Hello all,

Welcome to the GLUG training bulletin for March 2010

Just wanted to update you all with what’s going on and help keep divers diving, get new divers into the water, further your education and make you all better divers!! I am planning to run a series of courses designed to improve your diving over the next few months.

Some upcoming hilights!

Try Dive  – Saturday 20th March - £27.50

http://www.glug.co.uk/trydive

We are continuing the very successful try dive days, if you are unsure about scuba, come along and have your mind changed! ;)

Open Water Course Part One (April 2010 £249 – £399 parts 1 & 2)

Get your PADI scuba certification. If you’ve always wanted to learn how to scuba dive, this is where it starts. The PADI Open Water Diver course is the world’s most popular scuba course, and has introduced millions of people to the adventurous diving lifestyle.

This is the first part, the referral, it covers the theory and pool sessions, you can then go on to finish your course abroad or here in the UK. This course is filling up, so please be quick. I am scheduling others though, so get in touch!

Open Water Course Part Two (May 2010 £169)

This is the second part of the PADI Open Water course, we’re hoping to put a trip together (ideas include Malta, Tenerife, or Egypt) to finish off all those Open Water courses. Please get in touch if you are waiting to finish, or even just want to come along!

Nitrox (EANx) Diver (May 2010 £99)

The Enriched Air Nitrox course improves your diving in one enormous way! It allows you to spend longer under the water. This course is conducted entirely in the classroom and doesn’t require any diving. This course is almost full, get in touch ASAP

Scuba Review/Refresher Course (April 2010 £69)

Has it been a while since you’ve been scuba diving? Do you feel like your scuba skills and knowledge are a bit rusty? If you plan to dive this year and haven’t updated your log book in over 12 months, your dive centre will request that you take a refresher. Don’t cut into your dive time, do it in advance and pay less! The Scuba Review Tune-up is just the refresher you need. It reacquaints you with diving so that you’re back to feeling comfortable in the underwater world and log book ready in less than a day.

Advanced Open Water (£249)

The course helps you increase your confidence and build your scuba skills so you can become more comfortable in the water. This is a great way to get more dives under your belt while continuing to learn under the supervision of your instructor.  This course builds on what you’ve learned and develops new capabilities by introducing you to new activities and new ways to have fun scuba diving.

Rescue Diver (£299/£399 with First Aid Training)

This is the minimum level of training all divers should be at! “Challenging” and “rewarding” best describe the Rescue
Diver course. Building upon what you’ve already learned, this course expands on what you already know about how to prevent problems, and how to manage them if they occur.  You will learn: self rescue, recognizing and managing stress in other divers; Emergency management and equipment, rescuing panicked divers; and rescuing unresponsive divers.

Dry Suit Diver (£169)

Stay warm and cozy on your dives. Learn how to dive with a Dry Suit. A must if you plan to dive in the UK, I even take my dry suit abroad because I love diving in it! The buoyancy is so much better…

Deep Diver (£179)

Explore the wonders of the deep. This speciality course serves as an introduction to deep diving where you will learn the necessary skills, knowledge and techniques to safely participate in deep diving activities. Many wrecks and other popular dive sites are located at or just beyond 30m, the Advanced Open Water depth limit. This means you would have to dive beyond or very close to your limit and experience. This course is ideal for divers who want to extend their depth limit to the maximum recreational limit of 40m.

Wreck Diver (£229)

Wrecks open fascinating windows to the past. Most divers find wrecked ships, airplanes and even automobiles nearly irresistible because they’re intriguing to explore, exciting avenues of discovery, and usually teeming with aquatic life. The course teaches you the ins and outs of rewarding, responsible wreck diving.

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If you or anyone you know is interested in any training from absolute beginner to instructor, or interested in technical diving including rebreathers, we can get you trained and diving!!!

All courses can be arranged, if you are unable to make a date, or I haven’t mentioned a course, then please get in touch and we can arrange one. Training can be arranged in the UK or abroad.

http://www.glug.co.uk/training/padi

Don’t forget club night, 1st Tuesday of every month at the Phoenix Club on Charing Cross Road.

Please contact me on: 

or

Thanks very much,

Ian

GLUG Training Coordinator

www.pathfinderdiving.co.uk

Hello fellow divers! I couldn’t resist sharing this with you! I’ve just had a fabulous night down our local pub with …. MONTY ! He’s such a great story teller and has such a stage presence. He’s so funny and is very good at speaking with different accents: Scottish, South African, Irish, French …I think I’m in LOVE ….again! lol
He was telling us about his work for the BBC, such as the Great Escape and he’s off to Ireland soon for his next project. We should have him on one of the GLUG liveaboards!

Hi All,

Hope you all well and will be able to help.

I’m looking for a good international Diving insurance for the coming year.

Thank you

Manu

the dive season is rapidly aproaching

any one fancy joining Corrine and david  to practice dive skills in chepstow 21st March?

Corrine and i are planning to meet @ 10am

all welcome

better here than in the sea!!

Hi Guys and Gals,

Just a reminder that the monthly meeting is this Tuesday at the Phoenix!

As well as socialising, I’d like to get the Draft Constitution out there for you to see, so that any final adjustments can be made before putting it to the club to ratify it in April!

Hope to see you there!

Doug

Hello everyone, this post  is to invite you to my Professorial Inaugural Lecture on Tuesday May 18th at the Michael Chowen Lecture Theatre, BSMS, University of Sussex. The lecture is on scuba diving as ‘queer’, its culture, history and the experience of being underwater, lots of pictures! Here is the blurb:

Name: Professor Sally R. Munt

Title: QUEER AS FISH

Abstract:

Cultural Studies is passionate about the ordinary and the everyday. As an academic subject it encourages a mindful, reflective consideration of lived experience, which helps us grasp culture not so much as being about ‘the best’ but as a whole way of life, a spun worsted with all of its woven habits and rituals, dreams and banality.

Moments of creativity and intense sensation punctuate this flow, perhaps most intentionally with leisure pursuits. This lecture looks specifically at SCUBA diving. We will consider the histories, technologies, practices, literature, politics, and ecology of SCUBA in our brief encounter with the aquatic. Fully immersing oneself within oceanic wonder brings perspectives from the non-human sublime back to the surface. SCUBA divers are queer frogmen, freakishly enhanced cyborgs, clad in a cold neoprene skin, and disciplined by quasi-military rules of order, a necessary defense against the disorder of the deep, we descend into the paranormality of the sea.

Everyone is welcome, this is a public event.

I am planning on buying my first dry suit in a few weeks – my local dive shop stocks scuba pro and seems like the Everdry 4 at about £600 or the Fusion for £1,000.

Would appreciate any advice on benefit of spending the extra or not! plus any other products to consider,

thanks,

Peter.

Hello,

I am in the process of putting together a long weekend in Malta! Just wanted to see if anyone else would like to join us.

I am taking over some brand new divers to complete their open water courses, but I intend to do some deep wreck dives too, so all in all there will be something for everyone. Any training can be arranged including deep, wreck,  advanced - just let me know what you would like to do, or you can just come along and dive in the lovely Malta, training is totally optional. There will be 2-3 instructors on each dive, so if you are still new, we will keep a good eye on you while you gain experience.

I have about 6-8 people on the trip so far, so let me know if you want to come along asap. Prices is still to be fixed, but provisionally it will be about £450 + flights/training, I will be finalizing that in the next few days, the more we get the more I can haggle…. If you wish you can stay longer, just let me know and i’ll sort that for you as well.

The dive centre also do free Nitrox for those qualified, so we can get you qualified in the UK beforehand if you are not already.

A bit about the diving:
 
The water in Malta is very clear and very blue! There are some phenomenally beautiful wrecks to go and visit as well as some lovely shore dives and interesting underwater topography. The water should be nice and warm by June meaning a 5mm suit will be adequate.
 
More information:
 
The dive centre we use is a friendly, well set up facility. The centre is just 5 mins walk from the hotel and also just round the corner from a nice pub where you’ll get 25% off all food and drink. Overall this should be a really good value trip with some excellent diving!

Ian

GLUG Training

7 days 7 nights on luxury Mermaid II starting and ending in Bali, Indonesia.
28 August to 04 September 2010

Organised by Rainbow-Scuba.com from Koh Samui, Thailand.  Full details on their web site.  http://rainbow-scuba.com/calendar/51/11-Komodo-Gay-Cruise.html

Plus several days exploring and diving in Bali before the liveaboard and trip to mystical Kelimutu volcanoes on Flores island after the liveaboard

The minutes of the February monthly meeting are now available online on the welcome page.

Additionally, all past minutes and agendas are also now available form a drop down section of the pink meeting panel on the Welcome Page. Just click ‘View all meeting files’ to reveal them.

Cheers

Mark
(Webmaster)

Anyone else going to the Dive lectures at the RGS (Royal Geographical Society) this evening – I’ll be in the bar, from around 6.10pm.  For anyone who doesn’t know me, that’s me on the right there, and that’s the shirt I’ll be wearing (it has the GLUG logo on it).

Neil.

It’s that time of year I’m afraid… time to update your GLUG profile!

Why? Well another year has passed so presumably the number of years you’ve been diving will be a bit more than before… and it’s good to make sure everything else is still accurate.

Particular things to note – the fields marked with an asterix are required, even if set to ‘not specified’ etc otherwise the changes will not be applied and lost. Please do take note otherwise you’ll end up making the changes twice, at least!

We have also introduced an Organ Donor field so members can indicate that they are registered as an organ donor or that you would wish your organs to be donated in the event of your demise. I know it’s not the nicest thing to think about but the field is there for those who wish to use it.

The new trips system will shortly gain the ability to supply trip organisers with selected details from your profiles for the purposes of running trips and this field will be one of those made available.

As I’m sure most of you are aware, the online database of members is now the only source of personal information – this removes the complexity and risk of errors from trying to maintaining two databases. We also no longer require new membership forms each year, it is therefore imperative that you keep your online profile updated.

There’s a link at the top of this post notification email which takes you to your profile, alternatively log into the site and visit the ‘members area’ and select ‘your profile’ under the ‘users’ heading. The update button is at the very bottom and don’t forget to consider making a public profile for the members only ‘members’ profile page.

As usual questions/queries… just let me know

Cheers

Mark
(Webmaster)

i want to go to the dive show and wonder if glug members are going as a group.

would be good to go along with someone/or more?

Open Water Course Part One £249 (March 13th/14th 2010)

Get your PADI scuba certification. If you’ve always wanted to learn how to scuba dive, this is where it starts. The PADI Open Water Diver course is the world’s most popular scuba course, and has introduced millions of people to the adventurous diving lifestyle.

This is the first part, the referral, it covers the theory and pool sessions, you can then go on to finish your course abroad or here in the UK. This course is filling up, so please be quick. I am scheduling others though, so get in touch!

Thanks,

Ian

Hi GLUGgers

On Saturday 20th of March we will be holding a BBQ (weather permitting) in Streatham!  Those of you that have been before will know the drill, but I’ll reiterate in any case!

Bring food for yourself, and food to share (not loads – as last time we ended up with tons of left over food)!  Please also bring something to drink – this could either be just for yourself, or to share around.

If you could register your interest, please do, and we’ll try to co-ordinate things!  http://www.glug.co.uk/trips-page

Fingers crossed for good weather!

Doug