Glug would like to welcome several new members who signed up for membership at Brighton Pride.  We’ll be in touch shortly with your registration details as soon as your application is processed.

For those visitors to our stand that are thinking about joining we’d like to remind you that registration is a mere £5 for the rest of 2008 and if you sign up before August 31st, you’ll be entered into our Mares Prize Draw to win a pair of Mares fins worth £100. Have a browse through our site or if you have specific questions please use the Contact Form to email us.

To join us, you’ll need to download a GLUG Membership Application Form

Could this be you?

At the club AGM, we failed to fill the position of Publicity Officer for 2008. Kirk, who has done a great job of organising the GLUG Pride stall for the last 2 years (maybe 3? I can’t remember!), has had to step down, due to other (very worthwhile!) commitments.

If there are any GLUG members who would like to volunteer for the post for 2008, please let myself or Chris know.

What does it involve?
The main task for the Publicity officer is organising the GLUG Stall for the Pride Events. Although as yet we haven’t agreed which Pride events we’ll be going to this year, we regularly go to London Pride and Brighton Pride, and have been to Cardiff Pride in the past. Your task will be to liaise with the Pride organisers (Wilde Ones for London and Brighton Prides), to reserve a stall; and to organise club volunteers to man the stall on the day. It’s not a huge amount of work, but it can be frustrating at times, since the Pride Committees rarely agree on what their fees will be for community groups until a few weeks before the event.

The second task is to handle any email queries which we receive through the website form titled “Press/Advertising enquiry”. We occasionally get emails from organisations such as the Pink Paper, Attitude, GaydarRadio etc. It’ll be your job to respond to these, or bring them to the committee’s attention as appropriate.

Finally, if you want to be a little more proactive, then you could think up ideas which would help publicise the club and increase our membership - e.g emailing Gay or Dive publications to promote GLUG events.

As part of the change to Standing Order subscriptions, and ongoing website improvements, all GLUG members who renew their subscription this year will be required to re-register on the GLUG website, with a new Username (different from the one you currently use).

When we get your completed Membership Form and Standing Order Mandate, we’ll send you an email containg a link to a Registration Page, and a password, which you will need in order to complete the registration. The registration page will allow you to choose your own Username, and will ask for some mandatory information (including Dive Qualification, Contact Phone number, and Next of Kin details), as well as some optional information (alternative contact number, Number of Dives, and a Picture). Once you have successfully registered, you’ll receive another email, containing your password. This can be changed from your Profile page (as can all the other information), once you log into your account.

Note that by default, the Username you choose will be displayed on any posts you make on the Public website (but again, you can change this on your Profile page).

The personal information collected will only be available to Committee members, and will never be given to Third Parties without your permission, but it will allow Committee members to contact you, should the need arise, without having to first go through the Membership Secretary.

Because we’re a non-profit organisation, and we only use your personal information for club-related activities, we are not required to Register with the Data Protection Registrar. However, we do take the security of the website, and the protection of your details seriously.

Any members who have already paid for their 2008 membership (whether or not by Standing Order) should receive an email within the next week or so, giving the Registration Link and password.

It was agreed at the club meeting last night, that all old accounts on the website will be deleted at the end of March this year - so if you haven’t renewed your membership by then, you will lose access to the Members area of the website.

Happy New Year!

Neil.

Yes, it’s that time of year again. Club membership runs from January to January, so that means that subscriptions are now due for most members (there are a few who have already paid for next year).

At the last AGM, it was agreed that the club would require all members to pay their subscriptions by Standing Order from now on. This means that instead of sending a cheque with your membership form, you will need to fill out the Standing Order Mandate that’s included in the file, and send that with your form instead. The club will record your details, and send the Standing Order mandate on to your bank. (NB: Please don’t send the Standing Order form direct to your bank - we need to see it first!)

It also means that next January, and each following year, the club will automatically be paid the £10 membership fee, and will renew your membership. This means less work for the Membership Secretary, and less work for club members in the long run.

If at any point you decide to terminate your membership, you just need to contact your Bank to cancel the Standing Order (although we’d appreciate it if you could let our Membership Secretary know you’ve done so). Your membership will then continue to run until the end of the year, but will not be renewed.

So, if you haven’t already paid for next year, please download the 2008 Membership Application Pack, print, and fill out both forms, and send them to the Address on the form.  If you can’t open the file, then you need to install the Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Note: When filling in the date of the initial payment on the Standing Order Mandate, please leave two to three weeks from the date that you post them to GLUG, to allow time for the form to get to us, and from us to your bank.

If you are unsure whether you are already paid up for 2008, or you have any questions about the Standing Order process, please contact Allan - either via the link on the GLUG Contacts page (if you’re logged in), or by using the Contact Form page.

Portsmouth - July 2004
by Neil

This was GLUG’s first trip to Portsmouth, and was a success, despite problems with suit failure and seasickness.

Peter, Lian and myself arrived on Friday evening, and after sampling the local chinese restaurant, and Portsmouth’s gay nightlife (which seemed predominatanly lesbian!), we arrived at the dive shop bright and early the next morning.

After a brief introduction, we were off to the jetty - right on the eastern tip of Portsea island, where we found “Buccaneer” waiting for us. We “outed” ourselves almost at once, since after introducing ourselves as GLUG to the skipper, the other divers naturally wanted to know what it stood for. I’m pleased to report that it didn’t seem to make the slightest difference to anyone - everyone was very friendly, and we had no problems at all on that front. David Jones, who runs Triton Scuba explained that his dive shop club “doesn’t do politics, bigotry, or prejudice” - and one of the benefits of running it as a dictatorship is that anyone who does has their membership instantly revoked.

Dictatorship….hmmmmm…..must remember to investigate that one….

Anyway, back to the diving: The boat is a Lochin 33, recently refitted. With 12 people on board, it was cosy, but not cramped. Unfortunately, although the weather was sunny, the storms of the previous days had left the seas rather rough, and poor Lian soon started to feel the effects of seasickness.

After just over an hour, we arrived at the first wreck, the Camswam. This was a British steamship, lying in a depth of 18m, in Sandown Bay. It collided with another vessel, and the wreckage is now spread over quite a large area.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see any of it, since I managed to tear the neck seal on my drysuit while putting it on! Peter and Lian reckoned that it was a nice enough dive, though, with about 4-5m visibility - not spectacular, but considering the storms of the previous week, not too bad.

The dive did little to calm Lian’s seasickness, and the poor guy spent most of the rest of the day huddled in the corner of the foredeck with a towel wrapped around him, looking miserable.

The second dive was the Luis, which is a Merchant Steamship, close in to the cliffs, near Shanklin Pier. With both myself and Lian out of action, Peter managed to buddy up with one of the best-looking guys on the boat, Dan, and they managed to snare a lobster, and put it in Peter’s goody bag… which Dan then dropped during their ascent!

Lian had arranged to go to see The Full Monty at the theatre in Southampton that evening (where were our tickets?!), so Peter and I were left to our own devices. After a pleasant curry, we decided that, given the limited eye-candy on offer in Portsmouth, we’d head over to Southampton ourselves, and investigate some of the bars there. Armed with a copy of Gay Times, we set out to discover the Southampton gay scene. First stop was Bar Fusion…closed, with a notice in the window about an application for a license. Undeterred, we went to “The Edge” - this was a building on a corner with all the windows blacked out, neon signs, and music so loud that we could hear it from inside the car. I ventured as far as the door, and handed over some GLUG leaflets for them to display, before beating a hasty retreat.

Ah well, never mind, still two more bars to try…and so we ventured into the Hampshire Ram. Far more of a traditional pub…in fact, rather too much like a traditional pub. Although there were a couple of queens in there, there were also a group of decidedly straight guys, and a small group of elderly men and women. Were we in the right place?

There was loud music coming from upstairs, and so we ventured a look, hoping that perhaps this would turn out to be the “gay section”…but no, it turned out to be a Black club. We concluded that this was no longer gay, and sallied forth again (by now with Lian, who had returned from The Fully Monty), to try the final bar: “The London Hotel”.

Finally! We’d discovered a decent gay bar, with at least some eye candy. Quite a traditional pub feel, but with a small stage, music that was loud without being deafening, decent beer, friendly bar staff…I wish there was somewhere like it near Battersea! Unfortunately, by now it was ten to 11, so we just had time for one drink before it was time to go. We did manage to hand over another stack of GLUG leaflets, though.

Sunday dawned grey and damp. David at the dive shop had found me an XL 7mm wetsuit & shorty to wear, and refused to take payment for either that or for our air fills! As we arrived at the boat jetty, the heavens opened, and we loaded the boat in the pouring rain.

The sea, however, had subsided since the previous day, and the rain soon stopped. Lian had found seasickness tablets, and looked considerably happier!

First dive of the day was on the Cuba, a 476? long passenger liner, which was torpedoed by a U-boat in 1945. I had no idea how much weight I would need, never having dived in a 7mm wetsuit before, and consequently when I jumped in the water, I discovered I was rather underweighted, managed to let go of the shot line, and then had to leave Peter & Lian hanging onto it while the boat dropped off the other divers, then came and retrieved me, and dropped me back (with extra weight) at the shot. At this point, I discovered that Lian’s weight belt had slipped, and half his weight had dropped to the bottom, so he had to abandon the dive before it had started.

Peter and I descended through the gloom, to the wreck, which was lying at about 30m. It was pretty well broken up, but there were lobsters a-plenty. If only we’d had a goody bag! We stuffed a couple in our BC pockets anyway, and Peter spent half the dive clutching a third - which led to some interesting underwater acrobatics on the ascent! Visibility wasn’t great, at around 3m, but we had a good dive anyway.

The second dive was back on the Luis - one of the problems with the Solent is that if you want to dive wrecks, there are very few that can be dived more than an hour either side of slack water. The Luis is one of these, being tucked around a headland, and therefore subject to unusual tides. There are drift dives that we could have done, but the others on the boat (who were different to the previous day) wanted to do another wreck, so the Luis it was.

Lian had managed to find some spare weight, and so we jumped into the water, and started our descent…only for me to find that I couldn’t equalise! I abandoned the dive, and the other two carried on. They didn’t manage to find Peter’s goody bag, and the visibility was only about 2-3m, but they both seemed to enjoy it anyway.

Despite only getting one dive in, I thoroughly enjoyed the weekend. The Dive Shop was great - very helpful, and seemed to be there through a genuine love of the sport, rather than just looking to make a fast buck. The skipper, Pete, was excellent - he’s actually a very experienced diver too, and has dived some of the deeper wrecks (we’re talking 70m!) in the Solent, and obviously knows most of them like the back of his hand. Everyone was very gay-friendly, and I would definitely recommend the weekend to anyone.

Many people seem to have forgotten that the GLUG membership year runs from January to January - as yet only around 30 people have sent their renewal fee in.

If you want to renew your membership this year (and we hope you do!), then please download the Membership Form, and set it with a cheque for £10, payable to “GLUG”, to the address on the form.

You can also pay by Bank transfer, rather than Cheque. If you want to do this, you must make sure that your details as shown on your Profile page are up to date. Please send an email to our treasurer, Alan Larsen (email details on the GLUG contacts page), who will provide you with the bank details, and what you need to put as a Reference for the transfer. (You could also set up an annual Standing Order with your bank to pay the fee automatically each January!)

Please note that those who haven’t paid by the next club meeting on April 3rd will lose their access to the members area of the website, and will not be able to register for club events.

Also, if you’ve booked onto a GLUG dive, but haven’t sent us your membership fee, then from April 3rd, we may cancel your booking, if there are other paid-up members waiting to join the trip.

Finally, if you’re not planning to renew your membership this year, please email us and let us know why - it’s always good to have feedback, even if it’s negative!

Divers Training

GLUG is a Dive Club, rather than a Dive School, but because of the rising number of training enquiries, we have now appointed a committee member to help you to find the right training. Although his role is aimed at new divers, qualified divers are also welcome to ask for information about further qualifications - just go to our Contact Form, and select “Dive training” from the list of options.

GLUG welcomes members from all diving organisations, although the majority of our members seem to be either PADI or BSAC qualified. We therefore aim to offer easier access to training with these two organisations, however we can also offer advice about training with other organisations such as NAUI, SSI, and SAA.

Choosing a Dive Organisation

We’ve put together the following table to compare some of the features of PADI and BSAC, to help you choose:

BSAC training in the UK

GLUG offers at-cost training through our own BSAC branch, Dorothy Divers. Training sessions are run at a London Pool, subject to demand. For more information, please send an email via our Contact Form (choose “Dorothy Divers” from the drop-down list). We also would be able to suggest a BSAC club near to where you live (out of London divers).

PADI training in the UK

We don’t currently offer Basic PADI Dive training here in the UK. For Divers who are looking to gain further dive qualifications, one of our members, Scott, can offer PADI Advanced and Speciality courses lasting 2-6 days depending on the course. Course prices start from £160 per person. For more information, please email us using the Contact Form.

If you have any questions regarding which training agency to use, once again please contact us using the Contact Form and our training co-ordinator will get back to you.

Training trip

Subject to demand - we will organise a training trip to an overseas destination, which together with a warm climate and sea water will make an ideal way to begin diving.
If you’re interested in such a trip, please send us an email via our Contact Form (select “Dive training”).

Fred Wynn

BSAC OWI 5374/PADI OWI 494460

GLUG AGM agenda 9 December 2006

Drinks from 4.00, AGM starts at 5.00.

Venue: Konditor and Cook, 46 Grays Inn Road, EC1X 8LR

1. Apologies for absence

2. Minutes of AGM 2005

3. Matters arising

4. Officers’ reports:
o UK dive coordinator
o Treasurer
o Membership secretary
o Publicity officer
o Webmaster
o Equipment coordinator
o Dorothy Divers

5. Membership subscription 2007

6. Election of officers:
o Chair
o Vice-chair
o Treasurer
o Membership secretary
o UK dive coordinator
o Webmaster
o Publicity officer
o Equipment coordinator
o News coordinator

7. AOB

8. Date of next meeting 7.30 pm Tue 9 January, Konditor and Cook, Curzon Cinema, Shaftsbury Avenue

Please let Debbie know before 2 December if there are other items you would like added to the agenda.

There are still spaces available for the weekend in Swanage. Would be suitable ideally for PADI Adv/BSAC Sports, but possibly a few less experienced too (depending on the number of instructors/dive leaders signed up). If interested please e-mail me at membership@glug.co.uk. Cheers! P.S. Scapa is great!!!

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Chair

Name: Chris Lee
Years with club: 2
Dive Qualification: PADI Advanced / BSAC Sports Diver
Years diving: 5
Nitrox qualified?: Yes
Warm or Cold Water?: Both
Favourite Dive Destination:Thailand
Occupation:Education Project Manager
Places on my diving “wishlist”: Cocos, Scapa Flow (Scotland in general), Farne Islands
Favourite Dive types:Drift, Large Marine Life, Small Marine Life
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