Cork Sub Aqua Club

• 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.

Cork Sub Aqua will be holding an open night in Counihans Bar near the GPO, on Thursday 19th March, 2009 at 8pm. If you have an existing qualification, e.g. PADI, BSAC or other CMAS, please come along and find out more about diving with our club.

We have a defined crossover plan for most recognised diving qualifications, so whether you’ve dived here or abroad, recently, or in the dim-and-distant past, we should be able to get you diving in the open water before long. Our club has two well-equipped RIBs and dives regularly around Cork and further afield.

Members will be on hand to answer any questions you may have. Come along, enjoy a few drinks, and chat about what diving with our club is like.

According to an article in Today’s Irish Times, the South Western Regional Fisheries Board has outlined a new five-year plan which involves encouraging whale-watching and scuba-diving.

I had a quick look at their website and couldn’t find any more details, but it sounds like an interesting development and one which local divers should take an interest in. The motivation is to protect the regional fisheries by encouraging wealth-generating sectors that rely on its protection.

A clear night on Saturday of this weekend allowed us a fine view of the Space Shuttle splitting from its rocket on the way to rendezvous with the Space Station. We watched it from the West Cork village of Allihies after a fine day’s diving.

Below water conditions were a little more murky, with a lot of plankton around to spoil the viz. We weren’t complaining though, since these brought basking sharks in record numbers to hoover them up. We spotted plenty of these on the surface, and some of us were lucky enough to encounter one while diving.

Tall tales of basking sharks breaching were avidly discussed in the pub, but were dismissed by the more knowledgeable locals, who asserted that the creature seen leaving the water a few metres from our RIB was most likely a pilot whale, many of which had also been spotted in the sound between the mainland and Dursey Island.

Smaller forms of life were also abundant. Large shoals of mackerel entertained our divers on their safety stops. On Sunday morning’s dive, I came across what looked very like a cleaning station, with larger fish hanging around to be preened by the smaller more colourful cuckoo wrasse.

Inbhear Sceine dive club once again organised a very successful regional dive weekend, where over sixty divers gathered together in Cahersiveen to dive and socialise.

Plenty of basking sharks were around, and these played a merry game of cat-and-mouse with some of our divers, who managed to overcome their fear of snorkelling, at least temporarily, in order to see these impressive creatures up-close.

We were very fortunate overall with the weather. Some of our divers were lucky enough to get off early enough on Friday to get down for an evening dive, where the vis was reportedly spectacular. On Saturday, the rain finally arrived on our way back from our second dive, then departed again by Sunday morning, when we headed off for the Skelligs.

A very pleasant, if cold, dive accompanied the predictably breathtaking scenery. We pulled the boats just before the rain came back again, and headed back to base more than satisfied with the weekend’s diving.

Easter weekend the club went down to Kilcrohane for our first dive weekend away of the season. Easter was particularly early this year, so cold, rain and wind were always going to be on the agenda. We were able to put our brand new custom-built Excalibur RIB out on the water nonetheless. This was the culmination of a lot of effort by members of the club in fundraising, chasing up Sports Capital funding, drawing up detailed specs, inspecting the building process and test-driving and running-in, so we were very happy to see her used for her intended purpose.

The boat was built by Gael Force Ventures in Carrigaline to our own specification. From the beginning, members had a very definite idea of what they wanted to see in their new RIB. Having a large space for kitting up was a very big consideration. Having a slightly larger RIB than the previous ones we’ve used meant that, with a little extra thought put into the design, we could have a space large enough for two pairs of divers to don their gear and complete their buddy checks in comfort at the same time. Secure storage space for bottles, hand-holds for rough weather and ease of entry for divers were also very important considerations.

When it came to engine size, enough power to get up on the plane with ten fully-laden divers was the minimum criterion. That had to be balanced with economy, ease-of-maintenance, and the need to be forgiving to inexperienced coxswains. In the end, we settled for a 175 horsepower Suzuki 4-stroke. A large capacity fuel tank will help to minimise delay and spillage from messing around with extra fuel containers.

As the build progressed members were on hand to inspect how things were going and provide feedback to the rest of the club. As the plans materialised, Jim, our equipments officer, was able to carry the opinions of the club members back to the boat builders and fine-tune the specification. Decisions were made on the ideal dimensions of the A-Frame, fitting of the O2 bottles etc, even as the workers put the finishing touches to the fibreglass hull.

Time will tell if our new boat lives up to all our expectations. With a bit of luck, we’ll get the good weather soon to let her show her full potential, but if the weather stays a little choppy, well she should be able to cope with that too. We’ll be having a little ceremony before the end of the month to welcome her officially to the club and show our appreciation to everybody, in the club and out, who made this possible.

Fiona and I spent our honeymoon in Capetown and its environs, and although diving wasn’t the primary objective, we couldn’t pass by the opportunity to get under the water in some fashion. Our first dive was in the Two Oceans aquarium in the V&A Waterfront area, where we got to dive in the predator tank. Any qualified diver can do this for a small fee, and it seemed like an interesting way to get acquainted with the local marine megafauna. The tank is about 4 metres deep at its deepest and has the surface area approximately of a tennis court. It’s doughnut shaped with a modest anticlockwise current, and stocked with three sharks, a turtle, and various other fish including mantas and a shoal of yellowfin tuna. The sharks themselves didn’t seem to bothered by our presence, except for one of the smaller ones which approached us on a number of occasions, only to be dispatched by our divemaster’s high-tech shark-poking device (which looked suspiciously like half a broom handle).

Our first attempt to get under the open water was with a local expat Scotsman called Iain Robertson who operates out of Simon’s Town on the shores of False Bay. I was looking forward to seeing the famous Kelp Forests of this area. I’ve never been a huge fan of kelp, especially the short dense variety that thrives around the Irish coast, but the descriptions I’ve seen of the local algae seemed like a completely different matter. In the end, I was to be a little disappointed; a recent change to the licensing regulation for diving in this protected area led us to being caught without the requisite paperwork on the day, and we had to be content with a snorkel instead from the local Boulders beach – a spot frequented by a large colony of African penguins. The most I managed was a 3 metre duck dive, but I think I managed to get some sense of what the area had to offer.

Our last couple of nights in South Africa were spent in the small seaside town of Hermanus, where, following a day of whale-watching around Dyer’s Island,  we hooked up with a local dive operator – Scuba Africa – and finally managed to get a couple of proper open-water dives. The temperatures and viz here were comparable to what we get back home, but the amount of life and the colours reminded me more of tropical waters. Crayfish in particular were in plentiful supply, with every decent-sized crack in the reef providing shelter to anything up to eight or nine of them.

Apparently we were very lucky with the weather there. For the previous few weeks, strong winds and rain had led to a large number of cancelled dives, but on the day we arrived, the previous evenings winds had dissipated and we enjoyed a beautiful sunny day. On our second dive, we spotted a whale in the harbour. It would have been something else to be able to get into the water with her, but conservation regulation prevented the boat from getting too near. Instead, we were treated to a swimming display from a curious seal; a fitting end to our day’s diving and the last day of our holiday.