We arrived in Key Largo on Sunday after a 22 hour drive. Some of the more die hard divers went out diving. We dove the Duane (a coast guard cutter) just outside of Molasses Reef. The Current was light, the visibility was good. As always in was a fun, good dive. After that we drifted Molasses Reef, where we saw a turtle, lots of different types of fish and just relaxed after the drive.
The next day the fun began with
all the divers. We had 17 divers in Key Largo at one time.
We dive with Quiescence Diving Services
at mile marker 103.5. They operator 3 six pak boats. Which
mean 6 divers on a boat. We had most of there spots taken by us.
We dove the Benwood, a shipwreck in 30 to 50 foot of water. This
day was had about 100 foot of visibility, no current, no waves, it was
super diving conditions. It was a great place to start for our divers doing
their first ocean dive, the divers doing their check out dives and the
seasoned diver wanting to see the various fish live. After this dive,
we moved over to the Molasses Reef. At Molasses Reef, we did a very
slow drift dive. It gave us time to do the check dives for our students.
We all had a great time and was looking forward to tomorrow.
We all went to the Fish House in Key Largo for Dinner. They did a super job like always. We had all we could eat, we swap stories about the day.
Our next dive was to be a Duane dive again with more divers.
The current was ripping, we checked it out and I made the decision not
to dive it. So we move over to Molasses Reef to do a deep drift with
the other divers doing a 60 foot drift. As we started our dive, Bob
Schippnick saw a couple of Eagle Rays and pointed them out. I swam
over with the video camera, but just caught a short view of them.
I was thinking, what I had missed and wondering if I would be lucky enough
to see any more on this trip. When I saw something in the distance
coming at us. It was a HUGE school of Eagle Rays, I mean there 
must
have been fifty of them in this school and behind us was about another
thirty of them. They were swimming group I saw was swimming just
off the ledge of Molasses 
Reef.
They were from the bottom at 80 feet and they went up to 20 feet.
It was the greatest thing I have ever seen. The background on this
page was a video clip from the dive. We watched for about 2 minutes,
swimming against the current hoping to get to stay with them. No
luck, the current won! We drifted on the rest of the dive, enjoying
what we had see and taking in the new scenes. We knew we had seen
something pretty special, but we did not how truly special it was.
After surfacing we were talking to the Boat Captain, Ronnie Bleser, telling
him what we saw. He said they 
have
been seeing Eagle Rays in the area, but not in the numbers we said. 
We got the Camera out of the housing and showed him. He said that
they had never seen anything like that in the whole time he had been there.
Ronnie has grown up in the Miami area and has dove a lot in the Key Largo
area. He has more logged dives on the Duane than anyone else, so
when he got excited it made us feel we had something special. There
was a young lady on our trip that made a statement, "Boy it just keeps
getting better on every dive." I told her that this might be hard
to top.
The
rest of the dives were fun filled and exciting, but nothing to compare
with the Eagle Rays. We dove with Quiescence for the rest of the
week, making one night dive were we got to play with a Puffer Fish.
On another dive, we saw a Jew Fish the size of a VW Bug, we called it a
VW with fins. Later in the week, the waves raised their ugly little
head, so it made diving a little rougher. We even make a rescue,
NO not of a diver, but of a BRAND NEW fin. The diver was getting
in the boat and looked down and the fin was gone off his arm. The
Boat Captain took us over the site near where it was. The diver's
son and I dropped back into to see what we could find. After a short
time looking, we came up with it. Boy, was I glad, sometimes you
never find them out there.
All in all we had a great time with us great people.
Quiescence did a SUPER job like normal, a special Thanks to all the Boat
Captains for putting up with us. Ronnie, Johnny, Walter and Jay,
these are the guys that make the trip. Key Largo is a very special place,
it is still in the US, low cost for diving, some very nice reef.
Come join us on our NEXT Key Largo trip.