But Indian Valley Scuba still has three more weekends to spend there before we put the virtual cover on the pool for the winter.  And this weekend was a great one to enjoy at the local pond, with 55 degree air in the morning, warming up to nearly 80 each day.  The water is still great, at 75 degrees down to about 40 feet, so the diving is as good as it can get there. 

Both Saturday and Sunday saw some huge IVS crowds there, enjoying the return of Bev to the grill, cooking up some beer-steamed chicken, fresh Amberjack from North Carolina, and the usual menu of dogs, burgers and salads.  Team IVS does eat well, that is for sure!

Congratulations to Jarod Rodgers, John Zyskowski, Brenden Malloy, Brad Creveling, & Rob Lunny, on completing their Advanced Open Water certifications this weekend. 

John Glodowski, lead designer on the IAHD back-mounted scooter, was on site both days tweaking the development of our third generation scooter, designed specifically to allow handicapped divers with little or no use of their legs to be able to motor through the water alongside the rest of us.   This is a phenomenal product that opens up the sport of scuba diving to so many of our less-than-able-bodied friends.  Make sure you stop by the shop and check out the IAHD scooter.

It’s that time again, time to visit our favorite local water-filled hole, Dutch Springs!  And we did it this weekend, in spite of hurricane/tropical storm Hannah raining on our parade!  We were hammered by the weather today with up to 6 inches of rain falling in the area, but did that slow us down?  Not one bit!

The IVS crew sailed into the eye of the storm, without a moment’s hesitation, cause we heard the call of the quarry (and also cause we didn’t hear the call of Key Largo or some other palm-tree filled place this weekend!).  Our team headed in early on Friday to set up the road show tent and secure our space for the weekend, and we are glad they did, cause it was hopping there!!  Amazing with the weather how busy it was at Dutch this weekend.  Our gang showed up bright and early, with the typical myriad of classes to complete, fun dives to take, great barbecue to enjoy, and friends to meet.  All good!

Our own Ray Graff and Richie Kessler manned the grill this weekend, and although the’re not Beverly, it sure beats cold cereal for lunch!  Realistically, both Ray & Richie are great on the grill, and no one walked away hungry.

As usual there were lots of revelations this weekend, but perhaps the most telling was Julia Tate, remarking when our own Aussie staffer Rob Tenille slipped off his drysuit  - “wow, you are completely dry!’.  Hmmmm, did we miss something here in our open water class, Ms. Julia???? 

We want to welcome Tom & Crystal Colleran, Rob, Don & Janet Filson, Ian Matthews, and the lovely Ms. Julia as our newest PADI National Geographic Open Water Divers!  Way to go team!   And as always, not only did our divers complete their open water certifications, they also earned the PADI Peak Performance Buoyancy and Coral Reef Conservation specialties.

We also want to congratulate Art Poontang & Steve Holak as our newest PADI Advanced Open Water divers.  Nice job guys!

Overall we had 32 members of the IVS dive family out with us over the weekend, and it just keeps getting better, with several new faces joining us from North Jersey and New York, and more of our local divers making the switch to the IVS brand of Kool-Aid.  We’re all about diving, training & having a great, safe time while doing it, and it shows in every one of gatherings!  We’ll be back in two weeks to dip our toes into the near-balmy waters here again - hope to see you there!

Dave West, Robin Valicenti and I responded to the 4:30 a.m. alarm and traveled down to Belmar, NJ for another great day of diving aboard the Venture III.  We could not have asked for a more perfect day to sail out to sea - the sun was bright, the sea was calm, and the company was great!

Our first site was the Algor shipwreck.  This was an Andromeda class attack transport built by the U.S. Navy.  This class was also known as a “Victory Ship”, although often incorrectly referred to as a Liberty Ship.  It was one of a series of Navy transports named for stars; Algol is a star in the constellation Perseus, also known as the Demon star.   Originally constructed in 1943 in Oakland, Calif as James Barnes , it saw service in a number of conflicts, the most recently being the Vietnam War.  It is a large wreck measuring 459 ft x 63 ft, with 13,910 displacement tons, and a registered crew of 429 crew, including embarked Marines.  It was sunk as part of the NJ Artificial Reef Program on November 22, 1991, and sponsored by the Federal Aid in Sportfish Restoration group. This intact wreck sits in 145 ft of water, with the upper decks accessible as shallow as 70 ft.   This was a great intro-to-reel work dive for Robin, who quickly learned how difficult it is to multi-task with reel, depth, wreck and dive to deal with.   Good start, a nice dive with viz in the 40 plus foot range.  We ended up with a 130 ft dive for a 50 minute run time.

The Algol was a Navy transport ship that had a long and successful service career from World War II to the Cuban Missile Crisis. After lying in the mothball fleet at Norfolk for some twenty years, she was transferred to the New Jersey Artificial Reef Program and sunk with little fanfare, unlike the much-hyped ( and not much bigger ) Spiegel Grove in Florida.

This is the largest vessel yet used in the New Jersey Artificial Reef Program, and ranks as one of the largest vessels ever used as an artificial reef anywhere. She is also the largest vessel of any kind sunk in this region, excluding the Andrea Doria, and narrowly edging out the San Diego in tonnage.

The Algol is completely intact, upright, and huge. It would take several trips to fully explore it, without doing any penetrations. A good dive can be had on this wreck at almost any depth you want, from the top of the superstructure at 70 ft to the main deck at 110 ft to the sand at 140 ft. Since its sinking, currents have scoured out a hole around the hull that is significantly deeper than the 125 ft of the surrounding area.  The cargo holds are also quite deep, but are filling up with silt.

Since it was sunk as an artificial reef, considerable effort was put into cleaning and opening up the Algol before it was sunk. All windows and doors are removed, as well as the cargo hold hatches. As a consequence, there are many areas that can be penetrated easily, including much of the superstructure and the cargo holds. Because of its multi-level nature, the Algol is often used for advanced training dives.

No part of either the hull or the superstructure has even begun to collapse yet - even catwalks and railings are solidly in place. The superstructure is like a large three story building. The smokestack has been removed, leaving an ugly teardrop shaped scar which can be used to orient yourself. The fat end of the teardrop points toward the bow, and the narrow end points toward the stern. At the bow and stern, paired tubs for anti-aircraft guns are still evident. There is a large hole into the hold in the port-side hull near the sand below the superstructure, where a hull plate has fallen away.

Our second location was the Klondike Rocks site.  All along the coast there are natural rock formations in the otherwise sandy or muddy bottom of our underwater environment. The Shrewsbury Rocks are the largest and most well-known of these; the Klondike Rocks further south are similar but lower. Many others are not clearly defined, but are listed as “lumps” or ‘ridges” on fishing charts.

The Artificial Reef Program has greatly augmented the natural hard bottom of the region with millions of tons of dumped rock from construction and dredging projects.  These low outcroppings appear in small to large patches over a two mile area called the Klondike, and elsewhere, at depths ranging from 60 to 90 feet. The overhangs, crags, and holes afforded by the piles of rocks and boulders provide excellent homes for fish and lobsters. Visibility can be great here at times, but today it was in the range of 10-20 ft, mostly due to the silty bottom in most places. It’s easy to get lost here, so it was another dive for the reels to be employed to make sure we had our “breadcrumb trail” to get home. 

This site proved productive as we ended up with four nice bugs in the bag, and I missed a monster that had to be at least 10 pounds!   Our profile for this dive was 81 ft for a total run time of 60 minutes.  Bottom temp was in the 54 degree range, but we were toasty and warm in our Whites and DUI drysuits!

What a perfect weekend for the IVS gang to enjoy at Dutch Springs!  Beautiful sunny weather, humidity just right, and the conditions at our favorite local watery hole were excellent!  Head Instructor Butch Loggins, assisted by Instructor Ray Graff, treated our newest divers to another great seven dive checkout weekend - yes, that’s 7, and yes that’s about double what everyone else does.  Would you expect anything different from IVS?

This weekend, in addition to all the regularly scheduled fun, we also brought along our Aeris Compumasks for everyone to demo.  This is a great product, allowing divers to operate thier instrumentation in a truly hands-free mode, with the in-mask lighted display showing depth, time, tank pressure, and more - essentially all the data that you would see on the Atmos AI dive computer, without the heed to pick the device up to see it.  Absolutely perfect for photographers and night divers, it reduces the task loading by bringing all the key information you need and want right up to your eyes.  And, it’s fully Nitrox programmable, and downloadable to your desktop computer via a cable.  Interested in trying one?  We have demo units in stock at the shop - just ask and we’ll hook you up! 

And from a gastronomical point of view, we welcomed Bev Loggins back on the grill, bringing her special flare for making a simple BBQ weekend all that much more for our group.  The grill was ‘a-smoking, as the burgers, dogs, sausages and steaks were prepared to everyne’s delight.  Plus the spread of munchies, snacks, fixin’s, salads and desserts are an IVS trademark at Dutch Springs.  

We want to welcome our newest PADI National Geographic Open Water divers, Rebecca Moore, Linda Malloy, Jamie Winchester, and Brad Creveling into the Indian Valley Scuba family. They completed their Open Water certification, Peak Performance Buoyancy Specialty, and the National Geographic Specialty programs this weekend.  Way to go guys!

Rounding out Team IVS this weekend were DM’s Frank Gabriel, Bill Zyskowski, Csaba Lorinzcy, and DM candidate Chris Rich, along with …………………..

This weekend found us back at Dutch Springs for a rare back-to-back engagement with our friends from Halcyon Manufacturing.  The mission for this weekend was Halcyon Days Product Demo, and demo the product we did.  Backplate systems, wings of all shapes & sizes, new canister lights, and the rest of the entire line of fine Halcyon products were out and available for test-diving in the getting warmer-by-the-minute waters of Dutch Springs.  We enjoyed the company of the great Halcyon team, with renowned underwater explorer and founder of Halcyon and Global Underwater Explorers, Jarrod Jablonski on hand to answer questions, talk product, and provide a great Saturday evening presentation of some of the projects he and his team have recently been involved with.  Jarrod was supported by Ken Charleston and Sonya Tittle.  We were proud to be a part of the demo and honored to be one of the select delaers chosen to represent the Halcyon line.

And while all that demo’ing was going on, we were diving too!  This weekend found us graduating a new flock of PADI / National Geographic Open Water IVS divers, with Philip ‘Batman’ Nelson, Alberto & Chris Zeledon, John Zyskowski and Mike Gelatej joining the IVS family.  And we saw Lauren Halvorsen and Joe Bates working on Advanced Open Water, and Paul Stanton and Holly Germana completing thier Dry Suit Specialty course.  IVS Instructor Ray Graff was our guest chef this weekend as we gave Bev a couple of days off, and he he did a fine job representing the ‘B’ Team in the kitchen!  He even managed reached deep into his tofu recipe book to grill up some vegen burgers for our guests, Jarrod and Sonya! The great news is that Bev will be back in two weeks, so come back out and compare!  

Lead instructor Butch Loggins was assisted this fine weekend by Ray, DM’s Frank Gabriel & Bill Zyskowski, DM candidates Donna Raleigh, Jenna Murray, and Chris Rich, and the usual cast of supporting characters.  This is one of the most beautiful aspects of how the Indian Valley Scuba crew dives, as a ‘village’, with so much support and guidiance for everyone.  No egos, no BS, no conflicts - truly no one dives alone with IVS!

As usual we were joined by a bevy of friends and fellow diversand their families, and the laughter and fun continued all weekend long!  Be sure to mark your calendar to join us again the weekend of July 25-26 when we’ll be demo’ing the Aeris Compumask HUD display!  See you then!

It’s America’s birthday, and what better way to spend it than by enjoying the freedom to dive all weekend! So that’s exactly what we did, spending all three days at Dutch Springs!

Friday morning found us enjoying some summer showers as we arrived on site and set up the IVS camp.  Big tent, big grill, big banners - the way we like things here!!  The morning was a very quiet one at Dutch as it seemed most were home enjoying the holiday with family and not diving.  As a result, the viz was 50 plus feet right from the docks, and we took advantage of that all day long, enjoying five dives and completing a lot of Advanced Open Water requirements for Megumi Woltermann & Rob Lunny.  We were joined by Csaba Lorinzcy, Damian Chojnowski, ………..(name others)

Saturday morning dawned and the IVS crowd descended upon Dutch!  We had 13 Open Water Divers completing their checkouts, half a dozen Advanced Open Water, a DSD or two, and some specialty work also.  Lots and lots of organized chaos all day long, highlighted of course with the lovely Beverly’s fine cooking, which included some special wild boar and venison steaks today!  Another five dives on a lovely summer day, and every tank in the truck and trailer went back to the shop empty!  As the day came to an end, the gang helped pitch the cozy little love shack of Bev & Butch, who were spending their first night camping under the stars at Dutch Springs.  Truly worthy of an episode on World’s Funniest Home Videos, the team disregarded all written directions and had the tent assembled in only, oh, four or five tries!   

Sunday brought more of the same hectic activity and even more fun diving than Saturday, and we want to congratulate our newest PADI / National Geographic divers, Scott & Tom McClennen, Ria Lanning, Lauren Halvorsen, Alex, Brian & George Lauderback, Amy Stewart, Angela & Alyssa Tate, Chris Hebdon, and Kellen Thomas.   Also congrat’s to our newest Advanced Open Water Divers, Randee, Joseph & Kerri Bates.  One productive weekend for sure!  We’ll be back next weekend as we demo our line of Halcyon dive gear - look for us on the peninsula side.

Our intrepid group of pillaging wreck divers headed down to Belmar, NJ again today to visit some more of the thousands off wreck sites off the Jersey coast.  What a most beautiful day greeted us, blue skies, bright sunshine, flat seas, and of  course the great Venture III crew!  Today’s group consisted of Csaba Lorinczy, Donna Raleigh, Rob Lunny, Mike Noble, Jenna Murray, John Glodowski and myself.   We met a few other regulars on the boat and we (well at least six of us) prepared for our scheduled 8 a.m. departure.  Finally our group was intact and accounted for (no names mentioned on the sleeping beauty) and we headed out to sea.

Our first stop was the Cranford, a 200 ft. long x 44 ft. wide former ferry boat owned by the Central Railroad of New Jersey, and sunk in 1982 at a depth of 70 ft.  This was part of the very succesful NJ artificial reef program.  There was a bit of current running at the surface but not enough to cause any undue concern.  We splashed in, and headed down into the peasoup-ish like waters, expecting a nice improvement in visibilty once we got past the thermocline.  Well, good viz was clearly not in the cards for us today, and the dark green murky waters were the same from top to bottom.  Thank goodness for the quality wreck reels we had purchased from www.scubagearplus.com !  It was however, a very good first taste of Jersey wreck diving for Rob & Jenna, who came up smiles and laughing after the experience. 

Second on the list was the Spartan, a large steel hulled commercial tugboat, built in 1957 and sunk in 1986.  This 85 ft. long x 23 ft. wide intact wreck is covered with fish and life, and proved to be a nice dive, in spite of the continued poor viz.  Bottom temps of 54 degrees at 68 ft. were tolerable.  The gang managed to bring up copius amounts of fresh mussels from this wreck.

Finally, we hit dive number 3 for the day, an Indian Valley Scuba signature when out on the Venture III.  Todays stop was the Northeast Sailor, which essentially is remains of a large, unidentified sailing ship. The absence of towing bits is an indicator that this was probably not a schooner barge, while the presence of a boiler and steam machinery place the vessel in the mid to late nineteenth century.  No other information is known about this mystery wreck, sitting in 70 ft. of water.  It does, however, contain lots of holes for lobsters to hide in, and we managed to bring quite a few on board today!

If it’s Wednesday it must be time to go….Diving!  And that we did, heading out to sea today on the Venture III, captained by the always great Ruth and Paul Hepler.  Located in Belmar, NJ, the Venture III is convenient to hundreds of dive sites off the mid-jersey coast.  Our group today included Donna Raleigh, Dave West, Andrew Roebuck, our secret diver who we’ll refer to as “SK”, John Gladowski, and myself.  We headed out and visited three sites today, starting with the Golden Eagle wreck, a fishing vessel that went down in a storm in 1936.  Sitting intact and just a little worn after 70 years under the sea, it is a nice wreck to visit and explore, covered with sponges, mussels and life.  Loads of fish call the Golden Eagle home, so it is always a busy place.

After a short surface interval, thanks in part to the quantity of diveable wrecks in the area and the short distance between them, and also because of the advantages gained by diving with computers, we found ourselves moored to the fisherman’s barge, a rather non-descript 150 ft long steel barge that sank upside down in 78 ft of water.  The viz had really deteriorated in this area, probably down in the 15 ft range, so exploring much off the main wreck was clearly a ‘reel’ challenge.  

Finally, it was time to turn up the heat and put all those spearguns and bug bags we had brought along to good use, so we headed over to one of the many rock piles in the area, and dropped in for our third descent of the day.  Viz was better by a bit, and the water temperature was clearly a tad cooler on this site.  The dive proved productive all around with black sea bass, lobsters and mussels making the final ascent of the day with us, to head home in our coolers!   We’ll be back in two weeks for more of the same! 

This weekend Indian Valley Scuba hosted the second annual Whites Drysuit Demo Days at Dutch Springs.  A more beautiful weekend could not have been asked for, with clear blue skies and 90 degree sunshine all weekend long.  An enthusiastic crowd greeted the demo day crew as soon as the gates opened each morning.  All day long we had divers suiting up and testing the latest drysuits from Whites.  The event was headed up by Eric Connery and John Stella from Whites, two experts in the field of drysuit technology and evolution.  Plenty of great information and technical knowledge was shared by the two of them with a very receptive crowd. 

Indian valley Scuba is the #1 Whites dealer in the area, and it showed with the support we brought to this years event.  There were fifteen IVS instructors, AI’s and DM’s all working the booth, helping get divers into their Whites drysuits and into the water to try them out.  The major hit of the event, hands down, was the exciting new Fusion suit by Whites.  This suit truly represents cutting edge technology in shell suit design, with an ultra-flexible inner liner and a protective outer wrap providing unprecedented mobility and range of motion for divers of all shapes and sizes.  No other drysuit manufacturer offers a similar product, but you can be sure their spies were among us, checking out the suit, its features and how everyone who tried one raved about it! 

Look for us to be back with more Whites Fusion drysuits all summer long as Indian Valley offers FREE Demo Days at Dutch throughout the 2008 season!

Today Indian Valley Scuba had the distinct honor of hosting the first ever Discover Scuba Diving program at the 42nd annual SCOPE Jamboree held in Furlong, PA.  This event, held each year between Boy Scout and Venture units in the Bucks County, PA and Toronto, Canada areas, brings approx 600 scouts and scout leaders together for a three day camping, educational and cultural exchange event. 

Team IVS team (Randy Rudd, Donna Raleigh, Tom Rebbie & Csaba Lorinczy) met at the shop at 7:00AM to carpool up with the IVS truck and trailer to the Boy Scout camp in Furlong.  A quick stop at the local Wawa for some Mountain Dew, to ensure the team would be up to dealing with the flood of teenage boys, and we arrived at the camp just after 8:00AM.  Doug Ellis (our chief organizer) and Steve Clem met the team at the pool, where we parked the trailer for the day. “How is the temp Doug?” we yelled out looking at the outdoor pool. “Don’t know …. Don’t want to know … but it’s COLD” The water was later measured to be 65 degrees. “Anybody has some extra 7 mil neoprene?”  

The Scout leaders greeted us with enthusiasm. “Everybody is so excited that you guys are here, we never had scuba at the camp. Thanks for coming, here are the signed waivers.” And they handed us a stack of 2-inch thick folders with over a hundred signed waivers. We took inventory in the IVS trailer, scratched our heads a bit than shrugged our shoulders … “Not to worry, everything always seems to work our in the end with IVS events”.

 Csaba set up the DSD video system in the cantina, Donna took control of all the waivers, while Steve, Tom and Randy started to assemble dive gear by the pool. Doug coordinated the arriving troops and leaders.  We were somewhat relieved when only 45 kids showed up to watch the Discover Scuba Video. While the scouts watched the video, Donna sorted and confirmed each waiver. Doug had arranged the scouts into groups of 8 and everybody got their time slot when they have to show up at the pool. We had Steve, Doug and Randy dress in full neoprene and take position in the pool, while Donna, Tom and Csaba providing support from the “shore” helping divers in and out and managing equipment.

The first group with 8 Venture girls at 10:15, who had a great Discover Scuba session and were very exited to be in the pool with IVS, didn’t even care about the frigid water temperature. They wanted more. The next session started at 11:00, and continued with eight new divers jumping in every 45 minutes all day long.  Some of the boys and girls loved it, some gave it a try and said “This is just not for me … but I tried.”  Lunch was served in shifts during the sessions to keep the team’s energy up. We were served with a great camp lunch of burgers, hot dog and funnel cake.

The afternoon went fast with full sessions right until late in the day.  A few older scouts enjoyed one-on-ones with our scuba instructors and took advantage of the open dive-slots that were available later in the day.Everybody enjoyed the opportunity to breath under water, no matter how cold it was. Even when all completed their class, the 3 girls from the first session and 2 other boys from the later sessions came back, got back in the pool and just wanted more … more  … more. We know how that is, that’s how we all got into diving. Randy and Steve stayed in the pool a bit longer where the kids starting to do skills of mask flooding, regulator clearing and buoyancy control.