Looe (pronounced ‘loo’) Key, located five nautical miles off Big Pine, isn’t a key at all but a reef, part of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. This is an area of some 2800 square nautical miles of ‘land’ managed by the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration. The reef here can only be visited through a specially arranged charter-boat trip, best arranged through any Keys diving outfit, the most natural one being Looe Key Dive Center .
The marine sanctuary is named for an English frigate that sank here in 1744, and the Looe Key reef contains the 210ft Adolphus Busch, used in the 1957 film Fire Down Below and then sunk (110ft deep) in these waters in 1998.
