Book the experience! - The staff and guides are amazing, kind, and welcoming. The trip was amazing. I recommend 10/10! The shop was great too. I will be back to float rainbow river.

Manatees Sighted! - Let's start with the crew both at the office and our Captains Rodney and Austin, they were all helpful, knowledgeable, and most of all courteous and friendly! We (you) are not guaranteed a sighting, but we scored big by taking the 8:30 trip. A few dozen swam around us along with a close-up encounter with one. Highly recommend! We will be back next year.

Our tour guides were... - Our tour guides were friendly and fun. They gave us all the information we needed. We had a fantastic experience with the manatees.

Fun - Water temps were not very cold buy capt. John and capt jerry worked extra hard to find us some manatees. They would not give up. Excellent experience from start to finish. Definitely reccomend.

Manatee swim - John and Jerri were the best. Great education about the manatees and they worked hard to find them for us. Great day on the water!

Amazing Experience! - We had a group of 8 who had a wonderful experience. We went out at 8:30am. Rodney and Jerry were wonderful guides and very knowledgeable. We saw SO many manatees. They were everywhere and many interested with our group. I hope to do this again:)

Best Manatee tour in crystal river area! - We had an amazing time on this tour! It was a once in a lifetime dream for me and they really made our time fantastic! There were so many manatees and they were all friendly! It was quite busy but everyone was respectful! I couldn’t recommend this place more! 1000 stars!

Wonderful experience - Overall it was a wonderful experience. There were too many people at the site but that’s just the nature of that type of excursion.

So graceful and magical - Tip: Best viewing is when it’s chilly out and the manatees tend to escape the springs during low tide… plan accordingly. We still saw about six while in the water and the same number in the boat on the way to the springs. Even with that being said.. it was magical and gorgeous! Cpt John and Austin were awesome! I just wish the center sold sweat pants still - perfect for a chilly December day! 🥶🤩

Murky Water, Scolding Guide - We went March 15. I'll start with the positives, which were: Captain Ryan; the clean and beautiful dive shop and gift shop; the boat driver; the cute video taken of the dive experience. I took off one star for the very unpleasant Captain Rodney and one star for the misleading description of the tour. Our group kind of had two captains: Captain Rodney gave the speech back at the dive shop and was on board one pontoon, and Captain Ryan was onboard the second pontoon. Our group included many children, and so it was important that the welcome speech/instructional video be understood by them. Captain Rodney made coded jokes about "marinating" and the government controlling us, when what he meant was, "don't pee in the wetsuits" and "the government requires us to send flippers out for every diver, but you are not going to wear them." Bizarrely, he also stated to this group of children that seatbelts in automobiles cost as many lives as they save. He harassed a 12 year old member of our group who only wanted to watch from the boat, "Children don't get to make decisions!" and "why you are even in here [the equipment room]!?" This was a far cry from the tour description that states people are welcome to stay on the boat. Rodney spent much of the time in the water scolding the group in general for not following passive observation techniques, which was not only ineffective at getting kids to change their behavior, but also stressful for those of us who were following the rules. I did not observe him addressing specific people, he was just kind of shaming anyone within hearing distance. It's a difficult task to correct the behavior of kids you don't know, while in the water, without knowing their names. A more effective technique than scolding would have been emphasizing and insisting beforehand and during the swim that adults stay with their children, perhaps by holding their hands. That's what I did with my son. Every child there had a parent with them, and Rodney could have leveraged that to get better results. "Supervise your children" was mentioned in the intro video, but it should have been called out at the shop and on the boat. I also think it would have been beneficial for Rodney to demonstrate proper use of the pool noodle, with an actual pool noodle. The video did not show anyone using a noodle, and it's possible children did not understand what a proper position looked like, especially if they haven't snorkeled before. To future travelers, I advise: practice floating properly in the water with your child and the noodle right off the boat, before you head over to the manatees. The reason for the second star being removed was the poor water visibility and the fact that we saw very little of the manatees in the water. Now, I completely understand that the dive shop has no control over the temperature in the Gulf of Mexico, water visibility, or the behavior of manatees! My point is that the tour description was misleading for the reality of a mid-March tour, when the gulf is warm and the manatees have left the river. To call this a Crystal River dive trip was misleading. The staff were well aware that the manatees had already left the springs for the Gulf. I think that once the manatees leave the crystal-clear waters of the spring-fed river, this is an entirely different tour, and should be described and advertised as such. Our boat did not go into the Crystal River, and visibility was about 6 feet (that's being very generous). I asked the boat driver what body of water we were in, and she said "King's Bay." That's what it was, and it was nothing like the Crystal River, which we have been in before. Not only did this severely impact the ability to view manatees, but also it made the mandated passive observation techniques very difficult. At one point, Captain Rodney indicated in the water that he had a manatee right in front of him. By the time I got close enough to see it through the murky water, I was very very close to it, and could not stop my forward motion, so I floated right over it. Divers are not supposed to do that. When I got myself turned carefully and slowly turned around, I could not see it again. So I floated over a manatee for 2 seconds. That was the extent of the in-water "manatee viewing." Many in our boat had a similar experience. Honestly, it would have been much more pleasant and fruitful to stay dry in the boat and see the manatees from there. (The 12 year old had the right idea.) I must note that there were many other tour companies out there, and many, many other people diving with manatees in the bay, so perhaps their having a much smaller group size made for a different experience for them, if they were able to stay closer to their guide and not get in each other's way? (Note: we chose to go in a group with a large group of other families we had a loose connection to, most of whom we didn't know. Pro American Diving Center did not choose our group size, but it was definitely too large. They should have split up our pontoons instead of tying them together and looking for manatees in the same area. That WAS in their control.) To future travelers, I would recommend: Before you get your hopes up to see manatees, check out the temperature in the Gulf of Mexico. If it's above 68 degrees, use caution. You may be taken to the murky bay, because the only manatees left in the area are out there. And choose a tour with a small group size. Of note also is that the wetsuits were pretty damp and smelly when we put them on (we were first group of the morning), which is pretty unpleasant, but I would not have mentioned that if it weren't for the other problems. A moment of high praise for Captain Ryan. I could tell he felt our disappointment, and in my opinion, he felt bad about it, but this was not his fault. He was so informative and charismatic. Notably, he gave the boat-sitter no crap at all for not wanting to get in the water. He shared personal encounters with manatees, ecology of the area, birds of note flying and nesting near us, etc. He also explained to us why the water was so murky (a storm surge in September stirred things up and killed the naturally-filtering eelgrass). He did his best to gently correct the splashing and incorrect use of the pool noodle by a child in the group who had been left behind as his parents went way ahead to look for the manatees. He managed to provide guidance without scolding. The boat driver was pretty quiet but very pleasant. She let me get back in the water to pee after I got my wetsuit off. I could not have waited til we got back to land! Thank you boat driver, and I'm sorry I can't recall your name now!