This years event included local divers, photographers/videographers and one of the hosts of Deep Sea Detectives. The evening opened with a few words from our esteemed LIDA president Steve Burke and then handed off to the Master of Ceremonies, local diver, Stephen Martino.
The first presenters were Art Nelson and F. Allan Vogel with their videos "Jersey Underwater & Ocean Medley. These were a series of videos of the local aquatic life off the shores of New Jersey taken while freediving. These videos really demonstrated the amazing amount of sealife right off the New Jersey shores and how close you can get when you aren't blowing tons of bubbles.
The second presentation was Pete Nawrocki and "It's All About The Toys". Pete showed his images of the past 30 years of ocean and cave diving, the early equipment, and it's progression over the years. It's hard to believe that people actually dove, and dove deep, with the archaic and make shift equipment our sport started out with.
The third presentation was Glenn Butler, the director of Nassau University Medical Center Hyperbarics. He showed images of the facility and talked about the services provided by his department in recompression and hyperbaric medicine. All of us hope we never have to oblige him of his services but it is an interesting part of medicine that is particularly important to the dive community.
The final presentation was given by local diver and one of the hosts of History Channels "Deep Sea Detectives" Richie Kohler, assisted by Evan Kovacs, director of underwater photography for DSD. They both talked briefly about their histories of diving and their roles in DSD. Then they presented a video, scenes cut from the previous seasons of DSD highlighting some of their great discoveries. They finished off with vignettes cut from the upcoming season of DSD including a teaser of a special DSD to air in February 2006 of an exploration they were invited to do of the HMS Titanic!
Before they were done, the question was raised about a movie adaptation of the book Shadow Divers. Yes, it is being done and expected to hit the theaters in 2007. Richie hinted that his character was going to played by Danny DeVito. hahaha
All in all, another great evening of amazing images and videos both locally and from around the world.
Long Island Dive Association
Edited by CaptSaaz, 02 December 2005 - 08:24 AM.
