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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).
July
Meeting
Our next meeting
will be on Wednesday, July 12th. 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 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!
Our speaker for
this meeting will be Diane Schleissing whose talk will
be about the Sea Turtle Research and Rehab Hospital at
Whitney Labs.
The vote for our
new slate of officers for the Scubanauts was held at the
May meeting. The new slate has been posted to our "About"
page.
Dive reports were
plentiful last meeting from last month's 2017
trip to CocoView
Resort in Roatan, Honduras. For our 15 club
members who made the trip, it went off beautifully
and was a total success. There were an enormous number
of underwater photos taken. So this year's annual Scubanauts
Photo Contest should be quite competitive and interesting!
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.
We have
seen only a few recent Off-Shore Jax dive reports.
Visibility has declined after the recent storms;
being reported as 10' to 15' and "snotty" out to
around 15 miles. Visiblities of 40 feet or more
are being
reported
further offshore. Surface temps are around 80 degrees,
but bottom temps are being characterized as "cold".
No specific temps were found. Given that a thermocline
with 69 degree bottom temps is being reported further
south at West Palm Beach, we may be in a for a
few weeks of less than ideal conditions.
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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