The labyrinth of cypress roots provides excellent cover for bass and other fish in Morrison Springs.

Tne of Northwest Florida’s best-kept secrets is known to more Georgia and Alabama folks than Floridians. And they aren’t talking. It has to do with a jewel of a Panhandle spring, a turquoise pool surrounded by stately cypress trees whose aerial roots stand taller than a man. Below the surface, clear, 68-degree water wells up from a spring cave source over 90 feet deep.

Morrison Springs is just far enough off the beaten path in this sunny pine and cypress country to be special for any diver lucky enough to find and dive the site. The shallow pool reflects the overhead blue sky and if the water is clear and the bottom clean of silt, it resembles a giant sapphire. Unlike some springs with a deep, black hole of a source, this one takes visitors gradually into its shallows from a golden-sand beach. Div-ers gear up from a step-like bulkhead around the beach area, often using easily moved picnic tables as places for gear, then wade out into the cool water to put on their fins and masks.

From there, they angle past the roots of monarch cypress trees toward the main spring pool, where a large wood and steel underwater stage has been placed there just for their convenience. Measuring 12 feet by 28 feet, its steel framework supports it about 18 inches off the bottom. The primary reason for the platform is to keep divers from stirring up the bottom. It is great for classes, where students can practice their skills comfortably. The stage is also a perfect place for divers to fine-tune their buoyancy, check out their diver gear, adjust cameras and lights before easing down into the funnel-shaped throat of the gradually deepening spring.

Just over the lip of this dropoff the trunk of a large tree lying horizontally across the spring provides another good place to pause and look down into the blue maw. To its right, and down the right wall, divers see the opening of a small dead-end cavern at a depth of 40 feet. If you ease in first, this is a fine place for making a photo-silhouette of divers entering behind you. It is also home to many of Morrison’s freshwater eels. Most are gray, about an inch in diameter and maybe a foot or two long. They hang out beneath the undercut limestone walls. If you approach quietly and shine your light into these areas, they will be lined up, resting. It’s in the evening when they come out to frolic. Night divers have fun playing with them. Some divers take hot dogs down to feed them. You break off the tip and crumble the top with your thumb. While the eels swim around eating the particles, you or your buddy snap their pictures. Al Wickham, one of the owners of the spring, recalls one woman who came back from the 40-foot cavern swearing that she had just dived into a snake pit.

When he assured her they were only harmless freshwater eels, she glared back and him and said, “Yeah, but they wiggle like snakes!”

Wickham also recalled some winter night divers who went down to feed the eels. One of the divers was newly married. When he came back from the dive, Wickham noticed he had a fat lip and asked how he got it, to which he replied:

“One of those eels went for a piece of hot dog and grabbed my lip instead!” the diver grimaced. “Now how’s my wife gonna believe I got that hickey from an eel, for crying out loud?”

Some Florida springs are choked with hydrilla, a non-native, invasive weed. Up until 1990 that was a problem at Morrison. The state put in an herbicide to try to kill it. The owners raked and bulldozed. Nothing dented it. Then a levee broke on the upper river system bringing down enough muddy water to raise the level of the pool over 28 feet. When the water fell, the hydrilla had failed to get sunlight for so long that it perished. No longer is it a plague. Hopefully, native grasses will soon return. Beneficial vegetation shelters grass shrimp for the local fish population, and helps keep the water clear by filtering out sediments.

Though Morrison’s pool often sees visitations from large schools of mullet, and divers will glimpse furtive black bass hovering among the cypress roots, most anglers find the clear water makes it too hard to deceive the fish they are trying to catch. Those who do try arrive before sunup and after sundown. But most anglers prefer the less clear reaches of the river farther downstream. To protect divers, no boats of any kind are allowed to be launched at Morrison, and no motors are allowed in the pool. However, the fellow who does the tank filling at the spring confided that some early mornings he has seen bass striking green tree frogs that drop into the water and swim toward another nearby tree. It made me wonder what a fly caster might accomplish tossing a lookalike green frog out there some misty morning before sunup. Wickham swears that there is an old, horny-jawed, mossy-back black bass reputed to weigh in the vicinity of 14 pounds that hangs out around the cypress roots to the left of the springs. I quietly cruised that area underwater, peering into some of the more complex rooty lairs but I saw no bigeyed bigmouth bass glaring back at me. Good thing too because going eyeball to eyeball with something that size might make me swallow my mouthpiece.