Tampa Bay

5hr trip from Marianna to Clearwater (Tampa Bay)

Tampa Bay Area

Tampa Bay is beautiful. You can hardly believe it's a fairly large city (or collection of cities). Wiki puts the Tampa Bay area at 4.2 million people in 2010, and stats SA puts the whole Western Cape at 5.2 million and Gauteng at 11.3 million in 2011. So the Tampa Bay area holds at least a third of the whole of Gauteng and 4/5ths of the Western Cape. It is flat, and green, and clean, and the bays and beaches extend through-out with access to the different regions by long bridges.

Tampa Bay from the most NW bridge from Clearwater

The weather is generally hot, and sometimes humid, but mostly just pleasant. In the afternoon there are thunderstorms. The people are friendly, polite and helpful - just as we found in "cave country". There seems to be none of the anger and rushed impatience that I'm used to in people who live in large cities.

We stayed at the Travelodge, which is close to the beach in Clearwater. Thanks to Tripadvisor which found us this cheap 2-star rated motel which was much more like 3-star, and was clean, comfortable, had free high speed Internet (16 Mbps/sec !!!) and an awesome pool area right outside our room.

Pool area from our room at Travelodge

Saturday night, just after arriving we hurriedly booked tickets for the Tampa Bay Rays vs Seattle Mariners baseball game. Our first ever baseball game and our first (and last) ever corn dog :) It was an authentic American experience and a lot of fun, although at times baseball can be as slow scoring and boring to watch as a five day cricket game.

Clearwater Beach

On Sunday we hit the Clearwater beach. The sand is soft and white like chalk, and very clean. The sea was so warm it was like a bath, but there were no waves, it was more like a lake. I think that most of the Gulf of Mexico is like this.

By 1pm it was packed, but because there is so much beach and sea available the density of people is not too bad. It's just amazing when from the sea, to left and right, there are people and umbrellas stretching out as far as the eye can see.



On Monday we went to Busch Gardens which is an amusement park with loads of fast roller-coasters. One of them, the Sheikra, does a 200' (60m) drop at 90 degrees (yes, that is straight down)! Awesome!

Sheikra ... aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

And on Monday night, we went to watch Dark Knight Rises on a huge Sony 4K High Definition screen in Downtown Tampa :)

On Monday our heads had arrived at Juergensen Marine at about noon. By the time we got back from the movie we had news on email ... the heads were already on their way back to us!!! Wooooohooooo, how is that for service?! They had made hardware fixes to both heads, and apart from a GPS antenna that is broken in my head which they will fix when they get parts if I send it back, the heads are now in working order and ready to dive! We were ecstatic! This was the best possible news for our machines and diving holiday. Thank you Juergensen Marine and Trish for understanding our urgency and being so quick and efficient to fix the machines and get them back to us in record time.

We quickly looked on the cave diving forums to find out what was happening with the caves and the flooding in areas other than Merritt's Mill Pond. We found out that Madison, Ginnie and Manatee are open now, but the diving reports for Ginnie indicate that the viz is very low at about 20 to 30 feet (< 10m). People who have been diving Ginnie for years say that they barely recognize the system. So we decided our best bet would be to head back to Marianna and Merritt's Mill Pond where the waters are crystal clear, and we have a lot of diving left to do. Besides, boat day is still calling! I can't wait to dive Hole-In-The-Wall and Twin.

The heads would arrive at Cave Adventurers on Tuesday late afternoon. We decided to stay in Tampa for one more day and then drive back up to Marianna on Wednesday, collect the heads and get ready to dive on Thursday morning.

On Tuesday we went back to Busch Gardens for some more rides, and then went to Adventure Islands which is the water park next door. We got thunder-stormed out by about 2pm, so we headed back to the hotel and chilled by the pool and read.

Nice and relaxed, and ready for more diving, on Wednesday we headed back to Marianna.