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MAGICAL MYSTERY TOURBY PHIL TRUPP |
We land on Jupiter and, after consulting with those who will help us solve the mystery, we take off walking
under a crescent moon to the place they call Mars. They take their celestialism seriously here in South
Florida with streets named Venus and Saturn and Neptune.
This can only bode well: a stellar beginning to a scuba odyssey that will cover 120 miles, from Jupiter and
Riviera Beach in Palm Beach County, through glitzy-cool Fort Lauderdale in Broward County, and ending
with a voyage to Atlantis in racy, 24-hour-a-day Miami in Dade County.
Maybe the Jovian star fetish has to do with all the show-biz celebs in this squeaky-clean town with the putting
green lawns. Between the hamlet of Jupiter and Tequesta (it's called Jupiter-Tequesta, as if it were a single
entity) live legendary film and TV personalities Bob Hope and Perry Como. Then there's Arnold Palmer,
racing legend Rick Mears, Burt and Loni.
l Pop star/exhibitionist Madonna bought a house a bit farther south and was once seen driving topless down
Ocean Bouleyard in her convertible. It's all part of the crazy-quilt folk history that makes South Florida so
irresistibly kitschy.
We've come here with a provocative theory: Hidden not so far beneath the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of
Florida is a lost prehistoric civilization, an underwater Jurassic Park where our ancestors inhabited rude
seaside settlements and hunted "mega fauna" including sloths, satire-toothed cats and mastodons. I've
worked at this theory for a long time now, and our inspection of the Atlantic along this part of the coast might
provide the clues I need to put it all together in a neat, almost scientific package.
As in most destinations, summer is the calmest and most predictable time to visit South Florida. Spring and
fall offer long stretches of fair weather punctuated by fronts that sweep through in a day or two, pushing
breezes ahead of them and trailing sunshine and calm behind.
But with magazine deadlines pending, we're here in November. So we expect the unexpected. One day we
may get big swells and big animals; the next day may bring gentle zephyrs as tendrils of the Gulf Stream push
100-foot visibility and tropicals over the wrecks and reefs. This night, the trees were bent by relentless
northerlies. Offshore, the Gulf Stream charged straight into the wind and big seas were building atop the
huge chasm that lay below. The image of that canyon has fascinated me since my first visit more than 30
years ago.
Jupiter and all of Florida were born out there maybe a half-million years ago. Where there was once only sea,
there is now a remarkable peninsula with 3,751 miles of coastline-more than any other state except Alaska-
and all of it rose up out of the sea like a huge sandbar. When and how is the question. Of course, those
prehistoric relatives will be one of the primary pieces of this submerged puzzle.
We wandered into a place called Joxs. A yuppie bar awash with beautiful people intent for the moment on the
SteelersBuffalo game, seemingly unconcerned about what lies just offshore. For them it's the football game
and the bets, and journalistic speculation about Paleo Indians doesn't arouse much interest.
Yet here in Palm Beach County, almost everyone is connected to the ocean in some way, and divers are
given special treatment. Some hotels in Riviera Beach pamper them by extending checkout times. You get a
full day of diving without paying for an extra night's lodging. Dive shops are nearly as numerous as Rite Aid
pharmacies. And for recreation, lobster hunting is right up there with jogging.
"Jupiter current has the biggest lobsters there are, man!" says Alice, the Florida-style Valley Girl serving up
the Zima malt at Joxs. She's been diving for 10 years, mostly for lobsters, and for the kick of zipping along in
the Gulf Stream. "When I dive," she adds, "I don't even swim. It's intense. And the water! Man! Crystal
clear!"
But how does she poke around in the ledges looking for lunch with the current ripping by?
"We go in a group. It's 120 feet for 10 minutes. I find a lobster, hang a buoy on the reef and go to the
surface. My buddy comes behind and bags it."
Very practical. Very South Florida. The big seas running in winter aren't disincentives to the locals.
"You get used to it," Alice says. "You just go with it. It's Palm Beach, man! "
But when it comes to scuba, out-of-towners seldom think to explore the northernmost reaches of Palm Beach
County. For the most part, it's Fort Lauderdale that comes to mind. Naturally, there's an upside to this
undeserved obscurity.
"We haven't worn a groove in the bottom here yet," says Steve Harris, who operates a charter service here.
. "If you're looking for new frontier, this is it."
Harris says bottoms in the area average about 70 feet with shallows coming up to 40 and drop-offs falling to
150. And, as you might suspect, virtually all diving is drift style, simply letting the current sweep you along.
You cover hundreds of yards with hardly a kick. The dive boat churns slowly behind your surface float and
plucks you out of the water when the dive ends.
"If you want something new and different, this is the place to be," Harris r insists. - I
We go over some of those new and ! different things: big wrecks, fishy reefs. limestone ledges and drop-offs.
"There's a reef out there that hasn't been named yet," Harris tells us. "Want to see it?"
Of course we do. We also decide to name it for Harris's son, Sean.
"Sean's Reef it is," Harris beams. We plan to explore Sean's Reef bright and early the next morning.
What greets us at sea the next day wasn't a ripping current and see-forever vis. We plowed through the inlet
at Sea Gate Marina and into a big, rolling sea. There were whitecaps, and the sea, despite easterly winds,
hadn't managed to push the clear, warm waters of the Gulf Stream shoreward. Instead of indigo blue, we dove
into green whitecapped rollers big enough to block our view of the shoreline three miles away.
We landed on a series of 80-footdeep ledges called Juno Ball. Though we used a drift-dive profile, we did
more kicking than gliding in visibility that was more silt than see-through.
Florida's northern reefs aren't the vibrant, colorful displays you can still enjoy in the Keys. The nutrient-rich
Gulf Stream is 15 miles offshore here and the currents it spawns can take quite a toll on less-hearty varieties
of coral.
The nearshore bottomography features a series of limestone ledges with scattered tropical growth. Don't
expect big basket sponges or gorgonians. What you will see, however, are big barracudas, rays, big-game
fish, occasional sharks. There are schools of snappers and grunts, but fewer of the smaller tropicals such as
chromis and squirrelfish. On the other hand, the ledges are Turtle Central-this strip of coast being a prime
breeding ground for the seagoing chelonians-and we were delighted by a loggerhead turtle with barnacles
dotting his shell like small, white badges of courage.
The appearance of big creatures and tropicals drifting our way out of the Gulf Stream was nearly always a
moment of charm, somewhat less so when a group of blacktip sharks sized us up during a safety hang. But, as
usual, they concluded we were rather boring- definitely not edible-and wandered off.
Now, floating above the strange limestone ledges I couldn't help but recall the fact that every day,
somewhere on the planet, islands rise out of the depths to greet the sun while others-through faulting or
volcanism- simply vanish forever like the shadows of clouds passing over the sea.
Florida fits neither profile. The bottom reveals no hint of geologic cataclysm. The ledges of the east coast
resemble those on the west coast of the peninsula. Their uniformity is striking.
During the last Ice Age some 100 centuries ago, this shoreline extended seven or eight miles farther east,
and more than half the peninsula was awash or submerged. The sunken ledges, worn by eons of wave action
and current, appear as precursors, the building blocks of the landmass. And the more we dove, the more a
certain pattern began to emerge. It was tempting to imagine a grid, a kind of underwater L'Enfant city plan.
The ledges have a certain symmetry: limestone walls, four to eight feet high, running north and south along
the coast. Were they a design of nature? Or were they ancient artifacts, used by the Paleo-Indians who
stalked camels and two-toed sloths hereabouts?
Another site was more down to earth: a wreck, the basic fare of South Florida diving. Between Jupiter and
Biscayne Bay off Miami there are at least 150 large, steel-hulled vessels. If the wrecks around Miami alone
were placed stern to prow, they'd stretch more than two-and-a-half miles. And each year, about 10 new ships
are added to this, the nation's most extensive artificial reef system.
Our introduction to South Florida's wrecks was the 147-foot Honduran freighter Esso Bonaire, a confiscated
dope runner.
Any wreck diver has got to love the Esso Borzaire. She stands boldly upright at 90 feet, intact, with a big
wheelhouse and wide-open hatches that invite safe penetration. Her placement in the open sea makes her a
convenient rest stop and feeding station for amazingly thick schools of fish.
A little farther out, in deeper water, the ledges rise up again, only these are feeding stations for batfish and
small sharks that circled the divers on the way up. The sharks positioned themselves at odd angles to the
sunlight, predatory behavior learned in the million-year curriculum of the school of evolution. At times they
were like ghosts, chimeras revealed for a few moments then vanishing the next, but never really far away.
There are at least 50 regularly visited dive sites between Jupiter and Boynton Inlet to the south. New reefs
and wrecks are charted each season and, if you were so inclined, you could dive here for years and barely
make a dent in them. Among those within easy reach are the Miss Jenny, a capsized barge resting in about
85 feet of water. The Third Gully Barge sits atop a nearly flat ledge. Typically, the wreck is swept by current,
even at 70 feet, and you should get a feel for the local style of drift diving before signing up for this one.
An unusual duo is the Mizpah and the PC. The first is a 1S5-foot Greek passenger liner still pretty much
intact after decades on the bottom. It's been the setting for dozens of advertising photos. The bow of the
Mizpah is jammed into the PC (Patrol Craft1170); together they're an all-day event. Don't let their familiarity
fool you, though; as befits their station on the Florida frontier, there's still plenty of mystery left. Just last
year, photographer/naturalist Paul Humann found an entirely new and previously unknown species of
bryozoan clinging to the ceiling of the Mizpah's wheelhouse.
The so-called Eidsuag Triangle consists of the 150-foot freighter Eidsuag, plus Murphy's Barge and a sunken
Rolls Royce. Eidsvag is upright; the stern is broken off the main hull and lies on its port side. Depths for all
three range from 60 to 90 feet.
The Budweiser Bar is a 165-foot German freighter, sitting on her keel on a 95foot bottom. The odd name
comes from her primary sponsor, AnheuserBusch, which placed the vessel under water with the cooperation
of the Boynton Inlet Dive Operators Association. Nearby is the former treasure hunting ship Swordfish. Both
are close to Genesis Reef and are quite fishy.
By the time we departed Jupiter we'd seen only small pieces of the puzzle, hints of how the landmass came to
be. But we'd continue the search, no matter what the sea threw at us. Thus we headed down Blue Heron
Boulevard to "Dive Boat Central" at Riviera Beach, where our search for origins would be enhanced if only
the wind decided to give us a break and switch around to flatten the seas.
The following day we got what we hoped for: blue water and current enough to carry away the silt. Visibility
doubled from 50 to nearly 100 feet. There was a crisp, gem-like quality to the sunlight as it slanted through
the water, and at 30 feet you could see shadows of fish moving over the deeper bottom.
At Riviera we joined Captain Bob Johnson on board the Rampage. With the lack of wind came higher spirits.
It was more like peak diving in the summer and early autumn when the sea typically turns to glass and you
can actually see the big wrecks on the bottom from the rail of your dive boat.
This is the sight that greeted us as we circled the wreck of the Princess Anne, a 350-foot car ferry. At first it
looked like a whale sliding below the keel, but on a second pass we could make out the unmistakable shape
of a hull and the shadowy details of the foredeck. She lay north to south in 50 to 100 feet of water.
There were very large openings in the hull and divers clustered in and around them; it's a shelter from the
current and there's plenty of daylight inside. And there was the scale of the vessel, bigger than life. Its twin
screws, each 10 feet in diameter, seemed as ominous as oncoming locomotives. The stern flung its almost
primal mass toward the surface, forming a solid steel wall. We were so small and the ship so large. How did
humans ever build and launch her into the sea?
There are caveats. Though relatively shallow and open, the Princess Anne is not to be taken lightly. There
have been some accidents, some fatal. Most were caused by lack of skill and an even greater lack of respect
for this deceptively "easy" dive. The best and safest bet is to follow the lead of the area's experienced
guides, whose knowledge of the wrecks and currents will keep you coming back for more.
At the wreck of the Amaryllis, a liberty ship grounded during a storm and subsequently made into an artificial
reef, we were treated to a kind of underwater lion tamer act; only the lion was a very large green moray eel
and the tamer was Captain Scott Blount. The act goes down as follows: We dive as the boat moves over the
site and Blount, toting a bag of bait fish, swims to the midsection of the wreck, where a six-foot-long moray
keeps house. She eagerly wriggles out to greet him. He opens his bait bag, places a fish between his teeth
and the eel plucks it from his mouth. This is definitely not something you want to try to imitate. When the
goodies were gone, the eel glided among the awestruck bystanders looking for
Not to worry.
"Just put your hand out like so," Blount explained. He placed his hand in a palm-up position. "She'll just
swim away." Well, sure. How convenient. But one wonders: Do fingers look like anchovies to a myopic
moray? No one's ever been roughed up, Blount swears, and the encounter is, at the least, memorable.
Meanwhile, we continued scoping the bottomography. Bathymetric maps revealed an amazing piece of
submarine terrain. If you could strip away the water, you would see a narrow shelf, about three miles wide,
mostly submerged desert, with reefs breaking through at intervals.
The desert falls away at the 300 foot line, and from there a sharply canted slope drops to 700 feet. A broad
plateau stretches toward the Little Bahama Bank to the east, only to drop off once more, this time down to
2,000 feet, the depths scoured by the Gulf Stream.
As the seabed advances toward Settlement Point at the west end of Grand Bahama island, it begins to rise
again. In one of my dive logs is a sketch of this rise as seen from Bimini. It's a _ steep, deep plunge into pure
vertigo. I kept this image in mind as I continued to explore the ledges.
The Breakers is a 60-foot reef, more prolific than some we'd seen earlier. It was pleasant to cruise above the
Caribbeanesque colors; somehow reassuring. Overhangs shadowed big spiny lobsters, angelfish maneuvered
about, we even saw an octopus about in broad daylight. It's a popular site and, on this particular weekend, the
divers fairly swarmed the neighborhood.
Next, we drove south to trendy Fort Lauderdale, the "Venice" of America. I think of it more as the L.A. of
the Gold Coast: big freeways buzzing with sports cars driven by health-conscious yuppies with iron-hard abs.
Not altogether unpleasant.
Not at all. There are good restaurants, especially Italian, and the evenings are casually elegant without being
stuffy. Yuppieness notwithstanding, it's a very accommodating place and, according to the Florida Boating
and Diving Guide, is the "yachting capital of the United States, if not the world."
There's fine sailing offshore, steady winds and a slight swell running. For divers, it's drift diving, though we
didn't encounter excessive wind or currents during our visit. Moving water is clear water here, and slow
currents mean lowered visibility. We were told that was unusual, and my experience in the area tells me to
agree.
Here, nearing the tip of the peninsula, the continental shelf squeezes to a narrow waterfall of sand spilling
into the chasm. By now we see a consistent pattern in the ledges. They run north and south along the coast,
some close enough to grab the feet of unwary beachgoers. A little library work reveals that these are the tip
of an ancient limestone mountain hidden below the sand. During the last Ice Age, Paleo-Indians lived out
here, at what was once the water's edge. Our job was to find them.
What we found immediately was the startling aftermath of Hurricane Andrew, the killer storm that blew
through in August 1992. The 200mile-per-hour winds literally erased the town of Homestead, Fla., to the
southwest and took the roof off the National Hurricane Center in Coral Gables. Even here, 40 miles north of
where the eye came ashore, the history of the storm is written on the bottom.
The hurricane broke the 600-ton Mercedes in half-this even though it lies at a depth of 90 feet. Even more
impressive was the Jim Atria, a 240foot cargo ship sunk as an art)ficial reef in 1987. Before Andrew, the
Atria lay on its side, masts against the sand. After Andrew, it stood perfectly upright on its keel, masts
pointed skyward.
Other smaller wrecks didn't fare well in the storm. Some were virtually destroyed while others survived
intact. Thus Andrew was a mixed blessing, trashing some dive sites while improving others. Given the vast
number of artificial reefs, the changes are relatively small and didn't diminish the area's lure for divers.
We concentrated on the wrecks and they were impressive. While some are grist for novice and intermediate
skills, there are some advanced sites here as well. Shipwreck aficionados from colder climes come down to
see what really big, really deep wrecks look like in 100-foot-plus vis. One of these is Lowrance Reef, a
435-foot vessel that is one of the largest artificial reefs on the East Coast. This is the former Mazon, but the
name was changed in 1984 when her sponsor, Lowrance Electronics, helped place her on the bottom. She lies
well below the depth limit for recreational divers at 210 feet. The Lowrance deeper isn't the deepest wreck
around, but plenty deep enough to require special training, a lot of experience and expert local assistance.
There are shallower sites as well. The Pompano Drop-Off resembles the reefs we dived off Jupiter, and
Lloyd Beach Reef is a snorkeling-depth site off the north end of the Port Everglades Cut. The reef is only a
hundred yards offshore and, like Pompano Drop-Off, was very similar to some of the ledges we'd dived to the
north.
We packed up and headed south toward Miami. Traffic was backed up for miles thanks to a Rod Stewart
concert at the Orange Bowl. Entrepreneurs maneuvered through the lines of cars brandishing T-shirts with
the spikyhaired idol's face splashed across them.
Yep, this is Miami: South Beach, Coconut Grove, Calle Ocho. Three fingers of Cuban espresso from a
roadside stand near Key Biscayne and guava in phyllo pastry; all this for pennies and consumed in the
shadow of $200-a-night hotels. Close at hand are the newly refurbished Art Deco beauties of South Beach;
hotels that were the dream destination of the 1930s and '40s. Insouciant pastels drape facades rendered in
poured concrete, the only material malleable enough to reproduce the sweeping curves of the more exuberant
postwar hostelries. The international leisure class has alighted on Miami Beach and set its improbable
architecture abuzzing with an even more improbable rebirth. Chi-chi designer Gianni Versace will spend $6.5
million to remake the old Rembrandt Hotel into a Euro Trash palace next door to buildings that their owners
couldn't give away a decade ago. Who needs Rod Stewart? Miami is a nonstop show all by itself.
If you tire of the onshore spectacle, there are plenty of choices when you look seaward as well. The city is in
a league by itself when it comes to sheer numbers of dive and charter operations. Because the numbers keep
changing it's difficult to be precise. But at last count there were more than 40 charter operations and at least
80 dive retailers, some with their own boats.
As for photographic services, Miami is a paradise of underwater photographers. Excellent rush processing is
available, as is rental equipment and repairs. Flooded strobe? No problem; Miami has the fix.
Of course Miami is about much more than scuba. It's a rich city, the de facto capital of Central and South
America. The Bacardi Museum is a must-see for art lovers; for more material girls and guys there's the
Galleria in Coconut Grove and the Bal Harbour shops, the area's equivalent of Rodeo Drive. If you speak
Spanish, so much the better. Some of the best radio stations are broadcast exclusively in Spanish, an
appropriate aural setting for the songs of home-grown superstar Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound
Machine.
If you just can't stop ogling those reef fish, try the Seaquarium. Nearby Planet Ocean offers walk-through
deep submersibles and other attractions for explorers of all ages. There are excellent libraries and access to
state-supported resources, such as the artificial reef program officer for Dade County, Ben Mostkoff.
Dade's setup is the biggest of the state's 372 reef programs, says Mostkoff. But all is not peaceful in
artificial reefdom. According to Mostkoff, some scientists are beginning to question whether the reefs are
counterproductive, whether they merely concentrate marine life rather than increase it.
"I think [the reefs] help the population and increase spawning," he says. "Regardless, they take pressure off
of natural reefs. If that's all they do, they're serving an important function."
The reefs are mostly ships, more than 80 of them, placed under water by the Metro Dade County
Department of Environmental Management. Seldom will you have so much choice. Big, intact ships in warm,
clear water looking a great deal more intriguing on the bottom than they ever did topside. It's like touring a
grand nautical museum that's part history, part fun house.
The future of undersea Miami I promises the beginning of a kind of stateside Truk Lagoon. It's the
brainchild of Steve O'Neal, chairman of Miami's Destination Atlantis Committee, and head of a foundation
called EC OSAT. O 'Neal's BMI/Airside Corporation, which deals in aircraft parts, has begun the collection
by planting a Boeing 727-100 passenger plane just outside Biscayne Bay.
The idea is to bring in large mothballed warships-maybe even a battleship or aircraft carrier.
"We aren't all sold on this," cautions Mostkoff. "There are environmental concerns, and we're not
convinced it's ecologically sound."
Still, it's an intriguing idea, even if the realization is still elusive.
Whatever happens with the big ships, the Spirit of Miami is here and now, and it's a wonderful dive. The
plane is intact and its deepest point is only 80 feet, with the vertical stabilizer rising to within 50 feet of the
surface. I've always gotten a special kick out of sunken planes, and this one is the best I've experienced to
date.
We swam over the fuselage past experiments placed there by Miami schoolchildren. It seemed the friendliest
site in South Florida; it's certainly one of the most unusual, rivaled only by the Rolls Royce parked next to
the Eidsuag.
The Spirit of Miami ended our expedition. It had taken nearly two weeks and many hours at sea. We had
experienced the good, the OK and the awesome. We were privileged to discover some wonderful
visions-darkly mysterious shipwrecks, at rest, challenging and inviting. NVe'd seen some very big fish, and,
as always, a sea in motion, like an infinite abstract that keeps changing shape, size and color. For these we
offered our thanks to whatever lights had guided our journey.
I was doing just that on our final night in Miami. Clouds had rolled in and the sparkling skyline now appeared
gray, flat. The city's lights winked on and you could hear wind in the palms and men at the poolside bar
laughing and bantering in Spanish.
But this is South Florida, and before I had finished my drink, the sky was swept clean. The stars shone.
Fragments of melody floated in from somewhere. The air took on a slight chill and the big ceiling fan under
the striped poolside canopy swept dark shadows across the ceiling.
And finally-finally!-Jurassic Park. We had found it. Everything fell into place, and I offer the following, not so
much as a conclusion but as a jumping-off point for further investigation:
Begin with a bird's eye view-very high above the Florida peninsula. Imagine that the waters of the Atlantic,
Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean have been stripped away.
This panorama has never been seen by human eyes. We see what this area was like some 250 million years
ago, during the Paleozoic era. It is a time of primitive fishes, and distant cousins to the dinosaurs are testing
terra firma.
The relatively narrow peninsula we think of as Florida is twice as wide with the obscuring seas removed, and
its nearly 4,000 miles of coastline have more than doubled to 8,000-plus. The familiar profile has become a
thick triangle protruding from the southern tip of the continent. This is the Floridian Plateau, and it is the
beginning of the oceanic Jurassic Park we've been looking for.
The Plateau itself is flat, like a sandy plain perched on a mountaintop. And during its entire lifetime, the
landmass has been attacked by seas that alternately advance and retreat. In the age of Tyrannosaurus Rex,
the entire plateau was submerged, which is why today we find enormous fossil shark teeth in the orange
groves around Orlando, in the middle of the state.
It was probably during the last Ice Age that the seas began their latest retreat. The coastline was much
farther east and west than it is today, and the ledges we've been diving stood high and dry like Stonehenge
megaliths. Humans gathered here and reproduced.
Until divers began scouring the state's waters in the 1960s, scientific truth held that man was a latecomer to
Florida, arriving no more than one or two thousand years ago. Now, thanks largely to amateurs in Aqualungs,
we know better. Researchers at Warm Mineral Springs have found a 10,000-year-old human brain encased
in a skull. Human remains were found cheek-to-tusk with those of sabre cats and gigantic prehistoric sloths.
In Little Salt Springs, a turtle shell with a stake driven through it, the wood charred by a 10,000-year-old
campfire. Some are convinced that similar finds will be made in the Gulf. The notion of the ledges as centers
of settlement, of primitive civilization is a controversial one, but one that makes sense if these finds count for
anything.
The ledges we experienced on the Atlantic side are similar in construction, and they spring from the same
submerged Floridian Plateau, the great land bridge between the Gulf and the Atlantic, which were once
separate seas.
It is an irresistible idea that in South Florida, below the gem-clear waters of the Gulf Stream, the footprints of
prehistoric men and women are waiting to be found. The PaleoIndians who settled the Gulf Coast were not
alone. I can't prove it, but the logic works. So does the evidence. It will take more amateurs searching,
questioning and insisting before we'll know. Or, I suppose, all it needs is a little more time on Jupiter.