Coming up, a dive at Blue Grotto in Florida, and a visit to their secret cave!
Welcome to Jonathan Bird’s Blue World!
Once again, I have come to cave country in Florida for an epic adventure.
Cameraman Zach and I are heading over to Blue Grotto, one of the most popular dive training
locations in North Florida.
So the Blue Grotto is a great place for divers to be trained, and they’ve set it up for
diver training.
You have really easy entry into the water with stairs or a giant stride, then they have
platforms underwater where divers can practice their skills.
They have an underwater diving bell, where you can pop up and have a conversation—which
I don’t know if that’s good for training but it’s really cool—and then you can
go all the way down to 100 feet to do deep training.
So, it’s not really a cave, it’s a cavern, you can see the light coming in, so it’s
safe for open water divers, and it’s just great fun, I can’t wait to go check it out.
It’s perfect for diver training because it’s almost like a really deep swimming
pool, with crystal clear warm water.
But there is another, secret part of the Blue Grotto I’m going to get to see today, and
it’s only available to certified cave divers!
The adventure begins when I meet up with Kevin Tate, the head dive instructor, and my guide
for the day.
We’re going to start with a dive in the main grotto, to check out the training facility.
I don’t need cave diving gear for this dive, but it’s what I brought.
(So I’m going to try out something new today, which is putting my tanks on up here and then
walking with the two sidemount tanks down to the water.
Never done this before!
Kevin tells me it’s no problem.
They are kinda low riders but it looks like they are basically on.
Okay here we go, good grief!
Ha ha it’s kind of heavy!
Divers enter the water at Blue Grotto by just jumping off the dock.
Then we can submerge down to the first platform.
It’s easy to see why this is such a popular place for dive training.
The water is crystal clear!
We get our cameras focused and head on down into the cavern.
I really want to check out the air bell, which is a famous feature of Blue Grotto.
The air bell is held to the ceiling of the cavern by the powerful buoyancy of all that
air.
They constantly pump fresh air down to it so I know it’s safe to breathe inside.
It’s really weird to pop my head up into a dry space underwater.
Zach comes up inside too and we can have a conversation…although we can’t really
think of anything to say.
So this is weird!
We’re inside this thing underwater!
The fish are looking at us!
Hey what’s up fish?
Next we take a trip down to the deepest part of the grotto.
It’s a little bit like cave diving, but we can still see light from above, so technically,
it’s a cavern.
If you go to the very bottom, you can meet the mermaid.
Then it’s back up to the shallows and the light.
At the second platform, three rebreather divers are doing some training.
We have a look around.
Even though it seems like a pool this is really more like a small pond.
So it has fish.
I also get to meet Virgil, the famous and friendly resident soft shell turtle, who comes
out to meet almost every diver.
He is adorable and curious.
Zach and I spend about 15 minutes just filming him as he models for us.
After the dive, Kevin shows me the entrance to the secret cave section of the facility.
Now, give me a little history!
The first guy that found it was in the early ‘60s, he was inside the cavern and he noticed
some fish that were biting at stuff that looked like an outflow coming up.
And he thought that was weird, and so he started digging where the fish were.
Well, as soon as he started digging, it sucked in and opened up a little bit, and he realized
holy crap there’s something back there.
Well, he opened it up and he climbed in.
He thought it would be safe and prudent of him if there was an air bell in there in case
there was some kind of emergency.
So he and a friend of his took an old bathtub, and they shoved it in from this area and took
this bathtub inside the cave with the idea that they were going to mount it on the ceiling
or push it to the ceiling and blow air to it to where it would stick to the ceiling
so if either one of them had some kind of problem in the cave at least they would have
someplace to come to for a safety stop.
The bathtub is still in there.
We haven’t taken it out.
Next it’s time to dive!
I
follow Kevin down through the low cave entrance.
Almost as soon as we enter the main cave, we find the bathtub.
It definitely would not have been as nice an air bell as the clear one over in the grotto!
We continue past a PVC pipe, which is actually a water-well.
Whoever drilled that well definitely struck water!
As we follow the guideline deeper into the cave, I notice a very thick layer of super
fine sediment on the rocks.
Just to demonstrate—divers need to be extremely careful in here because a careless fin kick
could create a visibility nightmare.
We are careful to keep our feet high, away from all that silt.
300 feet from the entrance, we reach the end of the line.
There are three different routes back, with each of the arrows pointing a unique path.
Kevin takes the middle route, so he can take us to the most famous resident of this cave.
It’s on the top of a giant mound of rocks and silt.
Is it a cave crayfish?
A blind cavefish?
It’s….it’s….an action figure!
On the way out, we eventually cross paths with our route in.
Our bubbles hitting the ceiling have knocked loose some silt, which is raining down.
You definitely get better shots on the way in.
Woo hoo hoo, that was great.
A GI Joe and a bathtub on a cave dive, ha ha!
The Blue Grotto is definitely one of the wildest, most unique places I have visited as a diver.
An air bell, a mermaid, a cave king and a curious turtle are just part of the fun at
Blue Grotto.
Hey Everyone, thanks for watching this episode all the way to the end.
If you know what character that action figure is, please tell us in the comments down below.
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