The Down Under Dive Club (DUDC) is located in Melbourne on the sunny east central coast of Florida. Formed in 1984 by a group of enthusiastic divers, DUDC currently has about 100 members. Our mission is to promote safe, organized dive events, provide a social setting comfortable to everyone, and encourage environmental responsibility among the diving community. Our past dives covered the Atlantic ocean, from Georgia to Bonaire. We organize all types of dives: drift dives, wreck dives, shore dives, live-aboards, spring dives, and even shark dives! Our members include a diverse group of divers. There are men, women and kids, ages from 11 to 65+ with all certification levels from new Open Water divers to Instructors.
Meetings are held on the 2nd Wednesday of every month at 7:00 PM at the Indian River Lagoon House, Located just south of University Blvd. on US1 in Melbourne. Door prizes are awarded each month and we book a fascinating assortment of guest speakers. We invite everyone interested in SCUBA diving to stop by for some stimulating conversation, meet our group, and have some fun!
NEW YORK — The divers live in a windowless, pressurized chamber for
weeks at a time. They descend 700 feet — greater than the height of the
Space Needle — to toil for 12-hour shifts in dark, murky water.
Then
there's the helium they have to breathe to survive at such depths.
Their voices are so high support crews need to use a special recording
device to translate.
What's the point of this bizarre
subterranean life? Coming up with a way to save drinking water for New
York City, which is losing the equivalent of a small lake every day in
an enormous, aging, leaky tunnel.
About half the city's
water supply passes through the tunnel from upstate reservoirs. Of the
hundreds of millions of gallons that flow there every day, some 10
million to 36 million escape from cracks in a 45-mile stretch. Not only
is it a waste, the leaks create sinkholes and other problems at the
surface.
The city Department of Environmental Protection,
which oversees the water supply, has been aware of the leaks for
decades, but repair work is complicated and takes careful and extensive
planning, officials said.
The city began sending divers
down to the tunnel in mid-February to gather data that will be used to
develop a plan for repairs. The dive work is the first part of an early
stage that will determine the best way to fix the tunnel. The project
costs about $240 million and will take five years.
"There's
not a ticking clock on this, but it's important to fix because this is
50 percent of the water supply," said Emily Lloyd, commissioner of the
Department of Environmental Protection.
The city provided The Associated Press access to the project this week, offering a glimpse of the work performed by the divers.
The
endeavor requires six men to live in the specialized chamber — a tube
the size of a mobile home — for three weeks to get acclimated to the
change in pressure below ground. They breathe a mixture of oxygen and
helium, because the nitrogen in regular air is too heavy at 600 feet
and their lungs could not handle the pressure.
Man fatally bitten by shark off Bahamas identified
Monday, February 25 2008
By Andrew Ba Tran and David Fleshler |Sun-Sentinel.com
An Austrian man bitten by a shark while diving over the weekend near the Bahamas has died, authorities said Monday.
The man "passed away from his injuries sustained by a shark bite," said Coast Guard spokeswoman Petty Officer Jennifer Johnson. The victim was identified as Markus Groh, 49, a lawyer from Vienna,
according to Ken Smeriglio, an assistant in the Austrian Consulate in
Miami.
Groh was diving about 50 miles east of Fort Lauderdale on Sunday at about 10 a.m. when a shark bit him, according to officials. Groh had dove off the 70-foot Shear Water, which contacted the Coast Guard after the incident.
The blue commercial diving vessel is registered to Jim Abernethy's Scuba Adventures from Riviera Beach. The company offers shark trips to the Bahamas for enthusiasts and
photographers hoping to interact with hammerhead and tiger sharks,
according to its Web site. Operators for the company stir in fish and fish parts to "chum" the
water and attract the sharks, reads the itinerary. "Please be aware
that these are not 'cage' dives; they are open water experiences,"
states the Web site.
The Coast Guard dispatched a rescue helicopter, and its crew hoisted
the man off the boat and flew him to Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami.
In a brief telephone interview, Abernethy said he felt terrible about what happened.
"Right now my heart and soul is with his family," he said.
Abernethy said he couldn't talk further because he was busy with Coast Guard investigators.
MIAMI (AP) — A diver has died after being bitten by a shark off the coast of Florida.
The Coast Guard says the man died Monday at a hospital in Miami.
A Coast Guard statement said the victim was
attacked while he was diving off a commercial boat about 50 miles east
of Fort Lauderdale.
The shark involved in Sunday's attack got away before anyone could identify the species.
Coast Guard officials said the man was 50 years old but they did not give his identity.
Underwater Text-Messager Makes SCUBA Diving Safer
Sunday, January 13 2008
If there are any of you out there who are avid scuba divers, then
we're sure you're well acquainted with the dangers and difficulties
that go along with such a hobby. Most difficult of all when exploring
what lies beneath the waves is maintaining a line of communication. So
UTC (Underwater Technology Center) has developed the Underwater Digital
Device or UDI.
The UDI is a wrist-wearable diving computer
that not only keeps logs of your dive, but also allows you to
communicate with other divers and your boat. The UDI uses 2-way
text-messaging, over a distance of up to 500 meters (or about 1,640
feet). There is no keyboard, so divers send any of 14 preset messages
("Watch out for that shark!") Over the same range, the devices can also
be used as homing beacons so divers can find their boat.
There
is also an SOS beacon which functions at up to 1000 meters (almost
3,300 feet) letting other divers and the boat know you're in trouble.
The SOS beacon can also be activated remotely, so if your buddy looks
like he's in trouble, you can activate his SOS beacon for him. And with
an estimated eight-hour battery life (assuming one message being sent
every four minutes), this thing won't die right in your moment of need.
We caught a glimpse and got some hands-on with two of these
underwater wrist gizmos this morning at the Cherry Picks demo-fest this
morning and thought they could be useful and fun for us if we ever
actually go scuba diving.
Though the UDI was announced back in October, it seems to have been
virtually ignored by most outlets, so we're writing about it now, since
it looks like it's finally shipping at the price of $1,500.
Divers Break Record for Longest Cave Passage
Saturday, December 22 2007
Brian Handwerk
for National Geographic News
December 17, 2007
Completing the longest dive from one cave opening to another, divers on a treacherous 20-hour journey proved that vast underwater networks in Florida are linked.
Jarrod Jablonski and Casey McKinlay dropped into a small cave entrance called Turner Sink on the afternoon of December 15 and dove to a depth of some 300 feet (91 meters). They then swam through 7 miles (11.25 kilometers) of underground freshwater cave—enjoying what McKinlay called "an incredible ride"—before resurfacing the morning of the 16th at Wakulla Springs State Park near Tallahassee, Florida.
It took the pair over 6 hours to complete the two-entrance cave traverse, and more than 14 more to gradually decompress before surfacing. But they did more than set a record. Working for the Woodville Karst Plain Project, the divers swam for the first time through the state's Wakulla Springs and Leon Sinks cave systems. Scientists had already proven that the caves were connected earlier this year.
The project aims to map the Woodville Karst Plain, a 450-square-mile (1,165-square-kilometer) region that stretches from Tallahassee to the Gulf of Mexico. "This seemingly isolated [Leon Sinks] sinkhole in the middle of the woods is hydrologically connected to this incredible cultural and environmental resource that is Wakulla Springs," McKinlay said.
"It's difficult for people to connect one to the other, but that's what we'd [hoped to] symbolically prove."
Longest Cave
The Leon Sinks cave system—which divers with the project have explored for nearly 20 years—is the longest underwater explored cave in the United States and fourth longest in the world. It's also part of a massive liquid labyrinth that is a critical groundwater resource for much of northern Florida.
If there are any of you out there who are avid scuba divers, then
we're sure you're well acquainted with the dangers and difficulties
that go along with such a hobby. Most difficult of all when exploring
what lies beneath the waves is maintaining a line of communication. So
UTC (Underwater Technology Center) has developed the Underwater Digital
Device or UDI. 
Brian Handwerk