Coral Reef Travel

Eerie caverns and subterranean springs linked by an endless labyrinth of caves. It’s a whole new world–a magic kingdom, if you will–and not a white-gloved rodent in sight.

A land of horse pastures and live oaks dripping with Spanish moss, north-central Florida is that pretty countryside whizzing past the windshield as you speed toward Orlando’s plastic theme parks. But if it’s an alternate reality you seek, slow down, Bubba. You’re speeding past the best natural attractions in the state–north and west Florida’s freshwater springs and caverns.

More than eight billion gallons of water a day erupt from a labyrinth of caves, caverns and sinkholes. The local good ol’ boys will tell you that these passageways of porous limestone are off-limits to all but certified cave divers, but there are a number of springs where snorkelers and open-water divers are welcome.

These six commercial sites are scattered across the state from the Panhandle to Ocala. Chances are you’ll drive right by one or more en route to Orlando (it is a small world, after all), so why not pack a regulator and tell the kids you’re going to visit the Little Mermaid. These are magic kingdoms no diver should miss.

Devil’s Den:
El Rec Room del Diablo

The town of Williston, in Levy County, is a pick-’em-up truck, horse-trailer, double-wide genuine ol’ Florida kinda town where the local KFC proudly displays a sign announcing “We Now Sell Gizzards!” Main Street here is shorter than that last sentence and if you ain’t here to see a man about a horse, or to score some fried chicken guts, you must be a diver.

Out on the edge of town, and only about a mile apart, are two of the best places in the state for anyone wanting to try open-water karst diving. The first is found off Alternate Route 27, just after the paved road ends, and it’s one hell of a dive site.

Devil’s Den is a large sink–an underground cave where part of the roof has collapsed. The cave-in created a circular window that allows sunlight to splash into the underground chamber and pool on the surface of the water 60 feet below. As if the site needed more atmosphere, a waterfall of vines spills through the skylight while towering above is a haunted forest of live oaks with Spanish moss melting from its gnarled branches.

Devil’s Den got its hellish handle when early Floridians first came upon the deep, dark hole in the forest. On cold winter mornings, the perpetually 72-degree water literally steams like a satanic cauldron. Long before humans discovered the site, prehistoric animals stumbled across it–mastodons, giant sloths, bears. Judging by the fossils collected from the cave, critters have been dropping in through the skylight since the Pleistocene Era.

You enter the water from a dive platform over top of the debris cone, a pyramid of rock from the initial collapse. As you descend, the walls flare outward from about 120 feet in diameter at the surface to 200 feet in diameter at the maximum depth of 60 feet. The debris cone prevents you from seeing or swimming directly across the site, so you dive in circles around the cavern, moving shallower to cover new ground.

The walls and bottom of the Den are filled with crags, crevices and outcrops, and there are several dramatic swim-through tunnels that are like voyaging through the earth’s marrow. “We let divers carry lights for fossil viewing and for their own safety,” says Ginnie McKnight, manager of Devil’s Den. “But unless they’re cave or cavern certified they can’t use them to enter any cavern zones. Open-water divers need to approach any dark entrance and then cover up their light–if they don’t see natural light coming in from the other end, it’s not a swim-through and they cannot enter.”

Besides the swim-throughs, the Den is riddled with caves, caverns and wormholes that are way beyond the pale for most divers. Metal grates close off some entrances while common sense takes care of the others. As a gentle warning, there are signs posted in several openings featuring the Grim Reaper reminding you “there is nothing in this cave worth your life.” For any brain-stemmer who would pass this point without fully redundant cave gear, lines and extensive training, there’s a very good chance the next sign will be a grinning Mr. Reaper saying: “Come to Papa.”

Blue Grotto:
Grot Vis?

Just down Hwy. 27 apiece and off another dirt road that runs under a shady canopy of oaks is Blue Grotto. Naturalist William Bartram poetically described the incredibly clear water in Florida’s springs as “cerulean ether.” He must have been diving Blue Grotto. The spring’s four-million-gallon-a-day flow is turbocharged to 22 million gallons by auxiliary pumps, and the water here is dizzyingly, almost disturbingly, clear.

According to owner Ed Paradiso, Blue Grotto is Florida’s largest accessible cavern dive. From the surface though, the spring is deceptively small. As you gear up on the floating dock, you judge it’s maybe 10 times the size of Hef’s grotto at the Playboy mansion.

Swimming down from the dock, you’re in a gently sloping pond. Descent lines lead to three large open-water training platforms. You watch a softshell turtle paddle past and a school of sunfish comes up to beg for food. And then you enter the cavern. The bottom drops out from under you and your regulator drops out of your mouth. The water is so transparent, and the cavern so spectacular as it opens up around you, that it’s like flying off the balcony at Carnegie Hall.

At its entrance, the cavern is 30 feet high and 80 feet across. Once inside, it gapes open to 40 by 150 feet. Paradiso has installed a compressor-fed air bell on the ceiling of the cavern at a depth of 30 feet. While it can be used as an emergency air supply, it mainly serves as a place for you and your buddy to stick your heads into and yell “Cool!” The bell has Plexiglas windows and the view of your lower half floating in “air” 40 feet above the rocky bottom will have you reflexively reaching for the rip cord.

The dive shop has strung guidelines throughout the cavern and you can do the entire dive like a ride on a theme-park monorail. Lines take you down one side of the cavern, around the deepest part, which bottoms out at 100 feet, and then up the other side.

Divers finish off their visit in the shallow, sunlit section of the grotto where they can feed fish and search for turtles among the weeds. Actually, the visibility is so good that you can lie on the bottom and bird-watch if you like. Conditions are so routine at Blue Grotto, the dive shop’s answering machine is entrusted to give the unchanging good news: 72 degrees and 200 feet of visibility.

Vortex Spring:
Bigger Is Better

Everything about Vortex Spring, located outside the panhandle hamlet of Ponce De Leon, is huge. At 200 feet across, and better than 50 feet deep, the spring basin is a yawning blue chasm. Inside, schools of one- to two-foot Japanese goldfish, grass carp and largemouth bass flock to divers and snorkelers for food scrap handouts. The spring pumps out a healthy 25 million gallons of water per day, making it a big attraction for non-divers who flock here in summer to cool off in the 68-degree water.

The deep Vortex cavern is a dramatic threshold linking the dark subterranean world of caves with the sunny spring basin. A buoyed line leads from the center of the basin down to the cavern entrance at 60 feet. Just inside, there’s almost always a large bubble of trapped air you can poke your head into. Just don’t take a breath there; the “air bubbles” in Florida caverns often contain significant amounts of methane, and usually not much oxygen.

From the cavern entrance, a plastic-pipe “guideline” runs down the floor of a large, open, junction-free passage to a locked steel grate. Certified cave divers can get a key to this grate, but for openwater divers this barrier is a reminder that they should have turned around long ago–the grate is 300 feet from the surface, at a depth of 110 feet.

Although you may see open-water divers going up and down this passage, be aware that doing so without proper training is risky. Open-water divers should stop at the cavern entrance, and certified cavern divers should penetrate no deeper than 65 feet into the entrance or to the limit of natural light.

Morrison Springs:
The Deep South

Ringed by cypress trees dripping with Spanish moss, Morrison Springs exudes an ambience of not just the Old South, but primordial Florida. Considered one of the finest freshwater dives in the state, the large open pool slopes gently to a limestone brink, where it drops off to depths of approximately 50 feet.

Morrison Springs actually has two caverns, a ledge-like cave at approximately 50 feet, and a deeper cavern with a small entrance at about 60 feet.

The shallower cavern is the more open of the two and a nice introduction for cavern students just getting their fins wet. The deeper cavern has a small entry fissure that gushes water with the force of a fire hydrant, but leads to a wide room at 90 feet. Open-water divers should not swim past ambient light in either opening.

Divers traveling any distance to Morrison should call first, especially in the spring when rains cause the Choctawhatchee River to swell and flood the spring with tannin-stained water that’s exactly the color of Coca-Cola. Once the river recedes, the spring quickly returns to normal and is re-opened to divers. Bonus: If the spring has flooded recently, check the floor of the deep cavern for squirming masses of cave eels.

Madison Blue Spring:
Going With the Flow

Until 1993, Madison Blue was better known as a trash heap than a dive site. The exquisite turquoise pool was surrounded by discarded washing machines and a legion of beer bottles dropped off by the local Bubbas.

Since then, the area has been transformed into a beautiful commercial diving operation with a tidy paved parking lot, paths, steps down to the spring basin, a large entry platform, and campground.

Madison Blue is designated a first magnitude spring, and it spouts more than 100 million gallons per day. Madison has a huge cave aperture which slopes down into a large cavern area. Although “Grim Reaper” signs are posted to keep untrained divers out of the deeper cave, open-water divers shouldn’t venture more than a few linear feet past the cavern entrance. Curious divers can spend their dive in the open spring basin watching the spring-run’s waterfall from below and chasing skittish freshwater flounder (local biologist Tom Morris calls them southern hog chokers) across the rock-and-gravel bottom.

During wet weather, the spring can be flooded with dark water from the Suwannee River, which is only a stone’s throw away, so call before heading out.

Ginnie Springs:
Clearly Superior

Once known as Jenny Springs, the pure waters here have been referred to as “gin-clear” so many times that the name was modified to Ginnie Springs.

Spell it however you like, this is the spring that wowed Jacques Cousteau and is the centerpiece of the Ginnie Springs Resort, an old Florida natural water park that includes Devil’s Ear, Devil’s Eye and five other springs along the Santa Fe River. It’s the Disney World of Florida springs and caverns and it’s safe to say more divers (open-water and cave/cavern) earn their C-cards here than in any other spring.

Provided one uses common sense and the buddy system, the main Ginnie cavern is an excellent place in which to get a sense of cavern and cave diving. The shallow crater-like basin drops into a white sand bottom and is filled with sunfish. During daylight hours, open-water divers are permitted to take lights into the two cavern entrances. From the larger of the two, a rope guide line leads down into a large sloping room about 60 feet wide by 70 feet long. The room is filled with huge blocks of limestone; one cave entrance is sealed off with a steel grate.

A few minutes away on the resort grounds, three smaller springs–Little Devil, Devil’s Eye and Devil’s Ear–combine to create a short run to the river. The last of the three, Devil’s Ear, is actually on the river’s very edge; from the bottom of its narrow entry fissure, you can look up and see the dark, tannin-stained Santa Fe River water mixing and swirling around the crystal-clear spring outflow.

While open-water divers are allowed into these spring basins, divers must have a cavern or cave card, or be with a certified cavern or cave instructor, to carry lights.

Are You in Over Your Head?

At many of these popular springs, you may see certified cave divers gearing up with specialized dive gear and slipping past the warning signs and barriers to explore the deepest reaches of the karst terrain. Should you follow them?

Not on your life.

Florida springs typically have three interconnected features: a shallow open-water pool or basin, slanted caverns with some indirect opening to open water and sunlight, and flooded caves with no direct way to the surface and no natural light.

While diving in basins is no different from any open-water dive, moving into the overhead environments of caverns and caves dramatically increases the risk of a fatal accident.The most dangerous cave passageways are usually (but not always) marked with warning signs or blocked by grates, but each diver is responsible for making sure he stays within the limits of his training.

Ideally, divers should be minimally cavern certified before venturing beyond direct overhead light. While the rules may vary from site to site, a good rule of thumb for open-water divers at most locations is to leave all dive lights at the surface and dive only in ambient light.

Bottom line: If you’re tempted to “take a peek” past open water, take a class first. Cavern and cave courses are taught at all of these springs.

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