As well as all this, we will have some ex-rental gear available to look at and purchase. Fins for $20, wetsuits from $50, BCDs from $50, Dutch Auction on a set of regs!! Limited club t-shirts for $30. Don’t miss the opportunity to get geared up for Semester 2!

When? 6pm, Wednesday 28th July
Where? Engineering Building Rm 3.401, Auckland Uni, Symonds St.

Meetings provide a great chance to meet other members, ask for advice and relax and have a beer. See you there!

NEXT WEEK’S CLUB MEETING – Deep Wreck Adventures by Dr Simon Mitchell
Dr Mitchell is a world renowned technical diver. He began diving in 1972. His diving primarily involves the use of rebreather technology to explore shipwrecks at extreme depths. Simon is an anaesthesiologist and diving physician. He has devoted much of his career to diving medicine and has treated more than 400 cases of decompression illness. He recently co-authored the second edition of “Deeper into Diving” with John Lippmann and co-authored 2 chapters on decompression illness in the most recent edition of Bennett and Elliott. He is a previous Vice President of the Undersea and Hyperbaric Medicine Society (UHMS), and Chairman of the Society’s Diving Committee.

We are very privileged to have Simon talk to us. He is an entertaining and enlightening speaker. He is regularly flown to dive conferences around the world to speak to audiences who have paid a lot to be there. Next week you can hear him for free. Simon is such a great speaker that even non-divers will be entertained by what he has to say… bring your mates along. As with all our meetings, you don’t need to be a member to come along – the more the merrier!

We offer PADI Open Water courses, dive trips, freediving, spearfishing, a club boat, gear hire, club meetings, deals with shops, advice, underwater photography, buddies, wicked social life and advanced diver training… all at fantastic prices.

If you’re a keen diver, or you’ve always wanted to dive, join us and start enjoying life below the waves. No experience is necessary as we provide the cheapest PADI Open Water dive course to get you started. From there you can come on one of our many trips around New Zealand. We look forward to seeing you underwater soon.

Photo / APN

What caused the death of Moko the dolphin remains a mystery after a post-mortem, the Department of Conservation (DOC) says.

Boat strike and drowning through net entanglement had been ruled out as potential causes in a report released today.

There were no obvious signs of extensive bruising or skeletal fractures, making blunt trauma an unlikely cause of death, and no usual signs of drowning were present, Massey University pathologists said.

The pathologists were “unable to establish cause of death due to post mortem decomposition”, the report said.

Read full article from The New Zealand Herald.

World-first footage of orange roughy swimming at extreme depths near Chatham Rise could be worth millions of dollars to New Zealand’s fishing industry.

Orange Roughy

Often frightened by human technology, it is difficult to capture images of the scaly swimmer.

“I believe this is the first time we’ve seen orange roughy at depths of 30, 50, even 70 metres above the sea bed,” said voyage leader Richard O’Driscoll.

Orange roughy is big business, with last year’s exports totalling $51 million. Scientists now hope the footage, taken at almost 900 metres below sea level, will help keep better track of fish numbers.

In the past, scientists have had to estimate the orange roughy population. However, the new footage will help fisheries officials make more accurate predictions about numbers, which will be important for setting fishing catch limits and quota.

The success of the experiment has been helped by a bit of Number 8 Wire-thinking, with six Sony cameras on moorings being dropped into the sea.

“All our cameras were actually just Sony Handycams, (the sort) that you can go to your camera shop and buy,” said O’Driscoll.

See the world-first orange roughy footage here

Scuba dog

KUSA – It’s no big deal to see dogs hiking out on the trail or up a Fourteener. Dog owners like to take their dogs with them on whatever hobby they have.

Seeing a dog in scuba gear, now that’s a little unusual. But, a scuba diver in Russia made it happen.

The diver had a special suit made up for his dachshund, Boniface, known as “Bonnie” for short.

The dog is wrapped up in the wetsuit, then a large mask surrounds his head and is sealed off to prevent water from coming in and to allow oxygen to flow.

It’s hard to hear, but the photographer says little Bonnie did start whining once he was submerged, so his owner took him out.

By Dan Boniface, www.9news.com

Dave holds the current NZ records in both disciplines of dynamic apnea.  The current NZ record in dynamic apnea no-fins is considerably greater than the world record but because there were no international judges present his amazing 232m swim did not count.

In 2010 Dave wants to push out both records right here in NZ.  The proceeds from the sale of these t-shirts goes towards financing that attempt.

A major study of the king crabs from the New Zealand, Australian, and Ross Sea regions has just been completed, finding a total of 23 species and almost doubling the number of previously known species from the area. Dr Ahyong has described five exclusively from New Zealand, five from Australia, and four common to both regions.

“There are 23 king crab species in this part of the world, and only about 30 species of king crab in the entire Atlantic Ocean,” says Dr Ahyong. “I know of a few other new species around New Zealand, but the specimens are too damaged to do describe – so the number we actually have is already an underestimate.”

Read the full story from NIWA.

The discovery Saturday of a gray whale swimming in the Mediterranean Sea off Israel has been labeled by Robert Brownell, a prominent cetacean researcher, “the most amazing sighting in the history of whales.”

Alisa Schulman-Janiger, fromthe American Cetacean Society, said the sighting was "the equivalent "of finding a dinosaur in your backyard - it was that unbelievable."

The discovery Saturday of a gray whale swimming in the Mediterranean Sea off Israel has been labeled by Robert Brownell, a prominent cetacean researcher, “the most amazing sighting in the history of whales.”

Alisa Schulman-Janiger, who runs a gray whale census and behavior project in Southern California for the American Cetacean Society, said the sighting was “the equivalent “of finding a dinosaur in your backyard–it was that unbelievable.”

To be sure, scientists are perplexed as to how the gray whale might have traveled from the Pacific to the North Atlantic–the most likely entry point to the Mediterranean–where the species is believed to have been extinct for about 300 years.
Among questions being asked is whether – if other gray whales also have gained or will in the coming years gain access to the Atlantic–this could mark the beginning of a re-population effort by a species not encountered in the region since the late 17th or early 18th centuries.

Brownell, who works for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, believes it could if the consensus among scientists is accurate that a diminished ice cover in recent years in the Arctic region, where the eastern North Pacific stock of gray whales feeds during the summer, has provided pathways to the Atlantic.

“We’ve had other strange sightings, like narwhals from the U.K. or Japan, but those are still within the same ocean basin that they’re known to occur in,” Brownell said of Saturday’s sighting. “So they’re unusual but not as unusual as something showing where it had once gone extinct.”

The 40-foot whale was spotted more than a mile beyond Israel’s Herzliya Marina, close to Tel Aviv, and followed and photographed for two hours by scientists from the Israel Marine Mammal Research & Assistance Center. They initially assumed it was a sperm whale because, like gray whales, it lacked a dorsal fin. But the mammal was later positively identified as a gray whale.

While the news has not yet been widely reported, it has generated a buzz of excitement among scientists and conservation groups.

Erich Hoyt of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society blogged on Monday: “Discounting the possibility of the Panama or Suez canals, I suggest that the Northwest Passage is the most likely entry route. In August, 2007, it was announced that the Northwest Passage was nearly ice-free for the first time and these conditions continued into the summer of 2008.”

To be sure, gray whales could not have survived in the North Atlantic unnoticed for 300 years, so it’s universally agreed that this particular whale hails from the eastern North Pacific stock–the only viable population of gray whales, numbering about 19,000 animals.
These whales are renowned travelers; they feed during the summer in the Bering and Chukchi seas, and migrate each winter more than 5,000 miles to mating and calving grounds off Baja California, Mexico.

To reach the Atlantic by means other than an Arctic route, they’d have to either swim through the Panama Canal or continue another 8,000 miles to the south and round Cape Horn at the bottom of South America.

Scientists have discounted both possibilities. That leaves the Arctic route, either an easterly Northwest Passage journey across the top of North America, or a much longer westerly voyage across the top of Russia.

Brownell agrees the former journey represents the most likely scenario and adds that gray whales in the Atlantic might have historically come from the Pacific stock.

Historically there were three distinct populations of gray whales–the eastern North Pacific stock; the North Atlantic stock, and the Korean or western Pacific stock.

The western Pacific stock is critically endangered and might number fewer than 100 animals.

The North Atlantic population probably became extinct in large part because of hunting during the whaling era. Fossil records have shown that gray whales utilized both sides of the Atlantic. They probably shared a common northern feeding ground and fossils have been found as far south as Florida.

It is not known what the whale was doing in the Mediterranean, when it entered the Atlantic or whether it was the only gray whale to have strayed into that ocean. But from now on, scientists will be on the look out for more of the same species.

30$ for the new club spearos t-shirt with embroidered spearos logo!

If you want one of our latest club Tees, send an email with the size and color you want to spearfishing@akunidive.com!