Epcot Dive Quest (Orlando) - dec 1st, 2001

dive site	The Living Seas' 5.7 million gallon salt aquarium @ Epcot Center	water temp	76° F
sightings	Fake Coral, Touristus Hummanus... ...and... 70 varieties of fish and other marine animals, 8000 residents: grunts, jacks, snappers, parrot fish, trigger fish, spotted eagle rays, sharks, sea turtles...
visibility	wall-to-wall

Photos

Taken from outside the aquarium window	My son Daniel trying a BC at The Living Seas
See me, feel me. Touch me, heal me

Want to dive in an aquarium?
Earn your mouse ears by starring in a six-million-gallon Disney production:

I still have my hand on the BC exhaust, venting buoyancy five feet under water when a school of Bermuda chub passes just below my fin tips. Beneath them, a loose aggregation of grunts, sergeant majors and gray angels huddles around a coral mound. Before I can reach the bottom, two cownose rays fly by my right shoulder and I turn and kick to follow. The three of us cruise past a pair of tarpons and a trio of lookdowns before we reach the wall, execute a perfect bank turn up and to the left, following the wall until--suddenly--it stops.

Where the wall ends, there is a thick, dull transparency, a window, and, on the other side, a loosely laced pair of sneakers. Attached to the sneakers is a boy and attached to the boy is a smile that stretches from one black plastic Mickey Mouse ear to the other. The boy raises a hand hesitantly, not quite sure if what he's looking at is real and not wanting to be seen waving at audio- animatronic divers.

Momentarily, I lose interest in the grunts, angels and rays, even the three brown sharks I know are lurking somewhere in this magnificent fish bowl. Forget the fish; I'm part of the show.

Honey, I Shrunk the Divers!
The show in question is the Living Seas aquarium in Walt Disney World's EPCOT, which was opened for diving last fall to anyone with a C-card and $140. The diving program-- officially dubbed EPCOT DiveQuest--gives divers the unique opportunity, quite literally, to step through the looking glass and dive one of the largest aquariums of its kind in the world.

The size of the tank--203 feet in diameter, 27 feet deep--gives the Living Seas the feeling of a Brobdingnagian fish bowl. The bottom is covered with chunks of dolomite like the gravel in a home aquarium. The tank's six million gallons of salt water is exchanged through a massive filtration system every two-and-a-half hours. And at the viewing windows, people stare and point. I half expect frisbee-sized flakes of fish food to come raining down from the surface or to find a bubbling skeleton or a miniature treasure chest that opens to release an air bubble and then closes again.

There is no treasure chest, but in one corner of the tank is the "Shipwreck," a simulated wreck site created from the real remains of a Florida Keys wreck, including an anchor and several cannonballs. On the other side of the tank, a series of vertical bars separates the main tank from the dolphin tank. Dive guests aren't allowed in the dolphin tank, but one of EPCOT's six bottle nose dolphins might meet you at the bars.

There are plenty of other characters to meet in the Living Seas, all gathered from reefs in the Caribbean and Florida Keys: 10 kinds of grunts, nine different jacks, six species of snapper, five parrots, queen trigger fish, spotted eagle rays, three brown sharks and a pair of big green sea turtles.

This photo was produced by Disney

Two of the biggest stars in the Living Seas could be minions of Ursula, the sea hag in Disney's Little Mermaid. Like Orson Welles in his later, fatter years, a 500-pound jewfish named Orson rests his corpulent form on the tank bottom casting a suspicious eye on passing divers. And a nine-foot smalltooth sawfish skulls over the tank bottom waving its chainsaw snout from side to side.

It's typical Caribbean reef environment except for the reef itself: All the coral is man-made. Faking the coral means that EPCOT doesn't have to worry about the tricky maintenance required to keep live coral in captivity, and it means they don't have to plunder the seas to provide the real stuff.

The only problem with synthetic coral is that the coral eaters--most notably the parrotfish--can't graze on their favorite food. To remedy this, the aquarium keepers have devised a faux-coral feeder fashioned out of dental plaster. Food pellets are embedded in the plaster before it hardens and the feeders are placed alongside the coral. The parrotfish don't seem to know the difference.

Welcome to the Show
The fish, the turtles, the sawfish, the sharks and the artificial reef are only half the fun, because this aquarium is half habitat, half show. Most dives give us the chance to leave behind everything that is above water, including people. But drop down 10 feet on this dive, and that's exactly what you'll find. Not people wearing dive gear and blowing bubbles, but people wearing street clothes and looking at you.

Opposite the viewing walls of the aquarium exhibit is another set of windows that form one wall of EPCOT's seafood restaurant, the Coral Reef. After touring the aquarium, I kick over to one of these windows, where a family of four is winding down from a hard day of theme-parking with the catch of the day. I press my mask against the window, and they stop eating to watch me. Behind them, kids at the other tables are pointing at me and laughing. I turn a couple of flips, take the regulator out of my mouth to smile and pose for a couple of pictures. None of them touch their food until I turn to swim away.

Give me a costume and call me Goofy. I could do this all day long.