water temp at 50' was around 84-85, Viz was good to mediocre - there were times when it was around 50-70 feet but often less than that. Currents were moderate and Southerly on Saturday but turned Northerly on Sun/Monday and were almost non-existant at times (esp. Monday). Saturday was a zoo as far as boat traffic - luckily, we had no encounters with pleasure boaters. While were were just 'sight seeing' we did see 8-12 decent 'bugs'. Never checked to see if any had eggs. My wife was happy to see a handful of turtles (be believe most were green sea-turtles - one may have been a loggerhead but the viz was poor at the time). Our only shark sighting was a 5-6' nurse shark and a pretty large green moray (seemed to be 6-7' with a good 3-4' out of his 'hole').
It was nice to get back to the West Palm area, but I was disappointed with the crowds (well... it was opening of lobster season) and the change from the 'old days' when you could do a 3-tank dive with a lunch break between dives 2 & 3. Most of all, we figured out we finally need to get Nitrox certified. We really didn't get the bottom time we would have liked.
We dove Deeper Sat and Monday, SplashDown Sunday. Both were OK, but I must say, I felt a bit rushed on SplashDown. The surface interval just wasn't long enough to suite me and I had a shorter 2nd dive than I would've liked. Also, I found Capt. Leo (Deeper) very knowledgeable and personable. So much for the commercial -
Water temp at 50' was around 84-85, Viz was good to mediocre - there were times when it was around 50-70 feet but often less than that. Currents were moderate and Southerly on Saturday but turned Northerly on Sun/Monday and were almost non-existant at times (esp. Monday). Saturday was a zoo as far as boat traffic - luckily, we had no encounters with pleasure boaters. While were were just 'sight seeing' we did see 8-12 decent 'bugs'. Never checked to see if any had eggs. My wife was happy to see a handful of turtles (be believe most were green sea-turtles - one may have been a loggerhead but the viz was poor at the time). Our only shark sighting was a 5-6' nurse shark and a pretty large green moray (seemed to be 6-7' with a good 3-4' out of his 'hole').
It was nice to get back to the West Palm area, but I was disappointed with the crowds (well... it was opening of lobster season) and the change from the 'old days' when you could do a 3-tank dive with a lunch break between dives 2 & 3. Most of all, we figured out we finally need to get Nitrox certified. We really didn't get the bottom time we would have liked.
