First Charter of the Season..

Follow this link to view a short video of the first charter dive of the season - Good Friday - on the Wolfe Islander II..

Many thanks to Todd for organising this dive - and to Frank and Proteus for the opportunity.

Where do dolphins want to go?

Which Wrecks are your priority/favourite? POW Kingston
Mooring season is coming up and POW would like to know which wrecks are your favourite. When ever possible priority will be given to the desires of divers but you have to let us know what they are.

The most important (and expensive) annual project is placing the moorings at wrecks. With limited funds its best to allocate them where the divers and boats want to go. It is not a one time thing to moor a wreck. The boat operators dedicate great effort, time and gas to the moorings over the season. The buoys get damaged, break loose, lines and chains break and they have to be replaced.

Here is a list of wrecks. So let us know what you want and check out the POW website:

http://powkingston.org/default.aspx

Aloha / Effie Mae
Annie Falconer
China
City of Sheboygan
Comet
Cornwall
Frontenac
George A. Marsh
George T. Davie
Glendora
Katie Eccles
KPH
Maple Glen
Manola
Munson
Queen
S. M. Douglas
Terryʼs Tug
Titanic
Rickyʼs Tug
William
Wolfe Islander

War of 1812 Symposium in Guelph..

Members may be interested in a Seminar to be held at the University of Guelph on February 25th. The all-day event will feature at least one talk on the naval campaign, a subject close to our hearts here in Kingston. Further details can be obtained from the Organizing Chair - Tom Fournier (tom4141fournier@yahoo.ca)

This is funny just because everyone is looking down. Funny but a good idea too.

Welcome home Kev

Welcome home Kev!... And after the family the first thing he does is dive.

Gaetan's 100th this year

How many have 100 dives this year or wish they had? Gaetan had plenty of company for the event. It looked like fun and I wish I had joined them. Here's a picture of the happy guy after the dive and another of his crew emerging from the water.

Diving the Islander

Great trip today to Alexandria Bay to dive the wreck of the Islander. The water clarity was exceptional and it's still not too chilly at about 50℉ (10℃). As always on this site, there were lots of Crayfish, including this monster. There has been some damage done to the dinner table set-up, but we restored one piece to create the ensemble shown.

Pumpkin DIvers' pictures on Flickr..

Tom Rutledge has been good enough to post some of the great shots he took this morning at the Marine Museum's Pumpkin Dive on his Flickr site. Click here to see them.

The Marine Museum of the Great Lakes is hosting a Pumpkin Carving event this coming Saturday, October 22nd. Teams need to pre-register and full details can be found in the flyer here.

The Love Affair Continues...

Staying faithful and true to my only other love, continual diving education, this past Saturday was the culmination point of another series of courses I have undertaken lately. While on pre-deployment training and under a form of distance-learning, I dove into the world of technical diving. I had been diving doubles, stages, and other forms of technical-oriented activities for quite some time, but had never taken any formal training associated with the rigors of planned and structured technical diving.

Decompression Procedures, Advanced Nitrox, and Solo Diver, prepare divers to plan and execute complex decompression dives in up to 150 feet with a ''virtual'' overhead environment. A large portion of the course was to learn problem-solving skills in order to safely return to the surface if things go wrong underwater. Mastery of such skills as mask replacement at depth, managing back gas and stage bottle freeflows, left or right-post failures, BCD and drysuit inflator failures, gas planning and management, decompression schedule planning, and inflating surface markers were only a portion of what you learn....the list of skills goes on and on...

Throughout the course, my instructor took pleasure in throwing multiple problems at me during our training dives, enabling me to learn to prioritize problems, solve them underwater while keeping a decompression schedule on track. The picture above is a photo of my graduation dive on the Munson this past Saturday. In all, it took me a total of 9 training dives to complete all 3 courses.

Many thanks go out to Anne and Harold from Kingston Dive Charters, members from the club for their support in coming along for the dive, and my instructor Dan Downes for putting me through some of the toughest diving I had yet to encounter. His mantra throughout the course was: ''Technical diving is not a destination, but a journey...'' Are YOU up to the challenge ?