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Central Coast Marine Discovery Series — February 6
Maureen McEvoy, SSI Instructor and Underwater Naturalist, will present the Marine Discovery Series at Wallin’s Dive Center in San Carlos on Thursday night, February 6, 2003. This month’s lecture and slide show focuses on Nudibranchs of the Central California Coast. The lecture will be followed on Saturday February 8th with two staff led dives at Point Lobos State Reserve in Carmel. The Marine Discovery Series is designed to give the diver and non-diver alike a comprehensive overview of the subtidal communities of Central California. The three-hour lecture and slide presentation covers a different topic each month: kelp forest ecology, marine algae, invertebrates, fish and marine mammals. Staff led shore dives and field trips in Monterey follow each month for participants to experience the information from the lecture first hand. There is a fee. The lecture and dives include the SSI Underwater Naturalist specialty certification. Certified divers only are invited to participate in the diving portion of the program but all are welcome to the lectures and field trips. Wallin’s Dive Center is located at 1119 Industrial Road, San Carlos.
For directions and to register, call Wallin’s Dive Center at 650-591-5641 or log on to Wallin’s at http://www.wallins.com. Space is limited and pre-registration is required.
Once a year, in conjunction with the Underwater Cleanup, the Avalon Harbor Department permits diving in Avalon harbor. This event, which is steeped in over 20 years of tradition, brings together 500 divers from California and other western states as well as many foreign countries.
In the morning, divers will scour the harbor searching for trash and debris which is removed and sorted by volunteers. Prizes and awards are given at the afternoon Award Ceremony at the Wrigley Stage in downtown Avalon. Awards given last year for trash recovered included Oldest, Most Useless, Most Valuable, Most Perverted, Best Dressed and the well-known Silver Tongue Award.
Registration can be accomplished either online from the Catalina Conservancy Divers (CCD) website (http://www.ccd.org) or by downloading the registration form from the CCD website and mailing it with a check.
Proceeds from the event go to support the work of the CCD and Catalina Hyperbaric Chamber. CCD is a support group of the Catalina Conservancy, which is dedicated to restoration and protection of Catalina Island and its surrounding waters. CCD has been conducting underwater monitoring projects around Catalina since 1992. The Catalina Hyperbaric Chamber is located at the Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies near Two Harbors. The Chamber is the closest life support recompression chamber to the heavily dived Catalina area and has been responsible for saving many lives over the years.
All participants in the event will receive a T-shirt and be eligible for a door prize drawing. In addition to the door prize, numerous prizes totaling over $10,000 in value will be raffled off during the Awards Ceremony.
Catalina is located 22 miles from the LA/Orange County coast and can be reached by boat from Long Beach, San Pedro, Dana Point and Newport Beach and by helicopter. For information regarding transportation, hotel accommodations, activities, events or other services contact the Catalina Island Visitor’s Bureau at 310-510-1520. For questions regarding the event itself call 310-645-7900 or email turney@newcap.com.
John Chatterton to be Guest Speaker at CA Wreck Divers Banquet — February 22
“Hitler’s Lost U-Boat” will be among the topics that undersea explorer John Chatterton will present at the upcoming California Wreck Divers Annual Banquet to be held in February in Marina del Rey, California.
Chatterton, a commercial diver, scuba instructor, dive boat captain and member of the Explorers Club, discovered the wreck of an unidentified German U-Boat off the New Jersey coast in 1991. Following numerous exploratory dives and years of painstaking research, his team identified the lost submarine as the U-869. The endeavor corrected faulty war records and became the subject of a PBS television special.
Chatterton’s list of other discoveries and accomplishments is formidable. He was part of the first team of technical scuba divers to explorer the RMS Lusitania in 1994, and he discovered the first World War II casualty in American waters, the Norness. John also discovered the World War I tanker Sabstian, and the World War I passenger freighter SS Carolina, which was sunk by the German submarine U-151. Recently, he was a member of the British expedition to the HMHS Brittanic, a sister ship of the RMS Titanic, where he was the first individual to dive the wreck utilizing a rebreather.
The banquet will be held at the Harbor House Restaurant in Marina del Rey, California, at 5:30 P.M., February 22, 2003. The evening’s entertainment will include dinner and the California Wreck Divers’ famous “Giant Raffle.” For more information, call Steve Lawson at (949) 462-0462, or contact the California Wreck Divers’ web site at www.cawreckdivers.org.
Behrens Book Signing and Presentation — February 26
California Dive Center is pleased to announce that famed author David Behrens, author of such acclaimed works as Pacific Coast Nudibranchs will be at California Dive Center in San Bruno on February 26th at 6 p.m. to give a brief presentation to the Bay Area Hammerheads about his work around the world, filled with “Behrenisms,” and will be doing a book signing afterwards. You can purchase any of David’s books the night of the signing or you can visit his website (http://www.seachallengers.com) for advance purchases and bring them with you to the signing. Visit http://www.cadive.com for more information.
Monterey Sanctuary Currents Symposium — March 15
The 2003 Sanctuary Currents Symposium will be held at CSU Monterey Bay on Saturday, March 15, 2003. This is the event to learn about research going on within the Monterey Bay Marine Sanctuary. For more information, contact Liz Love, email: liz.love@noaa.gov