Wendy's Gone Walkabout

Crystal Springs, Florida offers visitors an opportunity you can’t find anywhere else in the world – you can legally swim with manatees! Several freshwater springs converge in Crystal Springs before going into the ocean, and it is these springs that attract the manatees. They can’t survive in cold water for very long, so in the winter when the coastal waters start to get cold, the manatees come into the springs where the water is warmer year-round. That means that winter in Florida is actually the best time to see them and they come into the springs in large numbers.

I first wrote about snorkeling with the manatees in Florida in a blog I did a few years ago as it was listed as one of the top 10 marine encounters in the world by Lonely Traveler.

The first time I went on a boat tour in Florida that had the possibility of finding manatees, the boat captain told us to look for “giant baked potatoes” in the water. Which, well, is pretty accurate. Giant baked potatoes with small flippers.

The Florida Manatee is (surprise) native to Florida. There’s more info on them on this site, but from what it says they can weigh up to 1,000 pounds and are typically around 9 to 10 feet long. They are vegetarian grazers, and their diet is mostly sea grass. They’ve been called a “sea cow” as a result. Unlike a cow though, they only have one stomach but very large intestines – about 135 feet long! And you might think that such massive creatures are blubbery like whales, but their bulk is mostly their digestive system – they have very little body fat.

There are many tour operators in the area that provide snorkel experiences. I’ve tried two of them. For each of them, they started by getting you outfitted with snorkel, mask, and full wetsuit (3mm). Once you’ve got your gear, you’ll watch a brief video about the manatees and what to expect. The video also walks you through best practices when snorkeling with the manatee:

• Don’t touch them! It’s terribly tempting when you’re so close but it’s not good for them to get too used to interacting with humans.
• Don’t swim over them – the water can be a bit crowded and sometimes the manatee swims under you, but you should avoid swimming over them. They come to the surface to breathe and you don’t want to interfere with that.
• Try to stay floating on the surface – this is important for a few reasons. First, it prevents you from accidentally kicking the manatees. Second, it makes the water clearer as you don’t have a bunch of people kicking up debris and silt.
• The tour company will give you a swim noodle when you get in the water. The guide on my trip today insisted we put it under our hips when in the water. This felt awkward at first, and took me a minute to get rid of the feeling that my face was being pushed into the water. Once I got the hang of it, he was totally right in that having the noodle there forced me flatter in the water so I floated more easily. And when I relaxed, it made for a nice easy float.

On our tour, we had a few people who hadn’t snorkeled before. The boat had life jackets for those who wanted them, but the folks who weren’t comfortable swimming and/or snorkeling wound up standing up and kicking a lot and focusing more on the swim than the manatees. So if you’re going to go on a trip like this, you may want to try snorkeling in a pool beforehand to get used to it. You’ll enjoy the trip more and help the manatees as well.

As I mentioned, I’ve done two tours where I snorkeled with the manatees. There were a few differences:

• Tour 1 – this one was in April 2023 and I went with River Ventures.
  • It was later in the season and most of the manatees had headed back to the coast by then, so the company had to try harder to find manatees than they do during the winter months.
  • We met at their headquarters and got kitted up and then got onto a small bus to go to meet our boat. It was pretty efficient that way.
  • They didn’t give us flippers. I had brought my own and left them unused – the company said we couldn’t use them and I didn’t need them anyway.
  • Once we got on the boat, it was a few minutes’ ride to our first manatee. We got into the water (it’s cold at first but warms up quickly with the wetsuit) and had our first sighting! The challenge was that we weren’t in the clear springs so the water was really murky – unless I was literally right next to them, I couldn’t find them.
  • Because there weren’t that many manatees in the area, we would swim with one or two, get back in the boat and find more, swim with them, get back in the boat and find more, etc. We did get to see a mother and her nursing calf though and that was cool.
• Tour 2 – I went today (February 11, 2024) with a different company called American Pro Diving.
  • It is still winter (but a lovely 80 degree sunny day), so there were lots of manatees in the springs and we didn’t have to search hard for them.
  • As with the first tour, we met at their headquarters and got kitted up and had the manatee safety video. They provided flippers as they said we were required to have them on the boat, but nobody wore them in the water.
  • After we got our gear, we all got back into our own cars and followed the guide to Pete’s Pier (about a mile away). And then after the tour, we had to return our gear back at their headquarters. We also waited for him to put the boat in and out of the water, which went reasonably fast but added to the overall time.
  • Once we got on the boat, it was a few minutes’ ride to the entry for Three Sister’s springs. And the springs were open (they are sometimes blocked off to protect the manatees). So once we were in the water, it was a very different trip than the first one I did as we swam our way up into the spring where the boats can’t go – and inside the spring was a watery manatee oasis. We probably saw thirty or forty different manatees – traveling in and out, resting on the bottom, coming up for breaths, etc.
  • Because we were in the springs, visibility was pretty good – I could see 30 or 40 feet. We had plenty of time to ourselves, just floating around and watching the show. Who knew giant baked potatoes could be so cute?
  • Rodney was my guide today – his jokes were terrible (sorry Rodney) but he was fun and took good pictures and videos and tried his best to keep everyone on the tour obeying the rules. I paid $37 for the video afterward, that felt a bit steep but I didn’t have an underwater camera with me and wanted the pics.

If you’re not a snorkeler, you can also do a boat cruise where you stay warm and dry but still see the manatees. I did one with Explorida in January 2024. We chose that one because it was 1.5 hours long (some of them were only 30 minutes) and we had a few people in our group who weren’t comfortable snorkeling. It was cold (for Florida) that day and was about 50 degrees outside!

I’m curious about other operators, so if you’ve tried a different one then let me know.  

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