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Florida has more first-magnitude springs than anywhere else on earth, and most of them run at about seventy-two degrees every day of the year, so they are cold in August and warm in January.
The large ones you can swim in: Wakulla Springs south of Tallahassee, Ichetucknee in Columbia County, Rainbow Springs and Silver Glen in Marion, Alexander and Juniper Springs in the Ocala National Forest, Madison Blue in Madison County, Gilchrist Blue and Fanning Springs on the Suwannee, Manatee Springs in Levy County, De Leon Springs in Volusia and Ponce de Leon Springs in Holmes County. Blue Spring in Volusia County closes to swimmers in the winter because the manatees move in, which is a fair trade.
Wakulla County. The spring opening lies 180 feet down, and the average flow is about 400,000 gallons a minute, with peaks measured at 860,000. That is a river coming out of a hole in the ground.
Open the guide →Columbia County. Ichetucknee Springs State Park lies about four miles northwest of Fort White, and the state park service gives its size as 2,669 acres. Eight major springs rise inside the park and join to form the Ichetucknee River, which runs six miles to the Santa Fe.
Open the guide →Marion County. The water comes up through many separate vents rather than one mouth, and it forms the Rainbow River. It was called Blue Spring until the 1930s, when the owners renamed it to sell it, and for forty years it ran as a roadside attraction with submarine boat tours and, in the 1950s, mermaid performances.
Open the guide →Lake County. Florida has only a small number of first-magnitude springs and this is among the easiest of them to get into: the basin has a gently sloping sand beach running down into clear water that holds at seventy-two degrees whatever the season.
Open the guide →Marion County. Dozens of small springs feed the swimming pool here, and together with Fern Hammock Springs next door they put out around thirteen million gallons a day. The millhouse the Corps built in 1935 and 1936 is the unusual part.
Open the guide →Madison County. The basin is about eighty-two feet across and twenty-five feet deep, and a run of roughly a hundred feet carries the water down to the river. That single spring supplies close to a quarter of the Withlacoochee's flow, which gives some idea of the volume: a first-magnitude spring moves at least two thousand eight hundred liters every second.
Open the guide →Gilchrist County. Ruth B. Kirby Gilchrist Blue Springs State Park sits at 7450 Northeast 60th Street in High Springs, on the Santa Fe River. Gilchrist Blue Spring itself is a sizable second-magnitude spring putting out 44 million gallons a day.
Open the guide →Levy County. It was one of the thirty-three first-magnitude springs in Florida, but the flow had dropped enough by 2008 that it is now counted as historically first magnitude rather than currently so, which is the plain fact and worth knowing before driving out expecting a torrent.
Open the guide →Levy County. William Bartram came here in 1774, saw a dead manatee on the bank, and wrote the place up as Manate Springs; the name stuck. The spring holds at seventy-two degrees and that is why the manatees come, moving up the run from the Suwannee in fall and winter when the river turns cold, with roughly a hundred sightings logged in a year.
Open the guide →Volusia County. The spring boil is thirty feet deep and the swimming area is the pool around it, walled and easy to get into. People have lived on this ground for at least six thousand years.
Open the guide →Holmes County. The state gives the park as 380.84 acres. The spring is second magnitude, putting out about fourteen million gallons a day out of the Floridan Aquifer, and the water holds at sixty-eight degrees whatever the month, which means it feels cold in July and mild in January.
Open the guide →Volusia County. About 102 million gallons of water come out of it every day at a steady seventy-three degrees. That warmth is the whole point in winter. When the river drops below the mid-sixties, manatees move into the spring run to keep from dying of cold, and from November through March the park closes the water to swimmers, divers and paddlers so the animals are left alone.
Open the guide →Bay scalloping is a Big Bend and Nature Coast thing, from Franklin County down to Hernando.
Nearly every coastal county runs free or low-cost public ramps, and the ones attached to a park are the easiest because they have parking for a truck and trailer.
Crab Island in Okaloosa County is the one with the reputation - a submerged shallow just inside Destin Pass where a few hundred boats tie up on a summer weekend and vendors run out to them by water.
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