Ken Kurtis
Contributor
Want to travel??? Upcoming 2016-2017 vacation trips:
• November 3-16 - Maldives on the Manthiri [ 1 FEMALE-SHARE SPOT LEFT ]
• March, 2017 - Bonaire (???)
• June, 2017 - Isla Mujeres (early in the Whale Shark Season)
• 2017 - July 7-19 - Yap Immersion #1 (special 13-day trip featuring all that Yap has to offer) [ LIMITED TO 12 DIVERS - 5 SPOTS LEFT ]
• 2017 - July 21-August 2 - Yap Immersion #2 (week #2 - same sked as above) [ LIMITED TO 12 DIVERS - 9 SPOTS LEFT ]
• Fall of 2017 - Ultimate Indonesia - A week at Murex in Manado, 10-days in Raja Ampat, 3 days in the Lembeh Straits
GET MORE INFO ON ALL OF OUR VACATION TRIPS HERE: www.reefseekers.com/foreign_trips.html
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Upcoming local dives:
• September 17 (this coming Saturday - 9AM) - Vets Park daytime dive (single tank) - FREE!!!!
• September 28 (Wednesday) - Vets Park night dive (single tank) - FREE!!!!
• October 22 (Saturday) - Avalon Underwater Park (3 dives - include tank rentals) - $150
• October 26 (Wednesday) - Vets Park night dive (single tank) - FREE!!!!
To sign up for any of these dives, either call us at 310/652-4990 or e-mail us at kenkurtis@aol.com
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It was a lovely weekend to go dive . . .
VETS PARK DIVE NEXT SATURDAY - But if you didn't get a chance to make it out this weekend, perhaps you'd like to join us next Saturday morning for our FREE (a diver's favorite word) Vets Park escorted beach dive. It'll be a 1-tank affair and the plan will be to meet at 9AM in the parking lot, go over some details of the dive, enter the water by 10AM, do a 1-tank excursion into Redondo Canyon to see what we can find, exit, debrief, and head for home. Vets Park dives can run the gamut from surprisingly good to predictably boring. Sometimes the sandy plain in the shallow area seems devoid of life. But if you know what to look for, suddenly you'll realize that it's actually teeming with critters. And once we head down into the Canyon and level off around 70 feet, we'll likely be running into crabs and cusk eels and target shrimp and juvy rockfish and a whole lot more. So if you'd like to get in a dive with us, give us a call (310/652-4990) or reply to this e-mail and let's go diving!!!! Make sure you bring quarters for the parking meters and remember that you'll also need to supply your own gear.
ELO AT THE BOWL - We went to the Hollywood Bowl Friday night for the ELO concert and it was fabulous. While that may seem to be not related to diving, there's actually a diving connection. ELO was a major act back when I was running top 40 radio stations in the 70s so I've always liked their music. And one thing I really liked about the show Friday was that when they played their hits (Evil Woman, Strange Magic, Telephone Line, etc.) the concert performance sounded like the records did. One thing that many older musicians today complain about is that technology has made it possible for people who can't carry a tune to have a career. In the "old" days, bands would go into the studio and essentially record their records live. If they couldn't make it all work, they couldn't have a hit. But as multi-tracking took hold and then digital, nowadays they can lay down one track and adjust it, then come in the next day and maybe record a vocal and auto-tune it, then put in some other stuff, and essentially create a song that is absolutely impossible for them to reproduce in a real-time concert environment. The parallel to diving is that in the "old" days, we made you come to multiple class sessions and multiple pool sessions and (hopefully) ran you through your paces to make sure that you understood the materials and were comfortable in the water with the skills. But nowadays with at-home E-Learning and Weekend Wonder certifications, people may be taught the right answer and do a skill correctly once, but it doesn't mean they understand the material nor have they mastered the skill. So we see more and more newer divers who are less-educated and less-skilled, as well as less comfortable, then their predecessors were when they were newbies. Fortunately, you've got to make egregious errors normally to seriously injure yourself diving so we haven't seen the fatality rate shoot up or anything like that. But in the same way that live music and concerts have changed in the last 30 years, so has diver education and in both cases, it's not necessarily a step forward. And that's why it was such a joy to hear ELO Friday night (even though we couldn't follow it up with a dive).
LOST CAMERA BUT A HAPPY ENDING - The story's a little old but its another saga of someone losing a camera, it's found by divers, and then reunited with the rightful owners. This time the camera was lost near Vancouver when a boat wrecked and the camera went down with the ship, but only to a depth of 40 feet. The camera was only recently found but the images on the card were intact and the search began. You can read more about it here: Shipwrecked camera discovered underwater after 2 years with photos intact ....
DR. SEUSS WOULD BE PROUD - One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish. Yes, there really are some blue fish being pulled up but they're Lingcod, which normally aren't blue. Normally, they're sort of reddish-brown but up in Alaska, some of them turn blue and no one really knows why. Check it out: One fish, two fish, what the hell is this blue fish?.
FOR THE CLIMATE-CHANGE DENIERS - There was an article in Sunday's L.A. Times about the water level in Lake Mead potentially dropping below a certain depth which would require water-saving methods to kick in. All of this is because of the drought as well as climate change, despite some people who still insist it's a myth (along with the moon landing) or a Chinese plot or whatever. But to add fuel to that fire, NASA just released some photos that over time show the 4th-largest sea in the world, the Aral Sea (between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan) shriveling up to about 10% of its former size. Pretty dramatic: These Photos Show How One of the World's Largest Lakes Disappeared.
AND SPEAKING OF PHONY-BALONEY DRAMA - How's this for a fake photo? This came out after some flooding in Maine and its quite obvious that it's been Photoshopped because there's no way those cars are real:
And that'll do it for now. Have a great week and let's go diving soon!!!!
- Ken
• November 3-16 - Maldives on the Manthiri [ 1 FEMALE-SHARE SPOT LEFT ]
• March, 2017 - Bonaire (???)
• June, 2017 - Isla Mujeres (early in the Whale Shark Season)
• 2017 - July 7-19 - Yap Immersion #1 (special 13-day trip featuring all that Yap has to offer) [ LIMITED TO 12 DIVERS - 5 SPOTS LEFT ]
• 2017 - July 21-August 2 - Yap Immersion #2 (week #2 - same sked as above) [ LIMITED TO 12 DIVERS - 9 SPOTS LEFT ]
• Fall of 2017 - Ultimate Indonesia - A week at Murex in Manado, 10-days in Raja Ampat, 3 days in the Lembeh Straits
GET MORE INFO ON ALL OF OUR VACATION TRIPS HERE: www.reefseekers.com/foreign_trips.html
—————————————————————————————————————————————
Upcoming local dives:
• September 17 (this coming Saturday - 9AM) - Vets Park daytime dive (single tank) - FREE!!!!
• September 28 (Wednesday) - Vets Park night dive (single tank) - FREE!!!!
• October 22 (Saturday) - Avalon Underwater Park (3 dives - include tank rentals) - $150
• October 26 (Wednesday) - Vets Park night dive (single tank) - FREE!!!!
To sign up for any of these dives, either call us at 310/652-4990 or e-mail us at kenkurtis@aol.com
—————————————————————————————————————————————
It was a lovely weekend to go dive . . .
VETS PARK DIVE NEXT SATURDAY - But if you didn't get a chance to make it out this weekend, perhaps you'd like to join us next Saturday morning for our FREE (a diver's favorite word) Vets Park escorted beach dive. It'll be a 1-tank affair and the plan will be to meet at 9AM in the parking lot, go over some details of the dive, enter the water by 10AM, do a 1-tank excursion into Redondo Canyon to see what we can find, exit, debrief, and head for home. Vets Park dives can run the gamut from surprisingly good to predictably boring. Sometimes the sandy plain in the shallow area seems devoid of life. But if you know what to look for, suddenly you'll realize that it's actually teeming with critters. And once we head down into the Canyon and level off around 70 feet, we'll likely be running into crabs and cusk eels and target shrimp and juvy rockfish and a whole lot more. So if you'd like to get in a dive with us, give us a call (310/652-4990) or reply to this e-mail and let's go diving!!!! Make sure you bring quarters for the parking meters and remember that you'll also need to supply your own gear.
ELO AT THE BOWL - We went to the Hollywood Bowl Friday night for the ELO concert and it was fabulous. While that may seem to be not related to diving, there's actually a diving connection. ELO was a major act back when I was running top 40 radio stations in the 70s so I've always liked their music. And one thing I really liked about the show Friday was that when they played their hits (Evil Woman, Strange Magic, Telephone Line, etc.) the concert performance sounded like the records did. One thing that many older musicians today complain about is that technology has made it possible for people who can't carry a tune to have a career. In the "old" days, bands would go into the studio and essentially record their records live. If they couldn't make it all work, they couldn't have a hit. But as multi-tracking took hold and then digital, nowadays they can lay down one track and adjust it, then come in the next day and maybe record a vocal and auto-tune it, then put in some other stuff, and essentially create a song that is absolutely impossible for them to reproduce in a real-time concert environment. The parallel to diving is that in the "old" days, we made you come to multiple class sessions and multiple pool sessions and (hopefully) ran you through your paces to make sure that you understood the materials and were comfortable in the water with the skills. But nowadays with at-home E-Learning and Weekend Wonder certifications, people may be taught the right answer and do a skill correctly once, but it doesn't mean they understand the material nor have they mastered the skill. So we see more and more newer divers who are less-educated and less-skilled, as well as less comfortable, then their predecessors were when they were newbies. Fortunately, you've got to make egregious errors normally to seriously injure yourself diving so we haven't seen the fatality rate shoot up or anything like that. But in the same way that live music and concerts have changed in the last 30 years, so has diver education and in both cases, it's not necessarily a step forward. And that's why it was such a joy to hear ELO Friday night (even though we couldn't follow it up with a dive).
LOST CAMERA BUT A HAPPY ENDING - The story's a little old but its another saga of someone losing a camera, it's found by divers, and then reunited with the rightful owners. This time the camera was lost near Vancouver when a boat wrecked and the camera went down with the ship, but only to a depth of 40 feet. The camera was only recently found but the images on the card were intact and the search began. You can read more about it here: Shipwrecked camera discovered underwater after 2 years with photos intact ....
DR. SEUSS WOULD BE PROUD - One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish. Yes, there really are some blue fish being pulled up but they're Lingcod, which normally aren't blue. Normally, they're sort of reddish-brown but up in Alaska, some of them turn blue and no one really knows why. Check it out: One fish, two fish, what the hell is this blue fish?.
FOR THE CLIMATE-CHANGE DENIERS - There was an article in Sunday's L.A. Times about the water level in Lake Mead potentially dropping below a certain depth which would require water-saving methods to kick in. All of this is because of the drought as well as climate change, despite some people who still insist it's a myth (along with the moon landing) or a Chinese plot or whatever. But to add fuel to that fire, NASA just released some photos that over time show the 4th-largest sea in the world, the Aral Sea (between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan) shriveling up to about 10% of its former size. Pretty dramatic: These Photos Show How One of the World's Largest Lakes Disappeared.
AND SPEAKING OF PHONY-BALONEY DRAMA - How's this for a fake photo? This came out after some flooding in Maine and its quite obvious that it's been Photoshopped because there's no way those cars are real:
And that'll do it for now. Have a great week and let's go diving soon!!!!
- Ken
