Where Should I Dive After Open Water? A New Diver's Guide to North Florida Dive Sites
North Florida is home to some of the best freshwater dive sites in the country. Spread across the region, you can find everything from shallow river drift dives to deeper springs that require good buoyancy control, situational awareness, and respect for the environment you are entering.
Some of the first questions we get from newly certified divers are pretty simple: Where can I go diving? How do I find a buddy? Can I rent equipment if I don't own all of my own gear yet?
We wrote this article to help answer some of those questions and give newer divers a few ideas for places they can continue diving while exposing themselves to different environments.
Before getting into the list, remember one of the most important concepts from your Open Water course: you are trained to dive in conditions similar to those in which you were trained. There may not be a scuba police officer waiting at the spring to check whether you are making good decisions, but your certification card does not magically prepare you for current, low visibility, deeper water, overhead environments, boat diving, or every other condition you might encounter.
If you are heading into an environment that is significantly different from what you have experienced before, consider going with an experienced buddy, hiring a local guide, or taking additional training. A good instructor is not just there to show you where to swim. They can help you recognize and work through problems that newer divers often do not think about until they are already dealing with them.
How We Are Categorizing These Sites
Florida diving can get a little complicated because property rules, local customs, and formal training limits do not always line up perfectly. Some sites are very straightforward Open Water dives. Others have perfectly good Open Water areas sitting right next to cave entrances, siphons, deep drops, or overheads. A few places allow recreational divers into environments that are technically beyond what a standard Open Water course trains you to do.
So instead of just making a list of our favorite places, we are breaking them down into four categories based on the actual environment you are entering.
Open Water Friendly
These are generally good places for newly certified divers when conditions are reasonable and you stay within your depth and training limits.
Open Water Areas, But Watch Your Boundaries
These sites have legitimate Open Water diving, but depth, flow, visibility, or nearby overhead can get a newer diver in trouble quickly if they stop paying attention.
Commonly Dived Recreationally, But Beyond Open Water Training
These are places or portions of sites where recreational divers are commonly allowed or routinely go, but the environment itself includes an overhead or other conditions that standard Open Water training does not cover.
Not an Open Water Dive
These are environments where there really is no meaningful Open Water dive to be made. If you are not appropriately cavern or cave trained, these should not be on your recreational dive list.
Open Water Friendly
Troy Spring State Park
Troy Springs is one of my favorite recommendations for a newly certified diver who wants to start branching out.
The spring basin reaches roughly 70 feet, but there is absolutely no need for a newer diver to go that deep. You can spend an entire dive exploring the open-water basin while staying comfortably within your training limits. Troy also gives you a good introduction to something newer divers sometimes overlook: the bottom matters.
There are areas with easily disturbed sediment, so poor fin technique can turn otherwise clear water into a cloud pretty quickly. That makes Troy a great place to practice descending down the slope while staying horizontal, thinking about where your fins are, and learning to move without constantly kicking the bottom. You can also float out toward the center of the basin and practice a direct descent without using the bottom as a stopping point.
By Ebyabe - Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8732795
One of the easiest things you can do here is simply turn around every few fin strokes and look behind you. Are you leaving a big cloud of sediment everywhere you go, or is the water behind you still clear? If you are making a mess, think about your trim and where your fins are during each kick. You might feel like you are swimming perfectly until you actually look at the trail you are leaving behind.
You do not need to be a cave or technical diver to start developing better trim and propulsion habits, and Troy gives you a forgiving place to actually see the difference as you improve.
There are some remains of the Civil War-era steamboat Madison in the shallow part of the spring, although there really is not much left to see. The real reason I like Troy for newer divers is the spring basin, the varied bottom, and the opportunity to just go diving while paying attention to how you are moving through the water.
Fanning Springs
Fanning Springs is shallow, and that is exactly why I think more new divers should use places like it. A lot of newly certified divers immediately start chasing depth because 60 feet feels like something they earned when they got certified. Depth can be fun, but it is not what makes someone a good diver.
Go spend an hour at 15 or 20 feet and try to hold your depth within a couple of feet without touching the bottom. Work on hovering, slow swimming, buddy positioning, and different propulsion techniques. Shallow water is actually one of the harder places to maintain precise buoyancy because small depth changes create larger proportional changes in the gas volume in your BCD.
Not every dive has to be an expedition. Sometimes an hour spent deliberately working on basic control will do more for your diving than dropping to your maximum certification depth just because you can.
Rainbow River
Eventually, go do a drift dive. Rainbow River is almost the opposite of a typical spring-basin checkout dive. Instead of descending, swimming around one area, and returning to where you started, the entire point is to let the water carry you.
That requires a different mindset. One of the biggest mistakes newer divers make in current is constantly fighting it. They kick harder, increase their breathing rate, burn through gas, and exhaust themselves trying to stay in one place.
On a drift dive, the current is transportation. Your job is to control your buoyancy, stay with your buddy, navigate when necessary, and pay attention to where you need to exit. Because much of the Rainbow is shallow, it is also a great place to work on buoyancy. If you can maintain control in shallow water while moving with current, you are developing skills that will follow you almost everywhere else you dive.
Alexander Springs
Similar to Fanning Springs, Alexander Springs does not get nearly as much attention as some of the famous cave-country locations, but it is a very good place for newer divers.
apasciuto, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
The basin is broad, open, and relatively shallow, with a gradual slope toward the spring vent. There is no big cavern attraction encouraging you to keep following a hole into an overhead. You can simply explore the basin, look for wildlife, work on buoyancy, and get more comfortable planning and conducting a dive without an instructor leading you around.
That is an important transition after certification. During your Open Water course, somebody else probably made most of the decisions. They told you where to meet, when to enter the water, what the maximum depth would be, and usually where you were going underwater.
At some point, you and your buddy have to start doing that for yourselves, and a relatively shallow, open site like Alexander is a good place to practice.
Devil's Den
There is a good chance you already know Devil's Den because a lot of North Florida divers complete at least part of their Open Water course there. The entire dive takes place inside a sinkhole with limestone formations, fossils, ledges, and openings all around you. The maximum depth is fairly modest, so depth itself is not usually the biggest issue for a new diver. Traffic often is.
On a busy day, you may be sharing the site with divers, snorkelers, photographers, and swimmers. That forces you to pay attention to what is happening above, below, and around you, which is actually useful experience for a new diver. The cave portion is blocked off, so enjoy the site for what it is without trying to turn every opening in the limestone into something you need to swim through.
Blue Grotto Basin
Blue Grotto is another place where a lot of divers first learn, and the open-water basin remains a good place to keep building experience after certification. The basin reaches around 40 feet, and on a good day the visibility can be spectacular. On a busy training weekend, though, a collection of students doing skills near the bottom can make the water look very different.
That is not necessarily a bad thing. Eventually you are going to dive somewhere with less-than-perfect visibility, and learning to stay close to your buddy, maintain awareness, and keep yourself under control when you cannot see across the entire site is useful experience.
The important thing here is understanding that the basin and the deeper overhead portions of Blue Grotto are not the same dive. More on that later.
Morrison Springs
If you are willing to drive west into the Florida Panhandle, Morrison Springs is worth knowing about.
Morrison has a large spring basin surrounded by cypress trees, with a dedicated diving dock and plenty of open water to explore. When conditions are good, the water can be spectacularly clear. The important words there are when conditions are good.
Morrison is heavily influenced by rainfall and river conditions, and visibility can change dramatically after significant rain. The spring also has deeper subsurface features associated with it, but for a newer recreational diver the attraction here is really the basin itself.
Stay in the open water, monitor your depth, and enjoy the site for what it is rather than treating every opening below you as somewhere you need to explore.
Vortex Spring Basin
Vortex Spring is another Panhandle site that many Florida divers eventually visit. For a newer diver, the open-water basin is actually pretty approachable. There is plenty of room to swim, usually good visibility, and a lot of infrastructure.
The main thing to remember is that the basin and the cavern are two very different environments. If you stay in the basin, Vortex can be a comfortable place to simply go diving and add experience.
Once you start heading into the cavern entrance, you have crossed into a different category.
Open Water Areas, But Watch Your Boundaries
Ginnie Springs Open-Water Areas
Sooner or later, most North Florida divers end up at Ginnie Springs. There is a reason for that. The water can be incredibly clear, there is strong spring flow, multiple dive areas, and some of the most famous underwater cave systems in the world.
For a newer Open Water diver, it is important to understand which part of Ginnie you are talking about. The Devil's Spring System, including Devil's Eye, Devil's
Ear, and Little Devil, has open-water areas worth seeing. Open Water divers are not allowed to carry lights or enter the overhead there. Looking down into Devil's Eye or feeling the flow around Devil's Ear is enough to give you a pretty good appreciation for why cave divers travel from all over the world to dive these systems.
The temptation is obvious, especially when the water is clear. You can see the cave entrances. You may see cave divers disappearing into them. That does not make them part of your dive.
Enjoy the open-water portions and stay there.
Manatee Springs and Catfish Hotel
Manatee Springs gives you a chance to experience a very different type of North Florida environment. There are two main areas divers usually talk about here: the headspring and Catfish Hotel.
Catfish Hotel is an in-line sinkhole connected directly to the Manatee Springs cave system. Open Water diving is allowed in the sinkhole, but this is a place where you need to be very aware of where open water ends. Catfish has an upstream side where water enters the sink and a downstream siphon side where it continues toward the headspring. If you start moving into the downstream overhead, the flow can carry you farther into the system surprisingly quickly.
The headspring is only a short distance away on land, which historically made the traverse between Catfish Hotel and the main spring tempting. Divers used to do it regularly, including divers who were nowhere near appropriately trained for that kind of dive.
That is no longer something to treat casually. Geological changes and rock collapses near the headspring exit have significantly altered that part of the system. In 2019, a group of experienced cave divers attempted the downstream traverse and encountered much more severe exit conditions than they expected. The flow became powerful enough that they could no longer hold position, several divers were swept through the restriction, and one diver died.
For a newly certified Open Water diver, the takeaway is simple: do not enter the siphon and do not attempt to traverse from Catfish Hotel to the headspring. You do not need to enter the cave to understand how powerful this system is. Spend some time near the main headspring and feel how much water is moving. Trying to hold position against that flow can humble even a very athletic diver. Current does not care how strong you are, and trying to solve everything by kicking harder can rapidly increase workload, breathing rate, and gas consumption.
Catfish Hotel can still be an interesting Open Water dive if you stay in the open-water area. It is also a site where knowing where not to go is every bit as important as knowing where to go.
Orange Grove Sink
Orange Grove Sink at Wes Skiles Peacock Springs State Park is another place where Open Water divers can get a look at a major Florida cave system without entering it. Open Water divers are allowed in Orange Grove Sink but are not allowed to carry lights. That rule matters. Visibility can vary substantially depending on water levels and environmental conditions. Sometimes the basin can be dark and murky enough that daylight disappears quickly as you descend. If you are following the rules and do not have a light, the environment usually gives you a pretty obvious signal when it is time to turn around.
Other times, Orange Grove can be spectacularly clear. That is when it can become even more tempting to keep following what you can see. Clear water can make distance deceptive. If you start following one of the cave entrances, especially with a light you are not supposed to be carrying as an Open Water diver, you can move farther from the daylight zone than you realize. Some portions of the system also get much deeper, so it is easy to combine an overhead with depths that are already outside your training.
If you stay in the open-water basin, Orange Grove can still be a beautiful place to dive and explore. It is also a great example of one of the most important lessons in Florida spring diving: just because you can see somewhere does not mean you should swim there.
Buford Springs
Buford Springs is another site that a lot of North Florida divers eventually hear about, and plenty of Open Water divers end up there. It is a beautiful site when conditions cooperate, but those conditions can vary significantly. Visibility can change with rainfall, groundwater levels, and surrounding environmental conditions, so this is not a place where you should assume your last experience tells you what you are going to find today.
More importantly, Buford gets deep very quickly and transitions into an overhead environment. That combination can sneak up on a newer diver because the water can look inviting and the descent feels natural. Before long, you may be significantly deeper than you intended with rock over your head.
If you are diving Buford as an Open Water diver, stay very conscious of depth, daylight, and whether you still have a direct ascent to the surface. Once you start following the system downward into the overhead, you have changed the dive in a very meaningful way. Buford can still be a beautiful place to see, but it deserves more respect than simply treating it as another spring basin.
Volusia Blue Spring
Blue Spring State Park in Volusia County is another impressive Florida spring worth checking out. It is a powerful first-magnitude spring with clear water, substantial flow, wildlife, and a spring vent that descends into a much deeper cave system.
The open-water area can be a really interesting dive, particularly if you have not spent much time around a high-flow spring. As with several of the sites on this list, though, the important thing is knowing where the open-water dive ends. The spring vent can make it tempting to keep descending, especially when the visibility is good. The cave system below gets pretty deep, and you can move from an ordinary recreational dive into a true overhead environment faster than a new diver may appreciate.
Stick to your training limitations and enjoy the open-water portion for what it is.
Commonly Dived Recreationally, But Beyond Open Water Training
Ginnie Ballroom
The main Ginnie headspring is relatively shallow, and at the bottom is the entrance to the Ginnie Ballroom. Ginnie allows certified divers to carry lights and explore the Ballroom, and the cave beyond it is physically blocked by a grate. That does not change what the Ballroom is.
Once you put rock over your head and no longer have a direct ascent to the surface, you are in an overhead environment. Standard Open Water training does not train you for that. A lot of recreational divers go into the Ballroom, and the site allows it. That is exactly why it is worth separating site rules from training limits. Being allowed to make a dive is not the same thing as being trained to manage every problem that can happen there.
If the Ballroom interests you, consider going with someone appropriately experienced or getting cavern training first. You will get more out of the dive and have a much better understanding of what makes overhead diving different.
Blue Grotto Upper Cavern
The same basic idea applies to the upper cavern at Blue Grotto. Blue Grotto allows certified recreational divers into portions of the cavern, and a lot of Open Water students and newly certified divers end up there. Once you lose a direct ascent to the surface, however, you are technically in an overhead environment.
There is a big difference between swimming through a clearly defined recreational cavern that the site manages for divers and heading past the warning signs into the deeper system, but it is still worth understanding what kind of environment you are entering.
Do not let the fact that everybody else is doing it convince you that overhead risk suddenly disappears.
Paradise Springs
Paradise Springs is probably the clearest example of this category. A lot of divers eventually end up there, and the site allows Advanced Open Water divers. The cavern is absolutely beautiful, with clear water, fossils in the limestone, and a large passage descending toward roughly 100 feet.
But it is still an overhead environment. Being allowed into the site does not mean an Advanced Open Water course teaches you how to safely manage a cavern dive. As you descend, the cavern gets darker and deeper. Around 100 feet, you reach the entrance to the cave system, which continues significantly deeper. This is not the place to decide that because you have taken a Deep Diver course, you should see whether you can make it to 130 feet.
The cave is very soft and silty. A bad fin stroke can destroy visibility, and even bubbles hitting the ceiling can knock sediment and debris down around you. What looked perfectly clear on the way in can become nearly zero visibility very quickly. Inside a cave, losing visibility is not just inconvenient because you no longer have a direct ascent to the surface.
Paradise is an absolutely beautiful place to dive, but it is also a great example of why site access rules and training limits are not always the same thing.
Not an Open Water Dive
Eagle's Nest
Since we are talking about Florida springs and cave-country diving, Eagle's Nest is worth mentioning for one reason: newer divers may hear the name and assume it is another place they can go check out. It is not.
Eagle's Nest does not have a meaningful Open Water recreational component. You are essentially entering a major cave-diving environment from the beginning, and the system is deep, complex, and well outside what an Open Water diver is trained to manage.
This is not a case of staying shallow in the basin and looking at the cave entrance from a distance. Open Water divers simply have no business planning a dive there. You may eventually hear experienced cave divers talk about Eagle's Nest because it is one of Florida's most significant cave-diving sites. That does not make it a destination to add to your recreational dive list.
There are plenty of places in North Florida where a new diver can safely build experience. Eagle's Nest is not one of them.
Cave Portions of Orange Grove, Peacock, Manatee, Ginnie, Vortex, Buford, and Paradise
This probably sounds repetitive at this point, but that is because North Florida has a lot of places where beautiful Open Water diving sits right next to serious cave systems. Once you move into the cave portions of Orange Grove, Peacock, Manatee, Ginnie, Vortex, Buford, or Paradise, you are not just making a slightly harder recreational dive. You are entering a fundamentally different environment.
You cannot simply swim straight to the surface if something goes wrong. Gas planning changes. Emergency procedures change. Visibility can disappear. Navigation matters in ways it does not in open water. Flow can make an exit physically difficult or impossible if you do not know what you are doing. That is why cavern and cave training exist. If that type of diving interests you, reach out to us so we can connect you with a good cave instructor.
North Florida Dive Sites for New Open Water Divers
If you just finished Open Water and are staring at your new certification card wondering what comes next, you do not need to immediately seek out the deepest or most challenging place you can find. Go somewhere that lets you dive.
Spend time at Troy. Do another dive at Blue Grotto or Devil's Den without an instructor stopping you every few minutes to run skills. Spend an hour working on buoyancy in a shallow spring. Visit Orange Grove when conditions are good and appreciate the cave entrances from the open water instead of swimming into them. Let Rainbow River carry you downstream and learn how current changes a dive.
Eventually, go experience tides and marine life at Blue Heron Bridge. Then go offshore.
The goal is not to check dive sites off a list. The goal is to gradually expose yourself to different environments while giving yourself enough margin to actually learn something from each one.
Depth changes your gas consumption and no-decompression time. Current changes your workload and navigation. Poor visibility changes buddy procedures and situational awareness. Ocean diving introduces waves, tides, boats, open-water descents, and ascents. Overhead environments fundamentally change how you get back to the surface. You do not need to learn all of those lessons on the same dive.
Site Rules Are Not the Same Thing as Training
There is a theme throughout this article that is worth repeating. Some Florida dive sites allow recreational divers into areas that would normally be considered cavern environments. Some establish their own certification requirements. Others prohibit lights for Open Water divers specifically to reduce the temptation to enter an overhead.
Those site rules matter and need to be followed, but a site's admission policy does not change what you were trained to do. If your Open Water course trained you to dive to 60 feet in open water with direct access to the surface, being allowed through the gate at a dive site does not suddenly prepare you to manage zero visibility, an overhead restriction, strong siphoning flow, or an emergency hundreds of feet from open water.
Think about the actual environment, not just what certification card someone accepts at the front desk. When you are ready to expand those limits, that is exactly what additional training is for.
What About Ocean Diving?
Eventually, you are probably going to want to get out of the springs and into the ocean.
If you live around Jacksonville, the obvious question is whether you should just book one of the local offshore charters. You absolutely can once you have the experience and certifications for it, but Jacksonville offshore diving is not where I would recommend a brand-new Open Water diver make their first ocean dives.
Nautical Divers runs offshore charters out of Jacksonville, but they currently require divers to be both Advanced Open Water and Nitrox certified. There is a good reason for that. A lot of Jacksonville offshore diving is deep, with many dives taking place around the 90- to 110-foot range. You can also encounter limited visibility, current, open-water descents and ascents, and a long boat ride to and from the dive sites. That can be a lot to pile onto someone whose entire diving experience so far has been dropping into a clear Florida spring.
If you want to start ocean diving, I would take a more gradual approach. Blue Heron Bridge in South Florida is a great place to start. It gives you salt water, tides, marine life, navigation, and changing visibility while keeping you relatively shallow. It is also a good reminder that ocean diving requires planning around environmental conditions. You cannot just show up whenever you want and expect the same dive every time. Tide timing matters.
After that, consider booking a charter around Pompano Beach, West Palm Beach, Boynton Beach, or Stuart. South Florida has a huge recreational dive-boat industry, and many operators offer different trips based on experience and certification level. Two-tank trips are often around $90 to $110 before tanks, Nitrox, or rental equipment, depending on the operator.
The big advantage for a newer diver is that you can choose a trip appropriate for your experience instead of jumping straight into a 100-foot Jacksonville wreck dive. Many of those boats also have very experienced divemasters and guides. If this is your first ocean dive, tell them. Do not try to act like you have 500 dives because you are embarrassed to say you are new. A good divemaster would much rather know ahead of time and keep an eye on you than discover halfway through the first descent that you have never done a boat dive before.
Ocean diving adds several new things all at once. You may be doing a negative entry without a bottom immediately beneath you, dealing with current, watching a moving dive boat, deploying an SMB, maintaining depth during an open-water safety stop, climbing a ladder in seas, and paying much more attention to where your buddy is when visibility is limited.
None of those things are particularly difficult once you have experience with them, but doing all of them for the first time on a deep offshore dive is unnecessary.
If you want some help making that transition, we can also work boat diving or wreck diving into your training with Precision Depth Diving. Those can be taken as specialty courses, or depending on what you are working toward, incorporated into an Advanced Adventure course. That gives you a chance to make those first boat or wreck dives with an instructor there specifically to help you learn the procedures instead of just hoping you figure them out on the fly.
Jacksonville has some excellent offshore spearfishing but it isn't as glamorous as South Florida diving. Just work your way up to it.
Find a Buddy, Rent Gear, and Go Diving
One of the biggest hurdles after Open Water certification is not finding another course. It is finding somebody to dive with and figuring out what to do if you do not own all of your own equipment yet.
A lot of people leave their Open Water course excited about diving and then realize their instructor is not automatically going to call every Saturday morning and ask where they want to go.
Start meeting local divers. Join local dive groups. Come on shop dives. Stay in touch with people you met during your course. Dive with people who have more experience than you and whose judgment you trust.
You also do not need to own an entire garage full of equipment before you can keep diving. If you want to use the same equipment you trained it, Precision Depth Diving does rent equipment when it is not already being used for a class, so if you need a BCD, regulator, computer, weights, or other gear, reach out to us and check availability. We also rent cylinders, but there is one important limitation: we only rent cylinders to divers who are Nitrox certified. Most of our cylinders contain Nitrox more often than not, so we require renters to have the appropriate certification to analyze the gas, verify the mix, and use it properly.
If you are planning a dive and need rental equipment, tanks, or help figuring out what you actually need for the site, contact us before you head out. Availability can change depending on our course schedule, so it is always better to check first.
More importantly, if you are looking at one of these sites and are not sure whether you are ready for it, ask. We would much rather help you plan a good dive than hear afterward that you discovered why a particular environment was more complicated than it looked.
Your Open Water certification is not the end of learning how to dive. It is the point where you finally get to start.
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