Rainy days in South Florida

What better way to spend a rainy day than to visit a museum! The History of Diving museum has been on my radar and since Florida is being all gloomy and rainy today I stopped by for a visit. They have quite the large selection of vintage dive equipment including a unique wall of nations highlighting hard hat helmets from multiple nations. They have tons of vintage gear and for the dive enthusiast it’s definitely a great way to escape the rain. I highly recommend a visit if you are in the area. You can check out my photos by clicking on the diver below (diver below, haha get it?).

The following day I ventured down highway 1 aka the Overseas Highway. On a previous trip I had only made it down as far as Islamorada so the 50 or so miles to Key West was all new to me. The drive is quite spectacular! At the seven mile bridge you are on a 2 lane bridge over the water on both sides of you. It was still overcast on my trip down but I imagine it would be just otherworldly on nice sunny day.

Since its a bit over 2 hours drive from my base camp in Key Largo, I had grabbed a room in Marathon Key for a couple nights so I could be close to Key West for my early morning excursions.

On my first day I visited Key West and did a morning trolley tour so I could get an overview of the city. By chance the National powerboat races were in town, so anytime I got near the harbor you could see and hear the boats ripping it up. Here are some random pictures from the town tour.

I did an afternoon 2 tank dive and we dove the Western Sambo reef which is part of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary Ecological Reserves. The reef was in pretty good shape and I was happy to see a nice grouper and both a green moray and a spotted moray eel on this dive. Click on the picture below for more pics and videos from the dives.

While in Key West I had to visit the Mel Fisher museum. If you are into sunken treasure surely you’ve heard the name before, Mel and family are famous for locating and salvaging one of the richest finds in history when he located the Atocha shipwreck. The Atocha was part of the Spanish treasure fleet sunk in a storm 1622 off the coast of Key West. Click on the photo below to see some real sunken treasure!

While staying in Marathon Key I had noticed the Turtle Hospital and on my last morning I joined them for a tour. It was super! They rescue and rehabilitate turtles that are in distress, mostly from boat strikes or sadly from ingesting too much plastic. Plastic bags floating in the water look just like the turtles main food source, jellyfish. Once the eat to much plastic it can cause them to get impacted and they can starve without intervention. The tour is about 90 minutes and you learn a bunch about the mission and get to visit with and even feed some of the resident turtles. This is a must see if you are in the area! I took a bunch of pictures, click below to see them all.

My next post I will share my visit to the Dry Tortugas via floatplane!