I have traveled everywhere from Belize to Australia to scuba dive, and I am delighted to have recently found some of the best diving much closer to home! Key Largo, FL, is home to Pennekamp Underwater State Park, with quite the variety of the most amazing reefs and shipwrecks (Benwood was awesome!) that I have ever seen. I went out on three charter trips with Reef Adventures, the State Park dive boat--what an awesome trip!! The captain and crew where knowledgeable and very helpful, and they took us to the best places each time!! I highly recommend this group, and I will continue to dive with them in the future. You can check them out at www.floridakeysdive.com--good times and happy diving!!

Quicksilver is a sailing catamaran, probably around 45 feet long. It took about 30 minutes to get from the slip at the Holiday Inn out to the dive site, during which time gear was handed out and we were briefed how to get on and off the boat.

The first site was the "Gardens", probably about 16 feet at its deepest point. We saw large formations of brain coral and some big fish. There were many barracuda ranging in size from less than a foot to about four feet long. A school of about 10 Tarpon swam by, which were pretty big and we just caught a glimpse of a spotted ray that was probably about six feet from wingtip to wingtip.

The second dive was at " White Sands". Depth was more like 10 feet here, with smaller coral heads, but there were far more interesting underwater landscapes. Colorful sponges and coral were everywhere, and tropical fish looked even brighter than usual because they stood out against the white sand background. My new camera didn't leak. As you can see from the photos, however, my photography skills could use a little work.

This is a beautiful park surrounded by a coral reef. There is great snorkeling and a nice beach for sunning. A glass-bottom boat take people out to the reef to see amazing fish and coral. There are picnic areas, camping and a marina.

John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park is the first park you come to as you start driving down The Keys.

We got quite excited arriving at the park, looking forward to some walking. Unfortunately the park seemed predominately to focus on glass bottomed boat trips - fair enough with hindsight I suppose as the name of the park is ‘Coral Reef Park’. For those, like us, who wanted to experience nature without the aid of a motor there seemed to be few options.

We did explore the couple of small beach areas, taking more than a couple of minutes each. And we also investigated the couple of signed boardwalks in the mangroves, but these proved disappointly short. In fact, in this first park of our 2 week visit to Florida’s National Parks, we began to realise that most signed walks tend to be for the disabled just to give a flavour of the area. That, and possibly because there really isn’t far to walk in the Keys.

From the longer of the two boardwalks we saw some people canoeing through crystal clear channels in the mangroves, and realised this was the activity for us – gliding peacefully along with the fish and birds and away from the noise of radios and boats. We were thrilled to find there is a 4 hour canoe trail, however, on the Sunday of Thanksgiving, we couldn’t rent a canoe for a few hours which would not give us enough time to get down to Key West in daylight.