Join Smoky Mountain Divers on our first dedicated Coral Conservation dive trip down to Tavernier Key, Florida. We will be partnering with I.Care and Conch Republic Divers as we spend four days of diving. Our diving adventure will include a total of 10 boat dives where we will get to do some clean up dives, coral outplanting, coral collection, sponge outplanting, and even a couple of wreck dives. This is an awesome opportunity to get some great diving in while also serving our greater diving community and making a positive impact in our oceans.

The minimum training for this trip is an Open Water Diver certification.

However, we strongly recommend that you also seek to complete your Advanced Open Water Diver and Peak Performance Buoyancy courses as well for his trip. The AOWD course will allow you to go to deeper depths when available as well as expose you to different types of diving. The PPB course is also important to ensure that each diver is comfortable and confident in maintaining neutral buoyancy and good trim; especially when handling fragile corals and sponges. We want to strive to do our best to make a positive impact. The Nitrox certification is also a great certification to have for this trip.

We will be diving Tuesday - Friday on this trip. This gives the flexibility to either drive or fly down on Monday and then take your time Saturday and Sunday to come back home. We are also tentatively planning on stopping by one of the freshwater springs farther North in Florida to "washout" the salt water out of our gear. More details about this additional and optional dive will be available at a later date.

Rooming is not included in the price of this trip. Where we will be in Tavernier Key there are plenty of options for hotels, Air BnBs, VRBOs, and other options. If you would like assistance or recommendations on places to stay or just want to know where our staff are staying please contact the dive shop directly to get this information.

For this trip you will need to have the following gear:

• Mask

• Snorkel

• Boots

• Fins

• BCD

• Regulator

• SMB

Gear that is recommended, but not required:

• Wetsuit

• Octo Necklace

However you prefer to get Tavernier Key, FL, driving or flying, this is our travel day. We will start diving on June 30th.

Our first day of diving we will get to decide between a 2-tank boat dive on wrecks or cleaning up different dive sites. These dives will take place after lunch.

We will have a class at the I.Care classroom to learn the process of handling the sponges at 8:30am. We will then break for lunch and then meet at the dive shop for our 2-tank boat dive.

We will have a 30-minute classroom session before we go out for our 2-tank morning boat dive. Expect these dives to be very interactive and most likely a drift dive. After lunch we will go back out for a 2-tank boat dive where we will be helping with maintenance dives.

We will have another classroom session at 8:30am where we will learn the process of handling sponges. Then we will break for lunch and make our 2-tank afternoon boat dives.

After our dives on July 3rd, we will begin heading back home. We are looking at potentially scheduling a Fresh Water Springs dive to "washout" out the salt water from our gear. This dive is optional. More details on this option at a later date.