I made a diving video! Link to heading

Feel free to head on over to YouTube if you’d prefer. But as a bit of backstory:

This winter holiday, my family and I had the chance to dive the Florida Keys for the first time. We have some friends who’ve made a tradition of visiting the Keys around Christmas, and they’d been encouraging us to join them. With my wife being a PADI Scuba Instructor, me a PADI Divemaster, and our 12-year-old daughter recently certified as a Junior Open Water Diver, an excuse to go to Florida (my first time) seemed great! We’re used to spending our winters skiing in Oregon, so trading snow for some tropical weather and warm water was a welcome change of pace.

We spent most of our time in Islamorada. It’s a great area for newer divers, offering fairly easy, shallow dives (and of course, that warm water!). We used Islamorada Dive Center, and they were fantastic. They’re a very family-friendly operation. Keep in mind that their boats can have upwards of 20 people, so it helps to be somewhat self-sufficient. But don’t worry, you can absolutely hire a guide if you need one.

Now, about those dives…

Diving in the Keys was an enjoyable experience, perfect for our Junior Open Water divers. The water was a clear, inviting turquoise, and the sunlight streamed through it, creating a dazzling underwater world. We were surrounded by schools of grunts and jacks, their silvery scales flashing as they darted through the coral formations. Parrotfish, with their vibrant colors and beak-like mouths, cruised by, while curious cowfish hovered nearby, their boxy shapes a comical sight. Although I had dived with quite a few shark species while living in Southeast Asia, encountering the nurse sharks in the Keys was a new and exciting experience. They were surprisingly calm, gliding along the seabed, seemingly unfazed by our presence.

While the shallow reefs were great for family-friendly dives, my friend and I were eager to explore some of the area’s famous deeper wrecks. We spent one day on the U.S.S. Spiegel Grove out of Key Largo (using Quiescence Diving Services, which I highly recommend) and a second day on the U.S.S. Vandenberg out of Key West (using Southpoint Divers, another great outfit).

Wreck diving is fairly new to me, only really having dived the U.S.S. Liberty in Bali previously. The Spiegel Grove and Vandenberg are on another level entirely. As we descended into the blue depths, the ghostly shapes of the Spiegel Grove and Vandenberg slowly emerged from the abyss, their massive forms gradually materializing in the hazy light.

Wreck immense size was disorienting; the towering masts and cavernous cargo holds stretched into the hazy distance, leaving us wondering where to even begin our exploration. Schools of barracuda patrolled the decks, their silvery bodies catching the dim light as they swam, while sharks circled the superstructures and Goliath Grouper lurked in the shadows.

Swimming along the massive superstructures, you feel dwarfed by their sheer size and realize you could do a lot of dives before seeing even a majority of these wrecks.

As for the video, if you’re interested in that sort of stuff:

  • All footage was recorded with a DJI Action 4 camera, stored in a housing, and shot in D-Log M.
  • All editing and color grading were done in DaVinci Resolve Studio (2024 was the year I finally got into video editing!).
  • All sound is from the dives themselves, but the backing track is from https://artlist.io.