Scuba Diving in Blue Grotto Florida

Welcome back to Diving Shorts. If you caught the last video, we dove in a large cavern called Beaufort Sink, which is a sinkhole in a remote spot in central Florida. Today we're going to be diving another sinkhole, but this one's going to be a little bit different. This system is very similar to a feature commonly found in Mexico known as a cenote. And just like Beaufort, it's the start of a massive cave system. But today we'll only be doing a cavern dive. I'll explain the difference here in a second. The dreams are not the same for me Standing by the shore While you're on the open sea Cannot take this anymore The reason why Blue Grotto is a cavern and not a cave is because when you get down to the bottom, you can still see light coming up through the top. So we're going to enter here at this main platform and make our way down close to 100 feet deep at the very bottom of the cavern. And as we start to run out of bottom time, we're going to make our way over here to the underwater diving bill. That's pretty cool. I can't wait to show that to you. Towards the end of the dive, we're going to make our way back to this platform. We're going to meet a very special turtle named Virgil. He's a soft-shelled turtle. He's actually 85 years old. So let's go check him out. The dreams are not the same for me Standing by the shore In the top by the entrance, this is the spot that receives all of the direct sunlight. It's where all the algae and all of the vegetation is allowed to grow. So this is where you're going to see the majority of all of the life. You can see we're passing by some training platforms, which means one thing, bad viz caused by students. But it looks like we got lucky today because this instructor seems very professional and has the students very well organized. It looks like the viz is actually going to be pretty good today. As you approach the guidelines, you'll feel the increase in pressure and you'll notice all the animals begin to disappear and all the light goes away. It begins to get really dark. When we finally hit the bottom, I noticed that in this particular spot, we're actually not able to see the light coming in from the entrance. After exploring around for a little bit, because we're close to 100 feet deep, we checked each other's bottom time and knowing that we still had a lot more that we wanted to see, we decided to make our way back up towards the top. And as you're making your way back up and you pass over the edge of these rocks, the point of this entire dive just kind of hits you right in the face. The view from down here. And of course, I'll never pass up the opportunity to take a good photo. Now it's time to check out one of the more unique side attractions that Blue Grotto has to offer. This is what's called a diving bell. It's basically an upside down bowl with air trapped inside of it. You can actually go inside without your regulator on and talk to each other. I seem to have plenty of air left and I could honestly explore this cavern all day. But there's one very special animal that I specifically came here to see. But first we had to find him. And to do that, we had to head back out into the sunlight. So the animal I'm looking for is a soft-shelled turtle named Virgil. Although I was kidding about him being 85 years old, they are known to live at least 50 years and he could have been in the spring for a really long time. After looking around for a bit, I still haven't had any luck finding him. So I decided to use some bait that I purchased beforehand to see if we could use that to lure him out of his hiding spot. And sure enough, as soon as the food comes out, so does Virgil. This weird prehistoric looking turtle. Quite possibly one of the strangest looking turtles you'll see in North America. It looks like now that we found Virgil, this is a good spot to wrap this one up. If you want to see more photos and videos from this location, visit my Instagram at scottbauer79. If you haven't already, don't forget to subscribe. See you in the next one. Thanks for watching!