Drift Diving off the coast of Boynton Beach, Florida

Lee and I kicked off our dive season with a bang. Early on May 28, we packed the rental car with our dive gear and listened to XM's Laugh USA on and off during the 10-hour drive to Boynton Beach, Florida. (Boynton is just past West Palm Beach off the Atlantic Ocean.)

With four dives ahead of us, stopping in local dive stores like Diver's Direct made our adventure come alive. (If you're not a diver, think about planning for a vacation or something else that gets you excited and you'll know what we mean.)

We dove with Underwater Explorers. Lee found them through recommendations on Scuba Board. (Scuba Board is an online community with divers from around the globe and forums on an array of diving topics.) I quickly learned that their 34-foot Crusader was really designed for back rolls and not giant strides. But after doing it the first time, I was hooked and wondered why I've only done it in my dive training classes.

Basket Sponge

Basket Sponges

All four of our drift dives were amazing. In fact, I found the underwater reefs to be as scenic - if not more - as the ones we've dove in the Keys. The first two dives exposed a veritable forest of basket sponges. (Typically, I've seen only one or two every mile or so, not hundreds.)

We saw a plethora of fish, including:

Moray Eel

Blue Tang (my favorite)

Cow Fish in Basket Sponge

French Angel

Loggerhead Turtle Under a Ledge

Rock Beauty

Hawksbill Turtle

Two French Angels

I hope the rest of our dives this season are as amazing as these four dives!

Drift Diving in Jupiter

This weekend, Lee and I went to Jupiter, Florida to do some drift diving. These dives were amazing and superseded my expectations by far. I must admit that at first I was skeptical about jumping into the ocean without a line to descend and ascend by. I was pleasantly surprised by what I found after I jumped in behind the leader who held the buoy. I looked down into the blue, tranquil water and could see clearly to the 80 foot bottom. The boat followed the leader's buoy as we traveled approximately four miles or more along the Gulf stream. The current gently floated us along the bottom as we were, in essence, sight-seeing in an open water aquarium. The beauty that surrounded us was full of life. There were abundant schools of brightly colored fish swimming in and around brilliant varieties of sea vegetation.

During this dive, Lee saw his first Goliath Grouper which we estimated weighed in around 900 pounds. (I'd seen one before on a previous dive, but not quite this large.) And I saw my first shark; a nine-foot nurse shark which was cruising in and around the reef and ledge. We also encountered a very curious sea turtle that was about two-and-a-half feet big. He swam up and hung with us while we were doing our deco safety stop at about 15-20 feet deep.

The dives were incredible and fun. And I met one of my online scuba buddies, Sandy, who lives in the Jupiter area. While we were drift diving, she and her dive buddy, Michelle, were hunting lobster.