Cave Dive Central

Welcome to Cave Dive Central, Central Florida's leader in open water and technical dive training. We're dedicated to the advancement and enjoyment of all types of scuba diving, including open water, cave diving and technical diving!

This site is your online gateway to scuba training and guided dives in North Central Florida, in and around the High Springs, Gainesville, Lake City and Live Oak area. Our primary instructor is Bruce Bosshardt with associate instructors helping out when needed.

We can take you through all levels of scuba certification, from your first open water dives through your Nitrox and mixed gas training and even into your cave and technical training if you decide to pursue that.

Our operation is based in North Central Florida, between Gainesville and High Springs. Throughout the worldwide technical dive community, this area is known as 'Cave Country', and for good reason. Locally, we have some of the best cave diving in the world.

In addition to our training schedule and classes, we have a 'how to' section where we will be posting detailed instructions on how to do some of the chores technical divers tend to do for themselves such as how to assemble doubles and how to build stage straps.

Another one of our endeavors, here on the web site, will be to create an ever increasing library of digital still photos and cave videos. Reduced quality versions of these digital stills will be available here for free! You can click on most of the pictures on these web pages, even the individual slides as they scroll through, to view or download a larger version.

As an example, the first picture in the slide show above is of a whale vertebra imbedded in the wall of the cave at Ginnie Springs. To give you some sense of scale, it's about the size of a dinner plate. This fossilized bone, just now exposed by the dissolving action of the acidic ground water, is around 40 million years old, which is the age of the Ocala Limestone formation that it is encased in! It takes thousands of years for bones like this to be completely exposed. Unfortunately, in the recent past, misguided divers have attempted to chisel this beautiful piece of pre-history out of the wall and as a result the guide line was moved away from the bones to protect them. It's always a treat, however, for me to get to show these to other qualified divers when we're diving in that area.

In a past life, I produced and directed television programs for a local PBS affiliate in Denver, KBDI (or the beady eye as it was known). That experience let me hone my skills as a photographer and videographer as well as giving me experience directing and teaching my camera crews, prompting them to recognize which shots worked and which ones didn't. From that background I have built a set of procedures, that I can pass on to others, for making professional underwater videos and digital stills. To see an example, you can view our Cave Diving Video by clicking the link below.

View our Cave Diving Video

In addition, we hope this web site will become a central repository where we can keep you informed of local conditions at the north central Florida cave diving sites as well as answer questions about all things scuba dive related. This will include gear configuration & set-up, safety, recommended procedures and special interest topics such as solo diving and exploration. Email us with your questions at support.

Be safe and have fun in the water! Bruce