bad spots gone bad

I am just curious as I know of a local site here thats gone down hill (Oklahoma). Has anyone of you got a story of how you had a place you love to dive and took like a year or more away from it only to return and found it full of trash and careless boaters and swimmers that tear up dive flags while you are under and so on.

Just curious to see how many others this has happened too?

My favorite site, Marineland of the Pacific in Rancho Palos Verdes, California was like that for a few years. I began diving there shortly after the park closed in 1987 and had it to myself for a few years until a magazine article article mentioned that public access was still open. It then became a free-for-all with divers, fishermen and vandals. Trash, fishing line, spray paint and broken windows became a weekly find. For nearly two decades I would spend as much time picking up trash as I would diving.
There is now a resort, Terranea onsite. The place is clean and we now have amenities such as restrooms and a fresh water shower plus easier access to the water.

That sort of how it is with the dive park in Gore oklahoma. I am very grateful to the few who take such pride in it as I do and pick up a can or 2 on the bottom. The dive shop just down the street puts alot of his time into keeping it clean and even sponsors an annual lake cleanup. It saddens me though that the sign states no swimming and divers only yet it always seems people use that sign as a towel rack and go swimming anyway.

I just think its great that some divers go out of their way and pick up a can or 2 here and there as every little bit helps.

Max your statement about articles is so correct in that no matter what it is in life when you find a paradise someone has to go and blab it to the world and the next thing you know you always have drunks and people doing things on the beach thats best left indoors. And of course the one thing I hate most and thats when it appears someone smoked a whole carton of cigerettes and you can account for every one of them by the butts they left behind.

It is endemic to the water.

In the 1970's, a dive off of Florida looked like what "the old standards" of Cayman looked like in '95.

In that same 70's time frame, Nassau and Grand Bahama were viable reef habitats, Jamaica was okay, and Cayman was still a delight. I settled on Cayman. After 1975, I returned every ten years: 1985 & 1995. That's when I stopped.

On Roatan, I know old timers there who simply do not want to look anymore. They stay on-shore. For them, it's an emotional pain.

Outflow and siltation are the killers. A reef can withstand thousands of clumsy divers without much degradation, but when development on the soil begins, when earth is displaced to run-off, when toilets are flushed.. that's the killer.

You can't know what you don't know.

On my first Cayman trip (1975 or so), I listened to the "old guys" talking how it used to be just 5 years earlier. I couldn't imagine what I was missing.

I still cant.

This is what starts so much uproar here on SB, about the condition of this place versus another... when you compare it all to what existed 20 years previous, the discussion seems rather silly and irrelevant. Which place is better? I'm on a cruise ship and I want to see the best reefs. I want a five star hotel and great diving....

Oops, too late.

The minute it becomes easy to get to, easy to stay at, and easy to dive there... the clock is ticking. Call it "getting known" if you like, but by the time the cruise ship dock is being built, it's already too late.

Money drives it all.

Then again, there is the Disney Dive. I've read here that it's spectacular.

Don Henley wrote a song about this some 30+ years ago.

From "The Last Resort"

"And you can see them there,
On Sunday morning
They stand up and sing about
what it's like up there

They call it paradise
I don't know why
You call someplace paradise,
kiss it goodbye"

That's why I like the Flower Gardens NMS. It's 110 miles out in the Gulf, so siltation and other landborn hazards have a smaller effect on the reef systems. In addition, since it's harder to get to, it tends to suffer less damage from overuse and careless divers than reefs that are closer to shore. One factor might also be that since it's an "intermediate" set of dives, divers who visit there tend to be fairly experienced and a little better at staying off the reefs and causing incidental damage, and the structures stay healthier. That's why the FGBNMS is used in some studies as a standard against which other reefs are measured.