Your Guide to the Best of Florida’s Springs, Parks and Recreations
The author started gathering information for this unique guidebook of Florida Springs over 40 years ago. In 1973 Robert F. Burgess began diving and photographing the underwater caves associated with Florida’s labyrinthine freshwater springs long before scuba divers had such things as depth gauges, personal flotation devices, or cave diver training programs. He attributes his survival in what has been called “the world’s most dangerous sport” to the fact that he always stayed within sight of the way out of these underwater sites.
He wrote his pioneering book The Cave Divers (Dodd, Mead, 1976) to alert divers to the inherent dangers of cave diving, an activity where your first mistake was often your last. In time he dived each of the major springs and their associated caves that he details here, documenting their depths, their features and photographing many of the details. In special cases he includes anecdotes of interest that occurred to him in some of them.
Over the years dirt roads to these sites became paved, commercial interests in the areas came and went; often his interviews with owners of springs now provide an accurate history of these natural phenomena that would otherwise have been lost. One spring after another has fortunately become state parks that have been improved to such a degree that they are all popular recreational areas for the public today.
Once, a spring run may have been an attraction for college students to float down on inner tubes while they imbibed in beverages and left the fall-out of soda cans and beer bottles on the bottom of these pristine places. But all of that has long ago been cleaned up and none of it exists today. Thanks to the awareness that all such sites are natural treasures and should be treated accordingly, Florida’s springs today radiate their original beauty and visitors flock to these places to enjoy them as Mother Nature intended them to be enjoyed.
So, here is the author’s research of those early years upgraded where necessary to include the many activities each recreational park has to offer today. Especially for divers, this is a source of unparalleled information about what awaits them in this unique underwater world.
Though the topside facilities may have changed, nothing about the underwater world at these sites is different. The fish and the manatees still come. The spring caves are still beautiful. The river runs are as idyllic as ever. The parks now preserve and protect everything.
Whether you are a nature lover, a floater, a fisherman, a boater, a camper or a diver, here is your guide to Florida Springs with all of the springs’ Internet links to instantly update you on what’s current at these beautiful Florida vacation spots.
