Dean &
Ginny's excellent adventures, a series of
fortunate events...
Main Adventure Page · New House · Transplanted Gardener
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Seven dives in three days: Narcosis & Pennekamp
We
started our dive trip with a three-tank & lunch dive on Narcosis, a
dive boat out of Riviera Beach. The current was fairly strong and
we had a dive guide who carried a dive flag. It was a drift dive
so both the divers and the boat drift along with the current. When our air ran low,
we surfaced and the boat came to pick us up. Not easy to get up
the dive ladder with the 4 to 6-foot seas.
We dove
three locations:
1) the Breakers' reef, logically enough it's off the luxurious Breakers
Hotel in Palm Beach.
2) Paul's Reef, and
3) Bath and Tennis Reef off of the Bath and Tennis club across the
street from Trump's place.
<-
You can see evidence of the current by the curve in the diver's bubbles
.
We saw a Nurse Shark (below), French Grunts (below, right), Blue Tangs (above, right), and many types of sponges (Barrel Sponges, above and Tube Sponges to the right.)
Above,
left: a Porkfish with two small Wrasse fish and above, right: a Parrotfish
amongst fan & finger corals.
<- This Barrel sponge is about 14 inches in diameter. Fish use the sponges for hiding and even for nesting. We didn't see these sponges at Pennekamp.
Below, a gray Angelfish swims with a school of French Grunts.
Then
on to Pennekamp State Park where we went out on the Reef Adventures dive
boat for a two tank afternoon dive and a two-tank morning dive the next
day. The coral reef is different than farther north and the water is
clearer. The wind had abated so the seas were only one to two
feet--much easier to get back on the boat. 
Ginny signals OK & Dean is dwarfed by the fan corals.
Above left: coral arch with those striped Sergeant Major Fish. Above
right: A Black Grouper aka a Jewfish. (Which one is more politically
correct, I cannot say.)
This two-foot long Bermuda Chub swam around us seven or eight times. He had us surrounded, that's for sure.
Above: Queen Parrotfish with a Suckerfish attached near its gills awaiting scraps of food to wash through.
Right & below: The beautiful and breath-taking Pennekamp coral scenery.
