Basin Hill Shoals

True to form, once I get back to land I settle into my land routine pretty quickly and lose the desire to post to my blog, which is really about living aboard, which I’m not doing right now. But in some recent past post I promised stories and pictures about our dives, so here’s the first such post. I’ll post about a different dive every week or two. This is my way of milking things until we get back to the boat some time in January. Who am I kidding, I’m thoroughly enjoying sorting through the images and creating videos and slideshows to share.

Basin Hill Shoals was one of four reef areas we dove in John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park. This was our second dive. Our first dive was at Turtle Rocks, but it was my first dive in quite a while and I needed to get used to maneuvering around the corals without damaging them before trying to also manage a camera. I’m not very good at judging distance on land or under water, so it takes me a while, and some floundering, to figure out how close to the coral I actually am.

John Pennekamp park was established in 1963 as the first undersea park in the United States. It and the adjacent Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary (FKNMS) contain the only reef in the Continental U.S. Their main purpose is to preserve and protect this reef. John Pennekamp park extends about 25 nm down Key Largo and out about 3 nm where it meets the marine sanctuary. We did several dives in FKNMS as well and I will post information and pictures of those later.

Various diving/snorkeling locations in both John Pennekamp and the FKNMS are marked with mooring balls, which they ask folks to use instead of anchoring. If the balls are full, one must anchor in a sand patch away from coral and sea grass. Due to the pandemic we were always able to get a mooring ball; their snorkeling trips are limited and they are not running their dive tours, although several local private dive tours are running at reduced capacity.

The reefs in Pennekamp are fairly shallow, 5-20′. Most of them still had their mooring balls, but a couple didn’t, so we didn’t dive those. These were fairly small reefs and because they are shallow they are really “nursery” reefs with mostly juvenile rather than the larger adults. There were lots of beautiful soft corals gently waving in the currents. So now I will let the images speak for themselves. Enjoy!