Underwater Wakulla

Relaxing vacation week

Hello Wakulla

I just came back from a pretty relaxing vacation week. During the week I was able to squeeze in a couple of very relaxing dives.

We didn’t really go anywhere away from home but took a couple of day trips to Panama City Beach and St. George Island for a little beach R&R. The scuba diving in PCB right now is really second to none. The water temperature is a little warmer than I like but at 88 degrees at 60-feet it’s bearable. A good friend and his wife went with me and my wife on the dive boat. We were the only ones on the boat except the captain and dive master.

The first dive site we went to was the Navy trash pile. It’s not a trash pile in the sense that there is garbage; it’s got some structures and what used to be a tow barge. The visibility was around 30-40 feet with very little current. It’s been about 40 years since I dove it last, but it was a nice dive all around.

The next site we went to was a little closer inshore and I thought if it’s that close then the visibility would not be as good.

I was pleasantly surprised because it had 50-70 foot visibility and the water temperature at 60 feet was 89 degrees. This site is called the Dan Barge. It has not been dived on a lot because of all the natural coral and sea fans of various species. The sandy bottom was pristine and clean.

There was an abundance of juvenile fish with several big queen angels swimming around it. Several large sea slugs, both black and white spotted ones. There were several juvenile barracuda that were just hanging out and watching me and my dive buddy.

As I said earlier that the water was really clear and it was very warm. I only saw one small jellyfish. I swam around the wreck zoned in on my surroundings; if I’d had my reel and pony bottle I would have penetrated it because there seemed like a couple of larger fish on the inside.

This Dan Barge is very deceiving in a way that would draw you in without much thought, so if you get the opportunity to dive it then take some extra training before you penetrate it.

I would recommend that you make sure your buoyancy is near perfect as you swim over the top of it or you will run a high risk of destroying the coral and sea fans that call it home.

It is very obvious that most of the dive boats don’t bring new scuba divers to that site for fear it would be destroyed by the multitude of fins that would hit the top of the barge.

I’m hoping to take some of my advanced students to it for a night dive soon. I’ll bet the sea life at night would be awesome.

I hope you will get just a glimpse into our precious underwater world that we tend to take for granted as we go on living our busy lives on this beautiful planet we call home.

Until next week.

Russell Miller NAUI #59999