Who says winters need to be long and cold in the northeast? They certainly don’t need to be when you have Indian Valley Scuba in your neighborhood! We love to dive and we love to travel, so it goes hand in hand that we love to travel to dive!
This weekend saw 29 IVS divers head south to sunny Key Largo, where we enjoyed 14 dives on the reefs - yes that’s right, 14 dives in three days! Lots of great reefs, shallow wrecks, deep & exciting wrecks such as the Duane and Spiegel Grove, and two night dives! What an exciting way to avoid the big snow storm that headed east this weekend.
With instructors Butch Loggins, Bill Zyskowski, Csaba Lorinczy and IVS-South Instructor & Spiegel Grove tour guide extradinaire Dave Hartman, plus Assistant Instructor Felix Gryn, and DM’s Rich Peterson and John Glodowski, our team heralded 8 new divers into the Indian Valley Scuba family - Lyn, DJ & Jessica Swartley, Cindy Eisenhauer, Cynthia Spitalny, Alex & Wendy Lepore, and Stephanie Rees all earned their PADI National Geographic Open Water Diver certifications, along with Peak Performance Buoyancy, Coral Reef Conservation, and Boat Diver specialty certifications. Congratulations to each of them!
Additionally, we had Keith & Nate Beaver, along with Jim Swartley, completing their Nitrox cert’s. Rounding out Team IVS for the weekend was Sylvia & Niki Lorinczy, Jim Dahlberg, Brian Montague, Tim Brown, Rob Lunny, and DAN Auction Winner Sharon Gill from Connecticut. Sharon was the successful bidder on one of the Key Largo trips that IVS donated to Divers Alert Network as part of their annual fundraising auction. Welcome to the family, Sharon!
The weekend found us with three great days of weather sandwiched in between two lousy weeks of Florida winter weather, so once again the scuba gods were smiling on us! And a very special congratulations to Ms Niki Lorinczy, who single-handedly took home the coveted “A.D.D.” award! That’s ” All Dives with Dave!” Three days, 14 dives, almost twelve hours of bottom time. Way to go girl!
The only sad news from this weekend was with Dave still nursing his cracked vertebrae & broken ribs (see the Boot Show blog entry!) there was no break-dancing allowed! Don’t worry, he’ll be back…with a vengeance!