SNUBA® KEY WEST CHARITABLE PARTNERSHIPS

SNUBA® of Key West is much more than just a vacation excursion.

Our crew are highly-trained Marine Conservation professionals as well as highly-trained Dive Professionals. Among the sources of our knowledge, we are grateful to have long-running partnerships with some of the world’s great Marine Conservation organizations. Officials from these organizations are frequent guests onboard our SNUBA dive excursions. They aren’t here for fun; they’re here to work. And along the way, they help inform our Crew and our Guests on the latest science and technology used to help save the world’s endangered reefs!

We have a close relationship with two South Florida-based reef repair charities: The first, based in Islamorada, is called Coral Restoration Foundation, whose main purpose is to graft healthy lab-grown coral specimens onto parts of our local coral reefs that have been deplete by human carelessness and pollution. The scientists & crew of Coral Restoration Foundation are out every day (weather permitting) finding reef sites whose native coral species have been hit particularly hard by this devastating carelessness: They find dive sites that are terribly depleted, and set up a plan to restore these reefs to true health & vitality. For more information on their mission, please visit www.coralrestoration.org

The second group is called Healthy Aquatics. Based in Delray Beach, Florida, Healthy Aquatics has assembled a team of Marine Biologists to study the DNA of endangered coral species. With permits from Local, State, and even Federal agencies, Healthy Aquatics is taking samples of all endangered coral species back to their lab to grow them back stronger than ever before. Their team of scientists is working to find ways of strengthening these keystone species for the long term, so that these corals can never vanish from the earth’s waters. For more information on the important work they do, please visit www.healthyaquatics.com

Our parent company, SNUBA® International , has a partnership with a global organization called Coral Reef Alliance. Working with ocean lovers around the world, the Coral Reef Alliance works with everyone from fishermen to elected officials and recreational divers to marine scientists, with partners and professionals all around the world in an effort to protect our most valuable and threatened ecosystems. They have created a holistic conservation program meant to improve coral reef health and resilience, and these programs are replicated in waterways around the world. For more details on the good works they do, please visit www.coral.org

The crew onboard Key West Cocktail Cruise are highly trained and experienced Hospitality Professionals.

We make it our mission to include on-going education for our crew to stay up to date on the most modern distilling techniques, products and styles happening in the world of the Craft Cocktail. A large part of that education centers around environmental awareness and charitable partnerships.

In addition to these science-based organizations, we have a close relationship with a South Florida craft distillery called Steel Tie Spirits. Steel Tie is based in West Palm Beach, and does a number of things to improve upon the standard way of making distilled spirits: First, they only use ingredients grown in Florida. Steel Tie also does something no other American distillery does: They capture the CO2 from their fermentation tanks and pipe it up to a greenhouse on the roof where they grow the botanicals for their “Juniper Jean” Gin! They’ve reduced their carbon footprint in order to create a brilliant product! Their rum is called Black Coral, and since being founded in 2012 they’ve donated $1 from every bottle sold to help support South Florida Veteran’s charities. As Steel Tie Spirits releases new products, they expand their charitable donations to spread the love to as many organizations as they can. It’s truly an honor to serve these products to our guests, knowing it’s more than just any old liquor company.

We’ve also joined the “zero waste movement” by making some changes to our program. We do not use single-use plastics to serve our cocktails; instead, we use acrylic servingware for all our cocktail and wine service. We immediately recycle all glass bottles and aluminum cans used during each excursion, and we do not offer plastic straws on our boat. We’ve seen one too many videos of sea turtles with a plastic straw lodge in its nostrils or its throat, and we simply couldn’t stand to be a part of that problem. By making these little actions a habit, we keep our waste from become a problem on our local reefs.

One other thing we do that you can do at home: When we press the juice from lemons & limes & grapefruit, we don’t just throw the spent carcass into the trash. There’s flavor and nutrition in there! We keep those spent citrus carcasses, and we boil them in water to extract the remaining juices and oils. This “citrus stock” is then added to the freshly pressed juice, effectively doubling the volume we can get from a piece of citrus. This also has the added benefit of multiplying the shelf stability of the juice itself! So not only are we getting more juice per piece, but it won’t go bad nearly as quickly! And as if that weren’t enough, this makes it easier for the fruit to be composted into new potting soil! We encourage you to use this technique at home when you’re mixing cocktails for family and friends! The flavor is exactly the same, but there are enormous additional benefits!

As you can see, SNUBA® Key West & Key West Cocktail Cruise is doing our part to improve our community as well as the health of our nation’s waterways, and we’re choosing to work with brands who are just as passionate about these issues as we are. In so doing, we’re passing the message to our guests as well. It’s important to know who’s helping, and to join in however we can. Thank you for coming out with us, and for being a part of these efforts!

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