Ken Kurtis
Contributor
Want to travel??? Upcoming 2015-2016 vacation trips:
• August 1-6 - Isla Guadalupe & Great White Sharks [ NOW $1,000 OFF - ONLY 5 SPOTS AVAILABLE ]
• August 13-20 (WEEK 1) - Isla Mujeres & Whale Sharks, cenotes, and statues [ SOLD OUT!!! ]
• August 20-27 (WEEK 2) - Isla Mujeres & Whale Sharks, cenotes, and statues [ A FEW SPOTS LEFT ]
• November 3-16 - Maldives on the Manthiri [ FILLING - ONLY 6 STILL AVAILABLE ]
GET MORE INFO ON ALL OF OUR VACATION TRIPS HERE: www.reefseekers.com/foreign_trips.html
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Lots of stuff happening now that Chamber Day is past . . .
EYEBALL REPORT - As many of you may know, I was scheduled for cataract surgery last Thursday. I'm pleased to say all went swimmingly. (BTW, if anyone else is in need of a fabulous ophthalmologist, I can recommend my guy - Dr. D. Michael Colvard in Encino - quite highly. I've been going to him for rover 30 years and he did my right eye cataract three years ago.) Cataract removal is the most common surgery performed in the U.S., with about three million eyeballs corrected each year. And it's fairly simple and painless. I went in around 9AM and was heading home around 11AM. You're awake during the procedure but not really aware of what's going on and there's absolutely (at least in my case) no pain or discomfort during the operation. And when they wheel you out, you can see pretty well, although you pupils are REALLY dilated (which is why you have to wear the funky Old Man Cataract Sunglasses for a day or two). While the eye heals, you need to limit some activities for a day, a week, or a month. In my case, the agreement I have with Dr. Colvard is no diving for eight weeks after the surgery. His concern is that he wants to make sure everything fully healed and sealed and that the eye can handle the extra pressures in the mask that comes from diving. (I had no issues with my right eye three years ago when I resumed diving.) He also told me he uses a different kind of incision and closing technique because he knows I dive. But one immediate thing you notice, and I realized this with my right eye when it as done, is how much brighter everything is. More to the point, you don't realize how yellowed your vision had become from the cataract. The other thing that's great, and which I didn't know until I had the first eye done, is that only will they remove the cataract, but they also implant a new lens that can correct your vision as well. I now have both my eyes a bit under-corrected which makes it phenomenally easy to read and use the computer and should make seeing things when diving (like my gauges or my camera readouts) easier as well. So overall, it's been a wonderful four days, except for the goofy-looking sunglasses.
SAVE $1,000 ON GUADALUPE - Hopefully that gets your attention. But we're very pleased to report that we've negotiated a deal with Nautilus Explorer to knock $1,000/person off of our August 1-6 trip down to Guadalupe Island on the Nautilus Belle Amie. What this is is actually the special they will be offering at the Scuba Show on some of their trips and they've authorized us to offer it for our trip as well. We've got five available spots for this but since we're sharing this trip with our friends at Ocean Adventures and they've got five as well, between the two of us there are ten. The discount drops the cost of the trip down to $2,595. This includes the diving, the 16% Mexican tax, some port taxes, transport from San Diego down to Ensenada, and the crew tip (another $300/person). You'll get three days of cage diving where you'll go nose-to-nose with these magnificent apex predators, as well as get up-close-and-personal with some of the biggest Yellowtail you've ever seen in your life. You're guaranteed a minimum of four submerged cage drops each day plus there are two surface cages (four divers per cage) that are always available on a first-come, first-serve basis. (Maybe "first-serve" is not the phrase to use when talking about Great Whites but you get the idea.) Last year I think I did 17 dives on our first trip, and one of those was close to two hours long. And I should point out that last year our August trip was also aboard the Belle Amie and it's the bigger/nicer/newer of the two boats as well as I thought we had more sharks on our August trip than we did in October. Bottom line is it's a great trip and a great time of the year to go and we'd love to have you join us. Give us a call at 310/652-4990 if you're interested in snagging a spot and saving $1,000.
SPEAKING OF CLOSE SHARK ENCOUNTERS - How this one for unusual? Dive guide Randy Jordan of Jupiter, Florida, conducts a daily dive where the are Lemon Sharks. Not that unusual. Except that, every day when he arrives, Jordan says one of the sharks comes over to him and "demands" to be petted and caressed before she'll let Jordan get the dive going. Pretty unusual and there's video to boot: Shark Swims Up To Divers Every Day Asking To Be Pet .
LOGGERHEADS IN SAN DIEGO - El Nino didn't live up to its billing this year in terms of the rain we were supposed to get but it may be living up to its potential for drawing warm-water animals northward. There are now reports of Loggerhead Turtles being sighted in the San Diego area. In fact, one aerial survey reported seeing around 200 of them. There was a report of a Whale Shark, there are some huge tuna being caught on the fishing boats, and there was a tuna crab stranding (those red crabs that look like mini-lobsters) last week in Orange County (Watch as red crabs cover the beaches of Orange County). So it's shaping up to be an interesting year and you literally don't know what you might see.
CLIMATE CHANGE AND RISING SEA LEVELS - While some may pooh-pooh the notion of climate change, it's happening right now in the Solomon Islands, where five small islands low-lying have now submerged. Other inhabited islands have seen the sea reclaim significant portions of inhabited land, forcing residents to move and make other adjustments. (This is a huge concern is the Maldives as well.) So this isn't something that might happened own the road. It's something that's happening now, and which will only get worse if we don't start taking steps to try to reverse this trend. Read more about it here: 5 Pacific islands swallowed by the sea - CNN.com.
THE SCUBA SHOW IS COMING - Make sure you mark June 4 & 5 on your calendars for the annual Scuba Show at the Long Beach Convention Center. It's pretty much the scuba industry under one roof and your chance to see all the latest equipment, get some deals from local dive shops who exhibit, check out travel opportunities, and hear speakers at various seminars. We'll be doing our annual "Why Diver Die" review of the fatalties of 2015 on Saturday at 4PM. I'll also be giving "Secrets of Fish ID" at 2PM on Sunday. Additionally, Bill Acker (Manta Ray Bay in Yap) and I are teaming up for a joint FREE presetnation about a special 10-day Yap trip that we're planning for July of 2017 which will include diving, manta ID classes, photo tips, island tours, and more. That one wil be Sunday at 11AM. Hopefully, we'll see you somewhere in LB over the weekend.
And that'll do it for now. Have a great week and let's go diving soon . . . but not for a few weeks.
- Ken
• August 1-6 - Isla Guadalupe & Great White Sharks [ NOW $1,000 OFF - ONLY 5 SPOTS AVAILABLE ]
• August 13-20 (WEEK 1) - Isla Mujeres & Whale Sharks, cenotes, and statues [ SOLD OUT!!! ]
• August 20-27 (WEEK 2) - Isla Mujeres & Whale Sharks, cenotes, and statues [ A FEW SPOTS LEFT ]
• November 3-16 - Maldives on the Manthiri [ FILLING - ONLY 6 STILL AVAILABLE ]
GET MORE INFO ON ALL OF OUR VACATION TRIPS HERE: www.reefseekers.com/foreign_trips.html
———————————————————————————————————————
Lots of stuff happening now that Chamber Day is past . . .
EYEBALL REPORT - As many of you may know, I was scheduled for cataract surgery last Thursday. I'm pleased to say all went swimmingly. (BTW, if anyone else is in need of a fabulous ophthalmologist, I can recommend my guy - Dr. D. Michael Colvard in Encino - quite highly. I've been going to him for rover 30 years and he did my right eye cataract three years ago.) Cataract removal is the most common surgery performed in the U.S., with about three million eyeballs corrected each year. And it's fairly simple and painless. I went in around 9AM and was heading home around 11AM. You're awake during the procedure but not really aware of what's going on and there's absolutely (at least in my case) no pain or discomfort during the operation. And when they wheel you out, you can see pretty well, although you pupils are REALLY dilated (which is why you have to wear the funky Old Man Cataract Sunglasses for a day or two). While the eye heals, you need to limit some activities for a day, a week, or a month. In my case, the agreement I have with Dr. Colvard is no diving for eight weeks after the surgery. His concern is that he wants to make sure everything fully healed and sealed and that the eye can handle the extra pressures in the mask that comes from diving. (I had no issues with my right eye three years ago when I resumed diving.) He also told me he uses a different kind of incision and closing technique because he knows I dive. But one immediate thing you notice, and I realized this with my right eye when it as done, is how much brighter everything is. More to the point, you don't realize how yellowed your vision had become from the cataract. The other thing that's great, and which I didn't know until I had the first eye done, is that only will they remove the cataract, but they also implant a new lens that can correct your vision as well. I now have both my eyes a bit under-corrected which makes it phenomenally easy to read and use the computer and should make seeing things when diving (like my gauges or my camera readouts) easier as well. So overall, it's been a wonderful four days, except for the goofy-looking sunglasses.
SAVE $1,000 ON GUADALUPE - Hopefully that gets your attention. But we're very pleased to report that we've negotiated a deal with Nautilus Explorer to knock $1,000/person off of our August 1-6 trip down to Guadalupe Island on the Nautilus Belle Amie. What this is is actually the special they will be offering at the Scuba Show on some of their trips and they've authorized us to offer it for our trip as well. We've got five available spots for this but since we're sharing this trip with our friends at Ocean Adventures and they've got five as well, between the two of us there are ten. The discount drops the cost of the trip down to $2,595. This includes the diving, the 16% Mexican tax, some port taxes, transport from San Diego down to Ensenada, and the crew tip (another $300/person). You'll get three days of cage diving where you'll go nose-to-nose with these magnificent apex predators, as well as get up-close-and-personal with some of the biggest Yellowtail you've ever seen in your life. You're guaranteed a minimum of four submerged cage drops each day plus there are two surface cages (four divers per cage) that are always available on a first-come, first-serve basis. (Maybe "first-serve" is not the phrase to use when talking about Great Whites but you get the idea.) Last year I think I did 17 dives on our first trip, and one of those was close to two hours long. And I should point out that last year our August trip was also aboard the Belle Amie and it's the bigger/nicer/newer of the two boats as well as I thought we had more sharks on our August trip than we did in October. Bottom line is it's a great trip and a great time of the year to go and we'd love to have you join us. Give us a call at 310/652-4990 if you're interested in snagging a spot and saving $1,000.
SPEAKING OF CLOSE SHARK ENCOUNTERS - How this one for unusual? Dive guide Randy Jordan of Jupiter, Florida, conducts a daily dive where the are Lemon Sharks. Not that unusual. Except that, every day when he arrives, Jordan says one of the sharks comes over to him and "demands" to be petted and caressed before she'll let Jordan get the dive going. Pretty unusual and there's video to boot: Shark Swims Up To Divers Every Day Asking To Be Pet .
LOGGERHEADS IN SAN DIEGO - El Nino didn't live up to its billing this year in terms of the rain we were supposed to get but it may be living up to its potential for drawing warm-water animals northward. There are now reports of Loggerhead Turtles being sighted in the San Diego area. In fact, one aerial survey reported seeing around 200 of them. There was a report of a Whale Shark, there are some huge tuna being caught on the fishing boats, and there was a tuna crab stranding (those red crabs that look like mini-lobsters) last week in Orange County (Watch as red crabs cover the beaches of Orange County). So it's shaping up to be an interesting year and you literally don't know what you might see.
CLIMATE CHANGE AND RISING SEA LEVELS - While some may pooh-pooh the notion of climate change, it's happening right now in the Solomon Islands, where five small islands low-lying have now submerged. Other inhabited islands have seen the sea reclaim significant portions of inhabited land, forcing residents to move and make other adjustments. (This is a huge concern is the Maldives as well.) So this isn't something that might happened own the road. It's something that's happening now, and which will only get worse if we don't start taking steps to try to reverse this trend. Read more about it here: 5 Pacific islands swallowed by the sea - CNN.com.
THE SCUBA SHOW IS COMING - Make sure you mark June 4 & 5 on your calendars for the annual Scuba Show at the Long Beach Convention Center. It's pretty much the scuba industry under one roof and your chance to see all the latest equipment, get some deals from local dive shops who exhibit, check out travel opportunities, and hear speakers at various seminars. We'll be doing our annual "Why Diver Die" review of the fatalties of 2015 on Saturday at 4PM. I'll also be giving "Secrets of Fish ID" at 2PM on Sunday. Additionally, Bill Acker (Manta Ray Bay in Yap) and I are teaming up for a joint FREE presetnation about a special 10-day Yap trip that we're planning for July of 2017 which will include diving, manta ID classes, photo tips, island tours, and more. That one wil be Sunday at 11AM. Hopefully, we'll see you somewhere in LB over the weekend.
And that'll do it for now. Have a great week and let's go diving soon . . . but not for a few weeks.
- Ken
