Welcome
from the Jacksonville Scubanauts Dive Club!
Download our
most recent newsletter in Adobe PDF format. (If you cannot
yet
read Adobe's PDF format, get the reader here).
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
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 arties. 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 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.
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!
Please note that since we're no longer a formal
organization the minutes of
last month's meetings are also now only sporadically updated.
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