The Aquarius!!

Hello Everyone!

Last Thursday I had the most fantastic opportunity to do two wonderful scuba dives on NOAA's and NURP/NURC's undersea research habitat, the Aquarius. I want to thank the 'guys' at NOAA and NURC here in Key Largo for enabling me to visit the habitat. Thanks to: Otter, Otto, Buck and James. You are all good guys and great scuba divers and am glad you are my friends.

It was a sentimental dive as years ago, we used to dive around the Aquarius frequently. It is located on Conch Reef and rests in 65 FSW. For more information on the Aquarius follow these two links:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/coralreefs/undersealab.html and

http://www.uncw.edu/aquarius/

My dive buddy was Connie Z and was in Key Largo, testing out her new underwater camera system this past week. Connie is a proud owner of Watershot's new housing system for Canon's XSi and T1i dSLR cameras. She was gracious enough to give me permission to use some of her captures of the marine life around the Aquarius for this blogpost. Thank you, Connie, for the great shots!

Diving the Aquarius was not only sentimental for me (it has been over ten years since my last) but was a true adventure. It was a great exploration and seeing how it had changed. A much wider variety of fish and corals on and around the habitat than years ago.

I'm including 11 photographs taken by Connie and myself that afternoon. Hope you enjoy them.

lg

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Matt's Kids Stockton College NJ 2009

I've blogged about Professor Matt and his students of the marine sciences before and will hopefully do so again. For reference you may want to scroll back through my blog and find my first blog entry regarding "Matt's Kids".

This year as in the past years Matt returned with groups of his students of the marine sciences and conducted three week long field trips where they studied our marine environment. The video clip I am presented depicts their experiences. The first slide is of one of his students sleeping on the boat. I thought it appropriate because these field trips are made of long days and work and as such his students grab sleep when they can!

The rest of the slides in the show are random images of their time here, above and below the water.

I can't say enough good about these young people and my best days of each year are in July when I am working with and for them.

Thanx Matt.

lg

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Famous People!

This blogpost has absolutely nothing to do with scuba diving or underwater photography, other than the fact that Moby, pictured above, is one of 'my guyz'. Moby is a life long radio disc jockey and very much a celebrity in Atlanta. He has a country 'and' western, yes, both kinds of music, morning talk show known as: 'Moby in the Morning'.

So, in my mind at least, Moby is 'kinda' famous, but, is not why I titled the blogpost 'Famous People'.

Like others do , Moby occasionally sends me 'cute stuff' in emails. Forward of forwards of jokes, etc. The other day he sent me something very very very kewel! I thought I would share it with my bloggers and guyz so am making this post.

Here is a copy and paste of his email to me:

" loved this one, and thought my friends would as well.
Yeah baby,
MOBY

http://cliptank.com/PeopleofInfluencePainting.htm



I think you'll like this one.. put your mouse on any one of the people& it tells you who they are.."BUT" double click on that person & a pageopens up & tells you Everything about that person.. Really neat . I can't believe how much work has goneinto this painting. The painting itself is great but as you run yourcursor over the people; it tells you who they are and provides a link(if you double click) to get more information on each person. This couldkeep you occupied for hours Move the task bar to the right to see the entire picture. Enjoy "

I opened the link to the painting and it is stunning and I have no words to best describe it. As Moby said when he sent it to me: "WOW"

lg

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"They're Baaaaaaack" (or were)

Every year, well almost every year, a group of my scuba students, and some of their friends, come to Key Largo for a few days of diving and diving with me. This year was no different and, who I affectionately refer to as: 'my Clines' returned and with a vengeance!

They were eight in number and adding me to the group made for nine of us in total. Having that large of a group, I made our diving arrangements with my friend, Captain Mark, who owns Scuba-Do (http://www.scuba-do.com/) . This was because while his boat will carry up to 14 divers, he limits his capacity to 10 in number. This resulted in our having the whole boat to ourselves and our pick of dive sites!!

One photo above features seven of the eight in the group. John, or Jack, or, oh yeah, 'Jim' is not in the photo as he likes lagging behind and exploring at his own pace. All of the divers in these photographs are wonderful divers and quite fun below and above the water. As you can see when you view the diver with the 'tu-tu' and 'rubber chicken'. I purposely did not capture his face when I made the photograph to protect the innocent, but, we all know it is Frank!

One photograph of a pair of spotted Drums is included as a representation of what we saw during their three days of diving. We saw, a southern stingray, several green moray eels, a couple golden tail eels, and a couple spotted eels. Lobster and Barracuda were also encountered and that is pretty typical of diving in the Key Largo area. We managed to witness the huge schools of Snapper and Goatfish at Snapper Ledge. Did a pair of dives on Molasses Reef and one on French Reef where we saw a huge 'cloud' of Horse-eyed Jacks, and our grande finale dive on the wreck of the Benwood, where the two spotted drumfish live.

We had perfect weather, with air and water temps in the 80s, and, calm seas which turned to flat calm seas during their time here.

The Scuba-Do crew took exceptionally good care of us, and tolerated our collective brand of bad senses of humor! Thank you, Greg, Jarod and Kevin!

'my Clines' have made it official to journey back to Key Largo for more fun diving every year from here on out! I couldn't be happier to hear that, as they are again, a lot of fun and good divers. Thank you, 'Clines'! 'Jack' and Frank included!

I'm not sure what they will come up with for next year, only that it will be funny!

lg

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