A brief recap of the George and Pina's visit to Monterey California.

DIVING:

The day was sunny and beautiful, but the *visibility* did NOT
cooperate!!  I would say we had a dark and murky 5' of visibility!!
Nevertheless, we had a good turnout, with several sets of single
and doubles rigs going out, along with the fleet of Gavin scooters.
It was the first time on a scooter for many of the folks that came to
try them out and we didn't want to use touch contact (BTW most
of guys did super well), so we turned the pitch down a bit and
scootered off into the murk. These conditions coupled with the
kelp made navigating and scootering more of a chore than fun.

A few tried to convince George and Pina that the visibility was
so poor and the water temperate so cold that it would NOT be
worth a dive...

Not to be easily discouraged, they donned their gear and
entered. I think most expected them back in about 10 minutes;
the 49 degrees and 5 feet of vis would turn most of us. Anyway,
when they came out of the water nearly an hour later they were
still smiling. Hummm, maybe all you warm water Florida divers
are tougher than we thought ;-)


LECTURE:

Manta Ray Dive Center had booked a conference room in the
posh Monterey Plaza Hotel and Spa a block away from the gear
demo area at Breakwater. Our local DIR group - BAUE - provided
the support as they did in the gear demos.

I must take responsibility for limiting the space available; I thought
I had only room for 50 but as it turned out we got a larger room with
capacity for 70!  Even with 9 no-shows, we had *47 attendees* at
George's lecture! For Northern California this is a HUGE number
of people!!!

George covered several subjects from the evolution of the gear to
current thinking of deco. The lecture and Q&A lasted nearly 2.5
hours and might have continued into the night ... We actually had
to tell everyone that our time in the room was over ... Oh yeah, we
had already run an hour over the scheduled time and the Plaza
wanted the room back ;-)

We videotaped the lecture, and are looking at possibly editing it into a
VideoCD/DVD; more on that later.


PICTURES:

We posted some event pictures on the BAUE website:

http://www.baue.org/images/demo/index.html


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS :

Thanks to all that attended and helped!

George Irvine and Pina P.
Bay Area Underwater Explorers - http://www.baue.org
Manta Ray Dive Center - http://www.mantaraydive.com - (831)-375-6268
GUE - Halcyon - Apex- Suunto/Aqua Lung - DiveRite - Gavin Scooters -
Diving Concepts - Mobby's


Thanks,

Jt

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