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Money Diving
Fort Lauderdale answers Loonie woes
Diving at any cost? For some yes, but for the vast majority of travellers in 1999 the bank book comes before the log book. There is relief this yearcompetitive Fort Lauderdale has developed Money Dives for cash conscious Eastern Canadians! For Canadians living in Ontario and Quebec, the state of Florida offers the most affordable and easy-to-reach warm water ocean dive sites on the continent. Fort Lauderdale aggressively puts out the welcome mat to Canadian visitors and is now attracting a growing number of budget conscious scuba enthusiasts. A Money Dive is a specific underwater attraction that people want to see (as opposed to reef and drift dives where it doesn't really matter where the experience begins or ends). In Florida, a Money Dive has to be pretty darn good to distract tourists away from Disneyland, Universal Studios, the Everglades and Miami Beach. Fort Lauderdale has a week's worth of Money Dives. Big wrecks, speciality training courses, shore dives, stingray feeds, and high voltage shark encounters are all part of the mix. Since the city is less than a day's drive from eastern Canada (cheap spring air charters also abound) and has inexpensive hotels, affordable restaurants and business establishments that cater to both Eng
lish and French Canadians, this is a Spring dive destination that deserves consideration.
Now mainland Florida is best dived in the summer months when the seas are warm, calm and dive boats are plentifulbut that is when it is nice in Ontario, so people tend to stay at home in Summer. Divers from Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto and the rest of the Golden Horseshoe area travel southward in the winter and spring, at a time when many Florida ocean dive shops have scaled back their operations. In Fort Lauderdale, any day is a dive day thanks to the Pro Dive training school and dive operation. Pro Dive has a 365 day a year operation and it is busy, not because of scuba diving tourists, but because of the endless parade of people enrolling in their many professional dive courses. England. South Africa. Quebec. Everyone working on board their ultra modern 60-foot glass-bottom Pro-Diver II charter boat is in school! From the captain-in-training, to the nurse selling hot dogs near the rack of Nitrox tanks, everyone is there to get certified in some aspect of the dive tourism industry. Woe be to the diver that shows any distress underwaterthere is always a handful of Resort Operations Specialists in training eager to shove an octopus in your face. Pro Dive has identified over a dozen Money Dive sites just off shore from the famous hotel beach strip. These are all artificial reef sites, created by the city and fish conservation groups over the past two decades. Shipwrecks, oil rigs and even army tanks have been scientifically placed underwater to create an ecosystem that is game fish friendly. The best dives are on a series of oil rigs that have been placed on the sandy bottom a mile or two from land. Once they were above-water platforms for huge cranes, oil pumpers and storage drums. Now, totally submerged, the rigs are covered in soft corals and huge fans. More importantly there are a whole variety of LARGE fish including packs of man sized barracuda, bold, black tip sharks and squads of cruising rays to be found in and around the platforms. The rigs start at 90 feet and head down into the sand hundreds of feet below. There is a constant south/north current and the nutrient rich water keeps the visibility in the 75 to 90 foot range. In spring the water can still be in the cool 70s, so wet suits are >recommended. Although a challenging dive to make, the Pro Dive operation keeps the stress levels low by giving all divers a thorough high -tech chalk talk. The briefing includes an on-board video presentation which has a graphic overlay to indicate how the day's current will affect the dive. Back on land divers have a wide range of hotels, motels and guest rooms to choose from. There are so many expatriate hotel owners from Quebec that there is a section of Fort Lauderdale Beach where French is the predominate language, and Canadian money is welcome. Although there aren't many places offering Canadian money at par, the Fort Lauderdale Tourism department encourages tourist operators to offer discounts to Canadians.
DIVER Magazine stayed at the Villas By The Sea. This resort is a series of small beach front and across-the-road buildings typically with four one bedroom efficacies. The hotel is the headquarters of Ocean Promotions and boasts America's most northerly coral reef shore dive. There is a modest reef just off the beach and in season local divers come to the area to hunt lobster. Most visiting divers use the reef as a check-out dive and for macro-underwater photography expeditions. Camera gear is recommended when you dive North Fort Lauderdale's shark dive. Ocean Promotions Scuba & Snorkel Adventures and the Aquanauts Charters have put together a small group (six divers maximum), big fish encounter that is short on amenities but long on thrills. There was a stiff current the day that DIVER signed up for the shark encounterwe couldn't anchorinstead as our small charter boat chugged over the dive site, when the GPSlocation was passed over, our party of seven quickly jumped in and speedily finned towards the bottom. The shark feeding station is in 40 feet of water, close to Deerfield Beach. What makes this locale special is a small coral ledge that rises four feet from the sand. With our backs to the mini-wall, and the food box in front of us, we had solid protection against sharks that might come at us from our blind side. First in for dinner was a small, skittish, three foot long reef shark. At first he wouldn't take a chunk of raw fish from the prongs of a long barbecue fork. With this shark, hunger won out over discretion. Before long, he had taken the appetiser, shook it for all it was worth and then gobbled it down. The feeding process released fish blood and body parts into the water. Letting tuna bits float free is akin to ringing the dinner bell for the big boys. Man-sized sharks, "smelling" the blood soon arrived on the scene and made a beeline for us. My camera man, Jim Kozmik took a close-up picture of the eye of afemale shark as she bit into a fish head. The bright flash didn't slow down the feeding, however when the unit began to recharge the shark whipped her head in our direction, took a bead on the camera gear and went into attack mode. It was the shark versus the dive writer. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but it was a 35 mm camera that saved the day. Our large bulky camera kit came in handyas the shark moved in, Kozmik thrust his camera into her mouth. She nipped at the casing and decided that tuna tastes better. Another picture was taken, the flash unit whined and the shark attacked again. After blocking two more assaults, we decided to put away the flash camera and use video instead. "Our biggest problem here is not with the sharks, but with fishermen," explained Captain Mike Rohrbaugh. "We no sooner get a group of sharks Not every underwater encounter is life threatening. In the waters of Boca Rattan, Florida the biggest danger for divers at the Stingray Wreck is getting a licking from the half dozen strong rays that "hang out" waiting for food near a downed coastal tanker. It is hard to think of Dasyatis Americanathe southern stingrayas cuddly or friendly. A six foot long sting ray has a whip -like tail and a top skin that feels like a 10 o'clock shadow. Yet they have pettable soft white underbellies, and at this one spot in Florida waters, they have a penchant for licking and sucking at divers and wrapping their three foot wide wings around anyone who smells edible! According to dive shop charter operators the Stingray Wreck is the most northerly spot in the Atlantic where divers and stingrays can network.This is a special spot, 60 feet down, where tourism and nature meet face-to-face, and it happens, weather permitting, on a very regular basis. For a decade divers have been coming to the site to explore a large multi-hold barge that was scuttled to provide a habitat for fish. The wreck has lived up to the challenge, travelling from one hold to another is like invading an aquarium, thousands and thousands of blue Cherub fish are attracted to the panels of sunlight that beam down through the holes in the hull. Nurse sharks burrow into the sand-filled bottom and groupers cluster near the many rents in the steel walls. Divers have always brought food to feed the fish. The stingray has a pea sized brain, but it didn't take them long to figure out that the sight of a diver means an incoming meal. Once the word got out that the fish didn't object to being photographed and hand petted, a new dive site was developed. Caribbean stingray feeds are in shallow waters and attract hundreds of rays. Near Boca Rattan, the dive is deeper and colder and there only a half dozen or so stingrays coming to the table on a regular basis. However, after a diver has finished with the rays there are eels and nurse sharks to feed and a fish-filled wreck to explore. And after a brief surface interval there is a high voltage shark dive to try too! Ocean Promotions in Fort Lauderdale puts together affordable half day boat dive packages for both the shark dive and the stingray wreck. If desired you can dive both in the morning for about $60.00 US with an additional $35 charged for anyone wanting a vanity video. Until such a time as the Loonie returns from the bottom, when Canadian divers shout out "Show Us The Money", one answer is sure to be Fort Lauderdale. |
used to divers, than the fisherman move in for the kill. It's done for sport and for their meat. We are down to about five or six sharks today, last August we had two dozen. We now try to protect them by keeping our site coordinates to ourselves."