Scuba Diving Thrills in Crystal River, Florida

Uh-oh. Bubbles of precious air—my air!—burst before me in blinding flashes, mimicking the white-hot panic coursing through my synapses. Danger! A semicircle of fish stares dispassionately at my struggle. My instructor pantomimes breathing in and out through the tube that links my mouth to my oxygen tank, but my lizard brain is in outright revolt. DAAAAANGER!!!! I jerk a thumb skyward—scuba for “go up”—and move from kneeling to standing, traveling 6 whole inches to the surface of a slow-flowing river near Crystal River, Florida.

This wasn’t even supposed to be the hard part, I think ruefully. I take a few easy breaths and fit my regulator back into my mouth for attempt number 5 at my first breath underwater.

When it comes to scuba diving, I’m a huge chicken. What sane person straps 40 pounds of gear to their back and intentionally sinks into a choppy, murky ocean full of sharks and who knows what else?

But then I stumbled onto a scuba destination that seemed to take my greatest fears out of the equation: Crystal River, a small town about 80 miles north of Tampa. Fonts of fresh water feed the area’s rivers and bays, which remain a temperate 73 degrees year-round.

The biggest creature in these parts? Manatees, famed vegetarians. Unusually clear water, with visibility up to 200 feet, keeps even the area’s puny alligators from dive spots.

“The only problem is that it tends to spoil people. Conditions this good are very rare,” John Engiles, my scuba instructor at Crystal River Watersports, later tells me.

Running out of excuses, I enroll in a half-day intro to scuba, pray Engiles can perform a miracle, and point my car east. For moral support, I bring along my travel buddy Kerry Maloney, who got scuba-certified in high school (which was years ago) but has been too scared to dive ever since.

Quite the pair, right?

City stroll

We arrive the day before my lesson to explore the drier side of Crystal River. With just more than 3,000 people, the town's small size belies an outsized natural richness that includes turquoise swimming lagoons, freshwater springs, epic fishing, scalloping opportunities, and plenty of channels to tube and kayak. All this thanks to a vast Florida aquifer that pumps 225 million gallons of water a day into Kings Bay.

But our first stroll down the historic main drag, the café-and-boutique-lined Citrus Avenue, lets us know quickly who the real star of the ecological show is. Even the dentist’s office sign features a beaming manatee.

“Crystal River is the only place in North America where you can legally swim with the gentle behemoths that winter among the area’s ubiquitous seagrass fields,” says Terry Natwick, sales and marketing manager for Discover Crystal River.

“Manatees are the fabric of Crystal River and [nearby] Homosassa,” Natwick tells me. “They are a part of our culture.”

The county broke the half-million-overnight-visitor mark in 2018, but when Kerry and I board a clear-bottomed canoe from the backyard of our bed-and-breakfast, we have a little slice of Kings Bay to ourselves. Fish flit through transparent water below, but I still can’t spot a whiskered manatee snout surfacing for air. I keep my eyes peeled and paddle until dusk, grateful for a distraction from what’s coming tomorrow.

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Deep-ish dive

A cheerful, brown-bearded Eagle Scout in his 20s seems an unlikely bringer of doom, or so I reassure myself upon meeting instructor Engiles next morning at his family’s small dive shop. The Discover Scuba Diving course is the baby step I hope will determine once and for all whether I’m cut out for this scuba diving thing.

Novices “test the water” with a guided dive. In summer months, trainees can practice in Three Sisters Springs, a frequent haunt of the neighborhood’s 800 or so manatees. (Divers can observe the protected creatures from 6 feet away.) But it’s still spring, so Engiles suggests we drift dive nearby pool-clear Rainbow River.

But first, class.

Facing off in folding chairs, Engiles walks me through basic scuba skills, safety measures, and equipment. We practice hand gestures, including the “thumbs up” I will use many, many times. The red bold print exclaiming “never hold your breath!” in the manual makes me nervous, I say.

“People have to learn how to fight their own instincts and not panic,” Engiles cautions me. “The water touches your face, and the instinct is to hold your breath and kick to surface.”

I stuff myself into a dry wetsuit and feel bizarrely confident after listening to the lecture. We hop on the water taxi, and it zips us upriver to the dive spot. Sure, nothing feels natural, from the awkward fins to the heavy, clunky oxygen tank. But Spanish moss sways from trees fringing the riverbank, the afternoon light is beautiful, and I know exactly what I need to do underwater … in theory.

Once I get over the initial OMG, I can’t breathe panic, I breeze through the rest of the skills I must complete before the actual dive begins. Engiles leads me several feet down a gentle underwater slope. I hold my nose and try to force air into my sinuses, protection against the intensifying water pressure around me. All’s well until a few feet farther down, when my right ear starts feeling a pressure no amount of nose holding or jaw waggling will relieve.

Turns out, the greatest threat I face on my first dive doesn’t come from the water at all, but the air. A pollen bonanza has left me slightly congested and unable to dive past 10 feet. It’s okay, though, because I’m completely mesmerized by the riverscape as the current pushes me along underwater. Twenty minutes float by, and I realize I haven’t thought about my breath once.

Never more than 5 feet away, Engiles navigates the valleys and flora patches with the ease of a cabbie cruising hometown streets. The plink plink plink of pellets rattling in his small metal canister alerts me to a tiny river turtle paddling below us. If I could squeal in a regulator, I would.

A bit downriver, 3 large, pointy nosed gar drift by in a tight cluster right beneath me. The water is so clear, I can count their speckles. I turn excitedly to Kerry and point emphatically. (She later tells me every time I made this gesture, she assumed something with teeth was swimming toward her. You don’t just overcome your fears in a few hours, after all.)

Emerging from the water an hour later, we’re both completely giddy. She blurts out, “I can’t believe how much I loved that!”

I couldn’t agree more.

Based in New Orleans, Jessica Fender is an award-winning journalist and world traveler, who’s stoked to add underwater locales to an ever-expanding destination bucket list. Follow her globe-trotting adventures on her blog, travelerbroads.com.

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If you go

What to do: Experienced divers can book trips to a range of pristine springs and marine caverns through Crystal River Watersports. The outfitter’s guided Discover Scuba Diving course allows novices to develop basic skills and test-dive scuba. From $85. Swim with manatees during a small-group snorkel tour with naturalists at Crystal River Watersports. From $75. (352) 795-7033.

Where to stay: The 4-room Crystal Blue Lagoon Bed & Breakfast features fantastical mermaid-themed decor and easy access by canoe and kayak to sprawling Kings Bay.

An on-site spring often attracts manatees during high tide. Rates start at $225. (352) 220-1488; crystalbluelagoonbb.com.

Where to eat: Cajun-born Jimmy Stoltz of Seafood Seller and Café entertains diners with magic tricks, pet crawfish, and impeccably prepared sautéed blue crab claws and trays of Seller’s shrimp. (352) 228-4936. An extensive wine list complements the eclectic menu at Vintage on 5th, a local favorite housed in a former church with a picturesque wrap-around porch. (Be sure to designate a driver if you plan to drink alcohol.) Don’t miss the rich she-crab soup. (352) 794-0004.

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