Welcome from the Jacksonville Scubanauts Dive Club!

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August Meeting

Our meetings are normally held the second Wednesday in each month.

The August 14th social meeting will be held at the Athenian Owl Restaurant at 9551 Baymeadows Rd. Suite #21-23. They have a private room reserved for us. Socializing / dinner begins at 6:00pm. Visitors are always welcome!

Please note:

After its first 39 years in existence, the Jacksonville Scubanauts went through a significant organizational change. For all of those years until then, we had been a formal 501(c) corporation. This made a lot of sense when we were much larger in membership - peaking at nearly 140 paying members.

But now the club's membership is enough smaller that the overhead of the cost and effort of maintaining the Scubanauts as a full formal corporation had become challenging. Keeping that corporate entitiy status meant legal filings and costs to maintain our coporate status, maintaining the associated required official meeting notes, producing formal meeting agendas, maintaining official financial records, coming up with a formal program for each meeting, producing a monthly newsletter, etc. plus also maintaining a full public, standalone website. All of that had become a bit too much for the remaining members and volunteer club officers.

We had been discussing the best way forward for the last few months. At the May, 2023 May meeting, a motion was made and carried to dissolve our formal corporation and instead go forward as an unincorporated social club.

We're still socializing and diving; just on a more informal basis. For the time being, we'll still usually have an informal social get-together each month at Athens Restaurant as before; just without the formal meeting, agenda, program, etc.

For now we are keeping our website at http://scubanauts.org though it will not be as frequently updated. For those who use Facebook, we're also maintaining our Facebook page; though that's also updated on a less-frequent basis.

As has been the case beginning back in the Covid period, our scheduled June social get-together will be a hybrid of both a Zoom video web conference and an actual physical meeting.

This dual approach accommodates those members who are ready to meet and eat inside our normal restaurant meeting room and those who have COVID-19 or other concerns such that they're not yet ready for that exposure.

The - now social only - meeting will start at 5:30pm . The link to join the Zoom side was mailed out by Beth earlier this month. If you are a member and didn't get it, please contact Beth or any former Scubanauts officer. (We are not posting the link here to avoid any possibility of "Zoom bombing" incidents)

Therer will be a short program at tonight's meeting on Seahorses.

New ways to get Offshore Jax! While out at Divers Supply getting some equipment serviced we saw notices for two different 6-pack dive boat outfits that are now operating in this area: Florida Man Fishing Charters and Due East Chartering Services.

We have not yet dove either operation so we can't provide any informed opinon on these boats. But this could be great news for local divers without access to a private boat. (Without such access it's been very difficult to get offshore here since Capt. Dan Lindley's "Diamond Diver" dive boat ceased operation). See our Jacksonville Area Diving page for more information on these new options.

We do need a couple of smaller trips throughout 2025.

Some suggestions we've been kicking around:

• West Palm Beach—easy to get to and there is always a Blue Heron Bridge
  dive!
• Pompano beach
• Keys with Florida Keys Dive Center?
• Kayaking trip

There are still some Scubanauts logo shirts and caps left from our last order. So if you didn't get want you wanted, check with Scott to see what stock remains.

The coveted Golden Copralite award is being held by Bill "CrawDaddy" Crawford. Please pass word of any future discretion to Bill so he can help others experience the pleasure of this award.

We could find no offshore Jax dive reports recent enough to be of value.

For our members who like to spearfish, there is important news. The group "Our Florida Reefs" is pushing very hard to near totally prohibit all spearfishing while on scuba. (The sole exception is to hunt lionfish). This proposal is very near being passed into formal regulation. So any members who have a strong opinion on this need to get involved very quickly and let your state representatives know how you feel. Click here to see a .PDF of their draft proposed regulation.

We've all been following the OCEARCH Great White Shark satellite radio tagging program which has been operating in the waters offshore Jax periodically for some time now. News reports are saying that the Jacksonville's Mayport docks will become the home port for their research boat. The city will build new docks for their vessel and will provide two historic buildings that will become the organization's home base.

In honor of this decision, a great white recently tagged 40 miles off Mayport was given the name "Miss May" in the Ocearch registry.

If you want to follow one of the specific tagged sharks which has been in the local news recently, here is the procedure. This example is for following "Katherine", the large female that has been sighted multiple times recently by divers off the Florida Keys; including being video'd by a dive team off the wreck of the Duane offshore Key Largo. At this writing, her satellite tracker's last "ping" was near the edge of the Continental Shelf east of the border between North and South Carolina.

• Open your web browser and point to the OCEARCH Global Tracker website
• Enter the shark's name (“Katherine”) into the field titled “Sharks” in the filter box to the left
• Click the blue “Update” button
• View where Katherine is in realtime