Underwater Wakulla
Summer season
Hello Wakulla
The summer season is in the last month by the calendar but in Florida the summer usually lasts until late fall, or some spearfishing folks say summer is over when they can’t get gag grouper or red snapper because their season is closed.
For now the ocean is very warm and the fish are very active.
I took a family of six for their open water certification to PCB (Panama City Beach for all you new Wakulla residents) on Monday and Tuesday of this week. The water temperature was a bone chilling 89 degrees from surface to 60 feet down.
If you have lived in Florida for any length of time you will know that ocean water that warm is hurricane fuel.
With that said, we are in hurricane season but it doesn’t get active until the latter part of August and through October. I’m not going to go into what you should do to prepare as I did when the season started, but what I am going to tell you is if you have not been diving much lately you should go before we get any heavy storms. Right now we are seeing water visibility like never before even on dives that are close to shore (3-5 miles).
Don’t get me wrong there are times where you will get patches of murky water but it’s not like that for long.
The other part of this, almost every class I have taken to PCB for their open water the ocean has been near flat and little to no surface or bottom current. That along with the visibility makes for a near perfect diving condition.
The sea life even on the wrecks or dive sites has been incredible to see. The enormous bait balls and some natural coral have been awesome to see.
While we where diving the hovercraft my students saw a massive goliath grouper along with a sea turtle. I saw a school of queen angels that were bigger than I have ever seen before. There were black sea urchins all over the wreck, the sea slugs and starfish were all over the sandy bottom around the wreck.
The takeaway from this is while the weather and water temperatures are steady you need to take advantage of these conditions before we have our first big storm come in and really mess up the coastal waters.
Check with your local dive shop or instructor to get the current conditions in the area.
Russell Miller NAUI #59999