Cork Sub Aqua Club

Took up an offer for a couple of nights in Don & Mercy’s place in Kilcrohane this weekend. Haven’t had a dive since last June so I needed to get those snorkels out of the way. Besides, we still haven’t figured how to get baby, buggy and dive gear all in the car yet.

Saturday morning was bright and sunny. And crisp, definitely crisp. Not a day for climbing back into a wet semi-dry, so I just did the one from Dooneen Pier. I went first, while Fiona looked after Diarmaid. I swam around the small rock south of the pier and headed west towards the rocky bay. The tide was too low to swim through, but there was a nice little cave in the cliff face just to the left of the channel. When it came to Fiona’s turn the water was high enough to get through and she enjoyed her snorkel on the south side of the island.

Today was slightly less inviting, but I still managed to drag myself into the water. Headed left this time, into the cave and explored the bay beyond that and around the corner. Nice spot for doing a few duck dives – the water was pretty clear and I could see the bottom a few metres below; a nice mix of boulders and flat white sand.

Staying down for a third night so I might get my quota of snorkels out of the way. We’ll see what tomorrow’s like. Tapping this in slowly on my Hero in front of the warm fire. BTW, anybody looking at this on their mobile? Let me know what you think of the new mobile theme.

For prospective members with no previous diving experience, there will be an opportunity to try out SCUBA equipment in a shallow heated pool under supervision by our instructors. This will take place in the Leisureworld pool on the 26th January at 7pm.

Please contact us for more information.

Cork Sub Aqua will hold an open night upstairs in Counihan’s Bar on 21st January. Members will be present to discuss our training plans for the year to come and answer any questions you may have concerning diving in Cork, conditions, training needs, club equipment, costs, or any other matters relating to diving.

Divers with existing diving qualifications are particularly welcome, as we will be doing crossover training early in the new year. If you have not dived before, please register your interest as soon as possible, because we will only be able to provide training for new divers if numbers justify it.

If you made an enquiry during the year about joining the club you should be contacted soon with more details. Enquiries can get overlooked sometimes though, so don’t hesitate to get in touch again.

Hope to see you there.

• Roman Statues Found in Blue Grotto Cave http://is.gd/3MstS #
• geotagged photos #
• Join us on Facebook http://bit.ly/43jDJO #
• Table Quiz 16th October http://bit.ly/kDqna #
• more facebook integration http://bit.ly/12o0Wp #
• World's first Shark sanctuary in Palau @Treehugger http://bit.ly/1PnGc #
• Mmm, Twitter Tools for Wordpress seems a little flakey. Try this http://bit.ly/14RJOD #

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Now here’s something that looks pretty cool. I assume you could manage without the torpedoes (and sharks).

Any takers?

To simplify adding your photos to the blog, etc, I’ve introduced the tag ‘corkaquatic’. Here’s an example of an image gallery based on a flickr search for that tag. So far just flickr photos, but the plan is to expand to other services, so start tagging…

…you can tag your photos in a batch from the Organizr . E.g. select a group or set from the drop-down menu on the bottom left, and drag them into the main window, then select ‘AddTags’ from the menu at the top.

You can even tag other people’s photos for them. I’ve added photos from Joe and Donal here to illustrate.

The wine tasting event scheduled for August 14th has been cancelled, and will be reorganised for sometime in November. A few of us will head to Dennehy’s for pints instead.

• weather is looking ok for the w/e. chance of rain, but what's new? #

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Two wine tasting evenings will be held over the next few weeks. The location is Meade’s Wine Bar on Oliver Plunkett Street, opposite Milano’s. Cost is €20 per person.

On Friday, August 14th at 8pm, Julian from Bubble Brothers will give a talk.

On Thursday, September 3rd it will be the turn of Barry from O’Donovan’s off-licence.

Please let us know if you are coming.

There will be a Table quiz on October 16th in Columba’s Hall, Douglas. Watch the calendar for more details.

Cork Sub Aqua’s web presence has been undergoing some changes lately and I thought a quick summary of those might be in order.  For starters, we’ve moved from wordpress.com to a self-hosted version of our blog here on blog.corksac.info. The main reason for this was to be able to experiment with new functionality provided by third-party plugins. Much of this is still work-in-progress and there are quite a few wrinkles to be ironed out, but there are a few new features worth calling out.

My favourite new feature is provided by the WP Geo plugin. Diving is a pretty location-dependent sport and I’ve always been keen on being able to relate the information we provide to a place on a map. Now, we can do that pretty easily with a handy little form that allows you to stick a pin in a map, enter coordinates or just search for an address. That last one doesn’t generally work well for dive sites, but the other two do. I’ve gone back and geotagged a lot of our older entries, so now when you look at our posts, you can see a little map widget on the right showing a geographical summary, and a larger scale map on the individual post page.

I’ve also made a move to consolidate some of the other public information into one place, so for example the About and Committee pages on the blog contain a lot of the information previously published on our static html pages. The links to these have in turn been redirected to the blog. The stuff we had linked to the blog before, like the Flickr group, are still there, and there’s an embedded calendar which is synchronised with our Google Calendar through the ICS Calendar plugin to make it easier to browse events.

We now have a semantic wiki, which hopefully will allow some of the type of structured, searchable content on divesites etc which some of our users have been asking for. For the moment, we have a basic social bookmarking service, and a list of directions enabled this way. These are again consolidated onto the blog using the RSS widget; you can see them in the right-hand column with the current layout.

I’ve also very recently installed the bbPress forum software so we can have our own public forum to complement the restricted one on Google Groups.  One use for this might be to field questions on membership, training etc, in a way that people can search for previously answered questions; or just to discuss diving in Cork with other clubs and other divers in the region.

The biggest challenge is getting all this stuff to work together smoothly without requiring people to log in with have a dozen different IDs. OpenID should help, for example I can login to the blog using my flickr photo URL, which is pretty nice, so I’m enabling that wherever its available. But like I said, there’s a few wrinkles still to figure out, so if stuff isn’t working like it should, give me a shout, or just check back later; it’s changing all the time.