Squares, tasters and Spooky times

What better time to post a blog entry than while I am waiting for the scuba-truck to have it's annual check-up so that it can carry your gear for another year?

A fun time was had at Club Night last night. My spanky new swim-through squares were inaugurated through the pool, we had a low-light session and Peter initiated a couple of fun and challenging games for those members who wanted to push themselves a little.

Let's start with the squares, because they were, well, really cool. Why? Because I made them. Ok, ok, they weren't so cool, but they were beautifully crafted and they did provide our newer divers with a good chance to work on their buoyancy skills to successfully float through the squares without getting entangled. And to make it a little more fun for our newer divers, we started with a fairly large square, which was then replaced twice with two smaller squares. Our divers still did great and made it through all of the squares easily.

To mix it up a little more, we even had everyone trying it backwards. Yes, predictably that was a little tougher.

One of our intrepid members also brought their u/w camera with them, so hopefully there were one or two shots that we can post when she shares them with us. Thanks, Christina, for bringing the funk!

Peter's games were a lot of fun for the participants, effectively a derivation of the stress tests used to push the skills of divemasters-in-training. For instance, our divers removed their gear, which was then strewn around the pool on the bottom. Without mask, fins, or weights, our divers then had to race to recover their gear and determine in which order that could best be accomplished. Mask first? Or fins? I think everyone went with mask first. Congratulations, Danielle on winning that race, I hope your half-pint of victory tasted sweet!

Peter and I raised the possibility of changing our Club Night venue to the Etobicoke Olypium swimming pool in the future. The pool there is 17 feet deep (instead of 10 feet deep) and would, accordingly, offer a better environment for our newer divers to really work on their buoyancy skills without popping to the surface. I'll ask on Facebook too, but similarly put the question to you here: would you travel to the Etobicoke Olypium for the Club Night once a month? It is approximately at Rutherford and the 427. Please let me know your thoughts by popping me an email on our website. Admittedly, it is a little more hassle to get to than downtown Toronto, but on the plus-side, the pool is deeper, the parking is free and ample and for those members who don't live on the transit system, it is more highway accessible. I look forward to your comments.

We are also now planning at least two Brockville trips next summer. Space will be limited (especially because our recent Open Water students will be taking advantage of their free Advanced Open Water diver instruction), so if you want to pop up to the 1000 Islands with us in July and August and toodle around some awesome wrecks, let us know as soon as possible.

Another topic that Peter and I have been mulling over is that of travel. We're keen to set-up the Papua New Guinea trip for 2011 (and we've taken preliminary steps in that regard), but we have a few more questions for our intrepid members....

1) would you want an exclusively dive-focused trip, or would you like a little culture and/or relaxation period at the end of the trip as well?

2) As 2011 is a way away, would any of you be interested in a Caribbean trip for a week in the earlier part of next year....

Oh......gotta run, the scuba-truck is coming out of the doctor's office....

and remember, although spiny black sea urchin spines hurt like bugger when they are in your skin, if you remove them very carefully, they probably make great writing quills.....

Absence makes the heart grow fonder?

Sorry for the absence, I had a busy few days with a number of new avenues arising for the Scuba Club, which kept me off the computer more often than not. And then I had a man-cold that kept me out of action for a couple of days.

Since then, I have been preparing a couple of presentations for some initiatives that Peter and I are hoping to kick-start over the winter.

In preparing one of the presentations (a 15 minute show designed for in-school presentations to junior and high school students), I've come across some awesome imagery. I know that it's not my photo, but I just had to share this image of a great shot of a giant grouper:

I love the way the grouper is emerging from the shoal of smaller fish. Of course, I should also admit to you all that this is therapy for me. While I have never really had any serious fears of swimming with bull sharks or reef sharks, for some reason, grouper have always sort of given me the willies. I distinctly remember being petrified when a giant grouper slid past a hole in the interior of a wreck I was swimming around in Thailand. It was so ghostly (and we were pretty deep) and so just seeing a giant eye and then a massive grey slimy thing slide past my eyes almost made me drop my regs. So posting this goliath is a small step towards getting over my fear of these guys. They're just so big!

If you have some great underwater photos that you've taken, please feel free to pop them over to me and we'll try and post some of them on our website. We're in the midst of getting a "news" section added to our site, so that's where we will likely put them up for now.

In case you haven't received and email from me or checked our facebook updates in the last week or so, don't forget that this Thursday is our monthly Club Night at Ryerson. We hope to see some of you there. We'll be bringing some new tools to help you improve your buoyancy skills. Email me if you are interested in popping down.

That's it for today, but remember .... don't sit on the scorpionfish!

Absent? Guilty. Busy on your behalf? Guilty

Hey, hey,

So, it's been a couple of weeks since I last blogged on, but hey, the Toronto Scuba Club has to work too, you know!! So many pokers in the fire right now.

I'm not going to spill all the beans in one blog, there's many a pearl to be polished yet. But let's talk about our new e-Learning capability....

So, PADI has been offering e-Learning as a teaching mechanism for a year or so now, but it's only been available to resorts and stores. It has not been available to individual instructors. Starting this month, PADI has now made e-Learning an option for individual instructors.....meaning that through our principal instructors (myself and Peter), we can now offer that flexibility to our students as well.

We're still working on the minutiae of getting the product smoothly running. As the programme itself is run by PADI, it's more the pricing and interaction between the programme and our website/database system that is being refined.

In case you're wondering, the e-Learning option effectively removes the classroom portion of the Open Water course. It can also be used for the Advanced Open Water course, as well as the Enriched Air (Nitrox) course.

A student simply purchases the e-Learning option from us, then we provide them with a pin number. The student then logs onto PADI's e-Learning website, puts in their email address and the pin and off they go. The e-Learning pass that they have now gained access too lasts for a year.

In the e-Learning programme, the student basically does exactly coursework as a student would be completing in a regular Open Water course. Instead of using the book, completing the Knowledge Reviews and then attending classes with yours truly, the e-Learning student completes the Knowledge Reviews online and doesn't have to attend any classes at all.

Even the final exam is completed online. When the student has completed the e-Learning course, they simply do a further 20 questions (which are based on the materials they have already completed anyway) and they're done.

So what is the advantage? Well, our regular courses usually take place over two days on a weekend. Students need to arrive and sit in class for about two to three hours each day and complete their final exam on the Sunday. This normally means a 9 to 4 day for both days.

The e-Learning student, however, turns up at noon on the Saturday and completes a 20 question quiz. They then get changed and jump in the water for the pool session. Similarly, on the Sunday, they again turn up at noon and spend another couple of hours in the pool and they've completed their Class and Pool course. Why do they get to turn up late? Because they have already completed the classroom portion, in advance, at their own pace and in their own time. It saves so much time!!

We're about to start up a three-week, one night per week course for the Open Water. I'll talk more about that in a day or two, but the most exciting part is that we are only going to offer this course to e-Learning students!! They get to complete their class and pool course with only a few hours of attendance. It rocks....

Anyway, some more news soon.....

In the meantime, don't sit on the spiny sea urchin!!

Poor Pufferfish or are they?

Not much to report today, mostly taking care of administrative business (cue BTO musak), but I did come across an interesting marine biology issue, well.....at least it was interesting to me, but probably not so much to you....

I always thought a porcupine fish was a species of puffer fish. Turns out that it isn't and that it is its own species in and of itself. If you want to see what a porcupine fish looks like, scroll down a blog or two.

Still damn cute.

Another marine issue I have been reading about (with increasingly disturbed horror) is the Pacific Garbage Vortex (also known as the Pacific Garbage Patch). This is an area roughly the size of Texas in the middle of the Pacific Ocean where trash and rubbish from the Pacific's coastlines and from sea-traffic accumulates and swirls in a mass at the surface of the ocean. Historically, such detritus would degrade and then sink to the ocean floor to be further broken down by marine life and the effects of salt water. When this consisted of bits of wood, fibres, wool, animals, etc. (i.e. prior to the last century and a half or so), this was not really a problem. In fact, it possibly helped create an ecosystem in an area of the ocean probably otherwise inhospitable to most forms of aquatic life.

The problem is that we (man) invented plastics, rubber and other materials that won't break down. So now we have a swirling vortex of garbage that simply won't disappear. Ok, ok, for the geeks out there, the plastics actually will break down through weathering, but not into anything that will naturally degrade into the environment safely. When the plastics do break down, they simply break down into smaller pieces of plastic, still at odds with a natural environment.

You can watch a wee video on the issue too here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-CVRFzLoEY

There is a similar issue in the Atlantic, although from what I have been reading, it is much broader in the Pacific. It is estimated that 10% of all annual plastic waste (again, estimated at about 200 billion pounds of trash) ends up in the oceans and a significant portion of that ends up in the Pacific Garbage Vortex.

The full effects of the Garbage Patch are not known at this time and scientists have only recently started to seriously examine its impact. It seems pretty obvious, however, that it simply isn't good.

So what can we do to help reduce this issue? Well, hopefully, many of you are already doing a little bit and recycling efficiently every day at home and at work. If you live in Toronto, you know that we have an excellent recycling system and if you look at the free recycling calendar's the City dispenses, you'll be amazed at what you can recycle. So doing your part every day certainly helps.

If you come diving with the Toronto Scuba Club as well (ok, not at Gulliver's Lake, but in any open water environment), you will also know that we like to do a clean-up each and every time we hit the water. If we see garbage, we pick it up. And every few dives, we are even committed to making the object of the dive itself a garbage clean-up dive. But you can do that even when you are not diving with the Toronto Scuba Club. If you see garbage, pick it up (providing that it doesn't further harm the environment to do so...i.e. by breaking coral, etc., and as long as it doesn't put you at risk....i.e. contaminated material or over-exerting yourself carrying excessive weight).

Another way we can help is by further educating ourselves to the issue and its causes. A friend of the Toronto Scuba Club, Jeff Shaw, has in fact created an Oceanic Defense Organization. You can join his group if you are on facebook. Each time you learn a little more and each time you hear of an organization that is trying to do a little to help, join in, get involved. Even if it is only a small contribution, every little helps.

Ok, enough ranting....