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 Welcome
from the Jacksonville Scubanauts Dive Club!
Download most recent newsletter in Adobe PDF format. (If
you cannot yet read Adobe's PDF format, get the reader here).
April
Meeting
Our April
meeting will be on Wednesday, April 11th, 2018. Please
note that our
meeting
place
has changed
from
past
years. The
meetings are now at the Mediterrania Restaurant at 3877
Baymeadows Rd. They do have have a private room
reserved for us that should suit us well.
Socializing begins
at 6:00pm with the actual meeting starting at 6:30pm.
Visitors are always welcome!
The guest speaker
for this meeting will be Mr. Mike McCrory. His program
will be about the dive salvage operations for the Italian
cruise ship "Costa Concordia" which struck a submerged
rock and capsized a few hours later in January, 2012. The
ship was refloated in 2014 and towed off to be turned into
scrap
at an estimated
salvage cost of €1 billion. This should give us a
rare glimpse into such difficult dive operations.
For our members
who are going on our 2018 club trip to Roatan in July,
the full final payment is due at this month's meeting.
Please do NOT forget to attend and bring your checkbook.
Our Treasurer has a deadline to forward all of the remaining
balance to the resort.
The balance of trip
costs for our May club trip to Venice, FL trip is also due
at this meeting..
Plans continue
for our big 2019 Wakatobi Trip. Please see Vicky Tyde.
She will be putting together
some dates for us and will have a “interested” private
group meeting in the
upcoming months.
We do need a couple
of smaller trips throughout the 2018 spring, summer,
and fall months.
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
Please
consider running a club trip; it is fun diving with your
friends! Be thinking about what trip destinations you'd
like to see in the coming year. At our last meeting, members
had tentatively volunteered to organize trips to Palm Beach
and the northern Florida Keys, but it is too early for
anything specific regarding those destinations.
See
the Activities
Page for
information on all Scubanauts activities! Don't
let the best of club diving pass you by!
Our
Photo Gallery has portfolios from members as
well as photos from our contests and parties. We're still
looking
for more material for the Photo
Gallery. Check
out the submissions so far! Members, send
in some for your own page.
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 Bob Riddle.
Please pass word of any future discretion to Bob
so
he can help others experience the pleasure of
this award.
Off-Shore
Jax dive reports are still few and far between.
New local dive report postings on sites like Spearboard
have almost .completely dried up.
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. The Scubanauts were
recently given a private tour of the OCEARCH research
vessel here in Jacksonville.
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.
To
follow Katherine's - or any other tracked
shark's - travels:
- 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
Newcomers, come check
our membership
pages to find out more about joining the Scubanauts!
If you have any ideas for speakers, please
let your officers know. We always need new ideas!
Missed the last meeting? See the minutes of
last month's meeting.
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