Key Largo Florida

Diving Pennekamp Coral Reefs

Want to go diving at John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park? They have a full-service PADI dive shop across the marina from the main concession building. The dive shop runs reef trips on Reef Adventures, a custom-built 35-passenger catamaran. They have rental gear available, and offer expert instruction up to PADI Divemaster.

Novices will be interested in the available PADI Open Water certification. This program costs $425 (plus tax), lasts 3 to 4 days, and ends with certification as a full PADI Open Water Diver. This is an intensive course, and certifies you to dive anywhere in the world! If you aren’t interested in the time commitment (or if you are just trying the whole "scuba thing" out to see if you like it!), we do offer a "resort course", PADI’s Discover Scuba Diving, which is a one-day course for $150 (plus tax). This course includes a morning of classroom and skills work and finishes with instructor-led dives. Although the Discover Scuba Diving course does not include a PADI certification, many who take the course return to get take the full Open Water class.

In addition to seeing the reef, many divers who come down to the Florida Keys want to take a course to become a better diver. The best course for this is PADI’s Advanced Open Water, which we offer for $300 plus tax. "Advanced" includes not only deeper dives and wreck dives, but allows the diver to choose which skills they are most interested in improving, from Peak Performance Buoyancy to Underwater Photography. This is the certification that is generally required by the local dive shops in order to visit the deeper wrecks on the outer reef tract, like the famous USCG Duane and the USS Speigel Grove. If you are more interested in covering one skill at once, you can take a PADI specialty course or two. Two-day specialties are $275 plus tax, and include Deep Diver, Underwater Navigator, Search & Recovery, and Wreck Diver. If you don’t have that much time, you can try one of the one-day specialties for $175 plus tax, including Peak Performance Buoyancy, Project Aware Diver, AWARE Coral Reef Conservation Specialty, Fish Identification, Boat Diver, Equipment Specialist, Underwater Naturalist, or Enriched Air Diver (this course can be combined with any other PADI specialty). We also offer the two-day PADI Underwater Photography course for $150, which includes the rental of an underwater camera.

• John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park

Location:
Mile Marker 102.5
Overseas Highway
Key Largo, FL
(800) 326-3521
website: www.pennekamppark.com

See:
• Pennekamp Reef Information
• Diving Pennekamp Reefs
• Reef Animals & Fish
• Jules Undersea Lodge
• Dive and Snorkeling
• Sailing