Cork Sub Aqua Club

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.

I hadn’t dived the Folia for several years, not because club dives on the Folia are especially rare, (there had been a few already in 2009), but because I just happened to be unavailable whenever one was arranged. So I was looking forward to this. My recollection was that the wreck is really quite impressive. She lies at a depth of 33 to 38 meters several miles off Ardmore Co Waterford, and is within sight of Youghal and Ardmore. Despite some imperfect visibility it was a very enjoyable dive.
The problem of photographing and describing a wreck the size of the Folia is a bit like describing and photographing the grand canyon. It is difficult to convey the impressive scale of a wreck in a series of photographs or words, especially if conditions on the dive were not especially favorable for photography. I would like to dive the wreck again with clearer viz, like I had the previous time I dived, and a fast wide lens. The Folia is one of those dives that people like to do many times because it is probably one of the largest wrecks at a non-decompression diving depth off the south coast. There is always something new to discover. OK the Kowloon Bridge was an order of magnitude larger, but since the bow section collapsed also an order of magnitude less fascinating.

Sometimes known as the Folio, her real name was Folia. Militarily speaking the U-Boat that sank her did a pretty good job by preventing a large cargo of artillery shell casings from reaching the Western Front. The deaths of seven of the crew was the sad price paid. Despite extensive salvage that has destroyed much of the superstructure aft of the boilers there are still many of the shell casings to be found. We saw evidence that salvage continues. In effect she is being turned into a habitat for marine life. There are lots of nooks and crannies on the wreck. This is a good place to see congers. As a consequence of being a cozy home for fish, it gets some anglers, so watch out for hooks and fishing line.

I used a 28% mix, and we had about a 20 minute bottom time with plenty of no-decompression limit to spare, partly due to a miscalculation on my part, we headed back to the shotline a tad early. Launching from Knockadoon was OK, but there were waves coming around the point which made retrieval a bit challenging. Thanks to Brian for towing and coxing, and to Helen for organizing the dive, also Joost for helping us drop the shotline on the correct spot.

For those interested in the history of the wreck there is an article on the Waterford County Museum webpage: http://www.waterfordcountymuseum.org/exhibit/web/Display/article/160/4/?lang=en

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Just a quick reminder that the quiz night is on Friday 16th October, 8.30pm in Douglas RFC  hall, St Columba’s Hall (AKA the Tinny Shed), All are welcome booked or turn up on the night. there is a bar for those who’s knowledge may need assistance

There will a raffles with prizes,

a first prize of €120 for the quiz winner.

€20 per table to enter, Teams of four.

Tables of 4  will be teamed up on the night if required.

Should be a laugh, see you there, friends & family and random punters welcome.

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.

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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.