At 7:00 p.m. on Thanksgiving, we boarded a bus at the dive shop for an overnight run to the Crystal River area of Florida.  We arrived at Ginnie Springs at around 8:00 a.m. on Friday ready to dive (and a little tired).

Ginnie Springs was interesting...other than our certification dives, we hadn't really done any fresh water diving.  The first two dives were in a cavern that went to about 50 feet.  It was relatively open and had a strong flowing spring at the bottom.  The second two dives (three caverns) were up river a bit -  The Crack, Devil's Eye and Devil's Ear.  At the end of the caverns the underwater cave systems began.  As we were unfamiliar with the cave systems we were only able explore a limited amount of the caves.  They were interesting, but there wasn't a lot to see.  We ended the day with a drift back down the river.

Day 2 led us Devil's Den and Rainbow River.  Devil's Den was by far our favorite site of the trip.  The dive platform was about 60 feet below land (you had to climb down 62 steps to reach the platform).  The surface diameter was about 150 feet.  The max depth was about 55 feet.  With tons of swim-throughs and caves, we kept ourselves very busy.  We were the first divers in the water so we had great visibility.  We did three dives at Devil's Den before heading to the Rainbow River for a 1.5 mile drift dive.  It took about an hour and a half to get down the river where we saw turtles, snook, mullet, alligator gar and rainbow trout.

Also on day 2, we also went on a night dive at Catfish Hole in Crystal River.  We had been hearing from everyone who did this trip that this was an amazing dive.  You go down into a hole six divers at a time.  Once everyone is down, everyone is to turn their lights off.  After a few minutes you are to turn them on and see all the catfish that have come out.  Unfortunately, this never happened.  We sat in the hole for about 10 minutes and saw three very small catfish.

The final day we snorkeled with the manatees and dove King Springs cavern.  The manatees were pretty cool - very friendly.  We had one that would not leave us alone.  King Springs Cavern was a small cavern that was relatively open inside.  We only brought one light and the batteries were near dead so we ended up sitting in the dark for quite a while.

All-in-all, it was a fun trip.