Tomorrow night's speaker is Jon Council who has been a fixture on Catalina for many years. Jon founded and runs the Avalon History of Diving Museum (ground floor of the Casino) as well as he's the go-to guy on Catalina for Marine Animal Rescue. Jon's vast diving resume has taken him all over the world in varied environments and to top all of that off, he's also the current president of the Historical Diving Society USA.
Our original intent was to have Jon talk about his world-record circumnavigation dive of Catalina (52 miles in 23.5 hours) but work has pulled him away to Atlanta, GA, and he doesn't have access to his files for that dive.
Instead, Jon's going to share with us his experiences working over the years with NASA in training astronauts for various missions. As you may know, NASA uses the underwater world to simulate space conditions in their training. Specifically, Jon's going to take about the NEEMO project, which stands for NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations. This project sent astronauts underwater to live for weeks at a time in the submerged Aquarius, the world's only underwater research station, as preparation for future space missions. (You can find out more about Aquarius here:
NASA AQUARIUS.)
This a Zoom meeting which will also stream through FaceBook Live on the Reef Seekers FB page. For those coming through Zoom, if you join before 7:30PM, you'll be placed in the "Waiting Room" and we'll let you in at 7:30. We are limited to 100 people on Zoom. If the Zoom room fills up, go to the Reef Seekers FaceBook page for the live stream. If you have problems, call me directly at the number below.
Here's the Zoom link. Hope to see you tomorrow starting at 7:30PM. Q&A will follow the talk and we should be done no later than 9PM.
- Ken
