Scuba Diving in Key Largo, FL

We visited my cousins and Grandma in Venice, Florida for a week in August. For the first two days, my dad and I drove to Key Largo, and went scuba diving there on four dives. The drive was around 4 hours, so we left around 9:00 p.m. We stopped in Homestead, and stayed the rest of the night there. We then drove about an hour to Key Largo, and registered at the dive center. Near our hotel. We eventually found the harbor where the dive boat was waiting. There were already 20 other people on the boat, ready to dive. My dad and I got fitted for a BCD each, and then the regulators. Our tanks and weights were already on the boat, so we didn't have to carry those around. By the time we got to the first dive site, The City of Washington wreck on Elbow Reef, the waves had picked up a bit. We used the Giant Stride entry method, and then inflated our BCDs. We submerged quickly, and I had an easy time submerging, which was a relief. As I submerged, I realized how large the wreck of the City Of Washington was. Even though the ship was crumbling after a hundred years under-water, some of the areas such as the bridge were still at least partially intact. The frame of one of the hallways was made of several six-inch wide brackets, about six feet tall and curved, with four or five of them still standing. Hundreds of fish were circling the frames. As I swam across one of the plates from the hull, I saw a giant green head slowly opening and closing its mouth. I kept swimming for a few more seconds until I realized that it was a Green Moray Eel! I swam back slowly towards it and then alerted my dad and our guide, Hugh. By the time they reached me, only the Moray’s mouth was showing. We turned left slightly and continued towards the bow section of the boat. We circled back and noticed a large shape resting near the sand with its mouth open, exposing rows and rows of razor sharp teeth. As we got closer, I realized the fish was enormous, over six feet long. The size and shape of the fish revealed that it was a Giant Barracuda. A tiny fish kept darting in and out of the barracuda's mouth. That must have been a really brave fish, cleaning the teeth of the Barracuda and in turn getting a meal. We decided to leave the barracuda alone, and continue back towards the dive boat. We swam over a cannon that was uncovered after hurricane Irma, old and rusted and not on wheels, just the barrel. No one knows where it came from. As we continued swimming back towards the dive boat, Hugh suddenly motioned for us to stop, because in the distance, a dark shape was slowly swimming towards us. A Caribbean Reef Shark, Hugh explained after we surfaced. It seemed intrigued by my dad, then turned, as if to swim away, but circled back. Eventually, the shark was no longer interested in us and swam away. We didn’t see much on our second dive, except for a few parrotfish. Unfortunately, I couldn’t photograph any of the things we saw that day, because the platform to rent cameras wasn’t working. When we got back to Key Largo after diving, my dad and I went to a dive equipment store and bought a GoPro Hero10 Black, along with a waterproof case that would make it waterproof up to 300 feet. The pictures on my website are from my second day of diving, at the wreck of the M.V. Benwood and on French Reef, at the Donut Hole. The next day, as we packed up our things to check out of the hotel, my dad couldn’t find the GoPro as we were in the parking lot. Eventually, we found it, and sped towards the dive boat. We barely managed to get our equipment and board the boat before the boat left towards our first dive site, the wreck of the M.V. Benwood. The benwood was a Norwegian freighter that collided with another boat during WWII. The two boats had turned off their lights to avoid the U-Boats off the east coast. A tugboat towed the Benwood to deeper water so it would not be a threat to other boats. The Benwood is now a popular dive site. We submerged and swam towards the Benwood with few problems with my ears and equalizing. We slowly circled the wreck, which was teeming with fish. As we swam around the bow, our guide pointed out a giant crab hiding under a shelf of metal, protruding from the side of the ship. I couldn’t get a very clear picture, but you can see his claw in the picture on my website, in the Florida section. As we were finishing our safety stop, I spotted a turtle less than a foot from the surface. The turtle eventually spotted us, and abandoned the jellyfish it was chomping down on. I got several pictures, such as the one shown below.

Our final dive in Key Largo was on French Reef, at the Donut Hole. We got to swim under several rocks that formed natural arches, and beneath one of the bridges we saw several bass (shown below) slowly swimming in circles, relaxing. There were tiny tube worms coming in and out of the sand, but they were too quick for me to take a picture of them. There wasn’t much else on the dive, besides a few parrotfish. I really loved diving in Key Largo, and I can’t wait to go diving there again.