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Dive Report; West Palm Beach, FL
ScubaHawk - 10/12/2008 6:25 PM
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Category: Travel
Comments: 1
Hello All, I have returned from West Palm Beach Florida. I dived for two days on the dive boat Narcosis with crewmembers Capt. Van, Bryan, and Elaine. I highly reccomend Dive Boat Narcosis and its crew. They were fun to be with, their boat was set-up well, it operated well, and the crew was superb. On some boats that I have been on, the crew and divemasters tend to be a little "Nazi-ish". I am an x-professionel mariner who has been around the oceans my whole life; I don’t need a 20 year old, 100 pound divemaster barking orders at me! No, on Narcosis, they were there to help, and if you wanted to dive on your own, they had simple techniques for you to follow in order for the boat to find you when you surfaced. As you know, the Gulf Stream flows up to 3-4 knots which makes drift diving on the Atlantic side the norm. Most of us used 36% Nitrox. 80’ dives were the norm and the water temp at depth was 79 degrees. The vis was about 75 feet. The water was very blue. While the Palm Beaches do not have rocky bottoms with exquisite coral clogged walls, it does have lots of small contour changes that are parallel to the Gulf Stream. There was plenty of diverse marine life. I saw Hawksbill turtles, green turtles, a black tip shark, what appeared in the distance to be a manta ray, lots of tropical reef fishes, rock crabs, bugs, goliath grouper, and etc. The hunters got lots of bugs, a cobia, a grouper, and more bugs. The town of WPB and its satelite communities are beautiful and full of great restaurants. I love my birth state of Florida and WPB! (I don’t know FL as I left when I was 1 yr old.) Gin clear water to all! markm

Comments

bobfish - 10/22/2008 10:57 PM
Just watch yourself around Riviera Beach near A1A. It’s a real crap hole and I was almost robbed there the last time I was in W. Palm. Lucky for me my dive buddy, a Hillsborough County Deputy, had my back and after the thug saw his rather large handgun at the ready he ran off. The was at a gas station near Blue Heron and A1A at around 1am.