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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).
June
Meeting
Our next meeting
will be on Wednesday, June 14th. Our
meetings are always on the second Wednesday of each month
with socializing
starting at 6:00 pm and the actual meeting
beginng at 6:30 pm.
Please note that
our meeting place has changed - and that change starts
with the June meeting; not the July meeting as previously
stated.
The meetings will now be 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!
Our speaker for
this meeting has not yet been announced.
The vote for our
new slate of officers for the Scubanauts was held at the
May meeting. The new slate will be posted as soon as the
minutes of the meeting are received.
Dive reports will
be given from our April 21st through 23rd dive trip to
West Palm Beach. Unfortunately the weather was not kind
to us on this particular trip and part of it was blown
out.
There will also
be more discussion on our 2017
trip to CocoView
Resort in Roatan, Honduras. All payments have been
made and the only thing left to do is go dive our brains
out
in
Roatan! It's not unusual for club members to rack up 24
or more dives during this one trip!
Local divers are
gearing up for the 5th
Annual Northeast Florida Lionfish Blast hunting competition;
running from April 20th to May 20th. According to the event's
website, Prizes are not yet finalized. But but the sponsors
are hoping to "maintain
last
year's
prizes structure, paying out to the the Top Ten finishers,
and a guaranteed $1000 first place prize We will also have
2 Tournament within Tournaments(TWT), one for largest lionfish
in decimal pounds, and one for largest grouper beginning
May 1st. There will also be the Golden Peanut awards floating
around as well as the Lionfish Blaster Award!"
This great cause - trying to limit the impact of the Lionfish
escologically disastrous population explosion - has become
a popular event. According to the website last year's overall
Lionfish Blash winner alone removed 587 Lionfish!
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 James Johnson.
Please
pass word of any future discretion to James so
he can help others experience the pleasure of
this award.
We have
seen only a few recent Off-Shore Jax dive reports.
Apparently the 'vis is good farther away from shore
with 60' visibility reported 20 miles or more offshore.
Bottom temp reports vary from the high 60's near
9-mile to "warm" being reported 20 miles off.
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 Great White
Shark satellite radio tagging
program which has been operating in the waters offshore
Jax periodically for some time now. If you want to follow
one of the specific 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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