Springs fever

It’s a warm late-winter afternoon in northern Florida, and three young women are gingerly descending a half-dozen wooden stairs to a mouthwash-blue pool of translucent water ringed with cypress trees. Yesterday, they paddled the Ichetucknee River, a clear, narrow stream fed almost exclusively by nine major springs. Today, at this popular swimming hole in the town of High Springs, they want full immersion.

After taking a deep breath, Beth Ann Rutledge of Tallahassee swims down into the pool, an earthen cavity called Ginnie Spring that discharges approximately 110 million liters of water per day, feeding the cola-colored Santa Fe River.

As she drops beneath a limestone shelf at the edge of the spring, the opening widens. Passing a couple of fish, she reaches the entry point to the spring’s source, an aquifer that connects to scores of other springs through a network of underwater caves. She touches a toe to the white sandy bottom, and, in a cloud of bubbles, kicks back to the surface. “I did it!” she announces after her head pops up.

Twenty meters away, a volleyball game is under way. Wet suits and scuba gear are strewn across a picnic table. A short distance farther, wooded campsites are thick with tents. A sign at a restaurant and dive shop depicts a mermaid with long blond hair blown back, not unlike the fluorescent-green aquatic eel grass that crops up beside these northern Florida springs, ever-bent by the continuous outward flow of water.

Visit the natural freshwater springs of northern Florida, and you may find it impossible to resist plunging in, or at least riding along the surface in a kayak or tube. Typically surrounded by trees and lush vegetation, the springs are often an eerily beautiful blue or green. Some are so clear that kayakers photographed on them appear as if they were floating on air.

The purity of the water at Ginnie Spring has attracted the Coca-Cola Co, which has a permit to extract up to 2,271,00 liters a day from a deeply placed well there and bottles some of it as Dasani water. And with water temperatures a cool 20°C to 22°C, these alluring springs are unlikely spots for a nervous Northerner’s meeting up with an alligator, or so their aficionados insist.

At least 30 billion liters of water a day gush up out of the Floridan aquifer, according to the US Geological Survey, mostly in northern and central Florida, which has one of the largest concentrations of springs in the world. “It is one of the few places where you can actually look down into an aquifer,” said Harley Means, a geologist with the Florida Geological Survey.

The region’s limestone substrate is so permeable, and the water table so close to the surface, that water readily works its way up from the ground. Besides generating rivers, the springs create, in effect, windows and doorways into the aquifer itself.

While long overshadowed by the state’s theme parks and beaches, the springs are well-known locally. Floridians use these waters for swimming, diving, snorkeling, canoeing, kayaking and tubing.

At Rum Island Springs, a cabin can be rented for the weekend beside a turquoise pool of water twice the size of a large Jacuzzi. Poe Springs, in an 80-hectare Alachua County park, has concrete steps leading into clear blue water. Blue Spring, Naked Spring, Johnson Spring and Kiefer Spring are all accessible from the privately owned Blue Springs swimming area in High Springs. More springs are preserved in more than a dozen state parks, including Troy, Manatee, Ponce de Leon and Wakulla Springs.