October 2009    Download the Entire Issue (PDF)

Vol. 24, No. 10   What's this?

Jim Abernethy, Scuba Adventures, Florida

not what I bargained for

from the October, 2009 issue of Undercurrent  

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Dear Fellow Diver,

While I live in the neighborhood, I’ve never dived in Palm Beach County. Having heard glowing reviews of Jim Abernathy’s operation there while on a liveaboard halfway across the world in Indonesia, I had to give it a go. So, I headed to Riviera Beach on Saturday evening in August and stayed at a funky but accommodating Super 8 motel. After breakfast at 6:45am, I headed to the dive shop.

The friendly office staff signed me up and I headed to the 42-foot boat for two morning dives with a full load of divers and clearly a professional staff. The reefs were outstanding for Florida. Best I’ve seen in terms of health, density and diversity of corals, sponges and sea life. A goodsized Goliath Grouper posed graciously above an outcropping, there were numerous lobsters, a spotted eel, giant green morays, many trunkfish and cowfish, French and gray angels galore. There was current, pretty stiff at times, but nothing untenable.

Drift diving is the norm in South Florida. Usually each diver is required to hold onto or clip in a reel attached to a surface marker ball throughout the dive, while the divemaster remains on the boat, watching bubbles. The Abernathy boat sends two divemasters into the water, each with up to 10 divers, and only the dive master pulls a marker float. This is a boon for the photographer, of course, not being dragged along by the current. We were instructed during our boat briefing not to swim to the boat after a dive; the deeply tanned, blond, dreadlocked Captain Sean would “park the boat in our laps,” which he surely did.

The boat was comfortable with a big rear open space that made gearing up and plodding to the stern easy. The dive platform was wide and deep with the best exit ladder I’ve seen: maybe eight steps placed only inches apart, at a steep rake and wrapped tightly with rough hewn rope. Made exiting a breeze. The dives were leisurely, with no pressure to exit other than the lack of it in your tank. My only issue was that my Air2 alternate had started free flowing and we couldn’t fix it on the boat, so I was relegated to orally inflating my BC, not much of an inconvenience except for not being able to fully inflate my back-inflate BC on the surface....