Head on over to YouTube to watch the video there if you prefer.
This winter holiday, my family and I went diving in the Florida Keys. We joined friends who have a tradition of visiting around Christmas. We are a family of divers: my wife is a PADI Scuba Instructor, I’m a PADI Divemaster, and our daughter is a newly certified Junior Open Water Diver. It was a great excuse to visit Florida for the first time! We usually spend our winters skiing, so the tropical weather and warm water were a welcome change.
We spent most of our time in Islamorada. It’s a fantastic area for newer divers, offering easy, shallow dives. We used the Islamorada Dive Center as our scuba home. They’re a very family-friendly operation and overall I was happy with them. Their boats accommodate around twenty. So, divers need to be self-sufficient, both on the boat and underwater.. Florida, like California, allows certified divers to dive without a guide (you’re paying for access to the boat). We preferred this. The sites are easy to navigate and being in our own group meant we could focus on our own diving. I recommend hiring a guide (which you can do through Islamorada Dive Center) if you are a less experienced diver or it has been a while since your last dive.
While the shallow reefs were ideal for family-friendly dives, we were also 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).
Despite having around 2,000 dives, I’m inexperienced with wrecks. My only prior wreck diving was on the USS Liberty; I did this during my 2008-2009 Southeast Asia stay, during which we stayed quite a few months in Bali. The Spiegel Grove and Vandenberg are on another level. These ships are massive! The Spiegel Grove is 510′ while the USS Vandenberg is 523′. Officials sank these ships far enough offshore to ensure their tops remain at a sufficient depth, around 60 feet at the shallowest, preventing interference with shipping traffic. Each ship has a fascinating sinking history. Even more exciting: They will sink the SS United States, the largest ship to date, by the end of 2025 or early 2026, creating the world’s largest artificial reef.
Diving these behemoths is something else. As you descend, they appear as ghostly silhouettes at first, hard to make out. And then their full forms reveal themselves in the hazy light and muted colors of the deep. The size is disorienting; towering masts and cavernous cargo holds stretch in opposite directions, leaving you wondering where to even begin exploring. Schools of barracuda patrol the decks, sharks prowl the outskirts of the superstructures, and Goliath Grouper lurk in the shadows. Swimming along, you feel dwarfed by the immensity and realize you could do hundreds of dives before seeing even a majority of these wrecks. I can’t wait to go back!
A few technical details on the video for those interested:
- 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 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.