A: Yes! Florida law requires a dive flag.
Q: What are park hours?
A: The park is open from sunrise to 10pm, but diving is not allowed past sunset unless you are signed up for a scheduled night dive. The local shops run night dives about every two weeks.
Q: What about the fishing bridge?
A: Many people enjoy fishing at BHB. Try to avoid the areas with fishermen, because they typically congregate away from divers. They have a bridge along the West span, try to stay out of their way.
Q: High tide doesn’t work for me, do I have to dive it then?
A: You can think of tides like a sine wave, going up and down. In between tides, currents can be very strong as water moves in or out. The Intracoastal waterway is often full of lower visibility water, which is pushed back by incoming tides. The visibility is best at peak high tide, and gets gradually worse on either side of the tide. Currents also pick up. The best bet is a maximum of one hour before and after high tide. Diving at low tide will have a similar currents, but visibility will be much worse. If you can’t make high tide, it’s probably better to enjoy one of your other hobbies that day, and save BHB for another day.
Q: What’s parking like?
A: Parking at BHB is in two areas, one for boat trailers and one for cars. Boat parking has a fee, and you cannot park your car in a trailer spot even if you pay the fee. There are 170 car parking spots, but the Bridge is a popular place, especially in the middle of the day on weekends. Generally, if the weather isn’t good for the beach or its a week day, you should arrive half an hour before you enter. On weekends, you should arrive an hour early in winter, and 2 hours or more early in summer.
Q: I want to see more recent visibility and informational reports, do you have those?
A: This website is a simple tide schedule, I recommend you check out the Facebook group for Blue Heron Bridge. It’s a volunteer page, like this website, but it hosts regular updates about the bridge conditions and news like about the ongoing construction. This page doesn’t contain live updates, but as a note, as of Fall 2023 there is ongoing construction on the Bridge that has closed the main beach entry, and requires crossing the road to enter. On the plus side, you get to wave at cars as you cross with your scuba tank and wetsuit on, probably making their day. On the negative side, it’s an extra walk across hot asphalt in your gear. But it’s the Bridge, it’s worth a lot more hassle than this!