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.

Congor_lings

Seeing as their was no plans for today, I decided the weather was too good to waste……. Its not every day you get flat seas, scorching sunshine and only a handful of divers – making the organising very easy. We headed out for the Lings at 9am hoping to catch slack tide… and conditions were perfect. After taking the scenic route for a while, our coxn made it in perfect time for slack water. Shot dropped, and straight down to 25m where we were surrounded by crayfish and pollock. Loads of life, even a free-swimming congor or two. Visibility was great and everyone had a beautiful dive.

After pulling the shot, we headed for home – but we got stuck in traffic. Everyone was very upset when we were delayed behind some pesky dolphins, intent on circling and riding the bow wave. Dolphins cleared, and we then noticed some old netting on the water. Delighted to pull in the nets and make the water safe, our humanitarian effort went out the window when we unleashed hundreds of tiny bait fish into the deck of the boat – only to suffer a flapping, petrol infused death on the Cuanmhara floor.

Dolphins cleared, nets removed and after commiting tiny fish genocide – we had a clear run until we got stuck again. About to plane straight through some feeding birds we noticed a fin or two on the surface. We tried to dodge them, but we were stuck again. This time we had to get in and try move our obstructors out of the way. Bloody basking sharks -obviously not aware that it was lunchtime for us aswell. So we managed to shoo them away and then it was the fish’s turn. Huge schools of mackerel started going crazy – it was like watching a bait-ball on one of those BBC documentaries! Birds, fish, basking sharks, jelly fish all conspired to delay us again for another hour. Only when the child like scream of a grown man staring into a basking shark mouth was heard, did we manage to get away.

Eventually we made it through rush hour and hit the slip just in time for lunch. I think we should stay on shore dives from now on, theirs just too much distration outside…….

On a bright Sunday morning we met at Lough Hyne for the CMAS Diver** tests.  The candidates from CORKSAC were Seamus Twomey, Laura Grim and Joe Bater.  We were met by other Diver** candidates from UCC and NUI-Galway.

It was a dark and very silty dive, with visibility becoming very difficult in the initial drills.  On the dive leadership work afterwards, the conditions rather reminded me of the moon landing imagery – gliding over a generally desolate terrain.  We didn’t see much life, an occasional velvet swimming crab but that was all.

 All candidates passed.

IMG_3618

Originally uploaded by rf_keane.

Another shot of the divers decompressing after the Lusitania dive on 2nd July 2006

IMG_3620

Originally uploaded by rf_keane.

Divers Decompressing after 90 metre dive to Lusitania.
Bottom time was 30 minutes and dive run time was 180 to 210 minutes.