Minetonka clean up dive

[jasondbaker]

We had a beautiful day for the clean up event once again. Many of us managed to walk away with a nice gift at the end of the event. Maynards provided good food. Mike, thanks for taking the lead with organizing the event again.

While the event is fresh in my memory here are my recommendations for next year:

1) Divers should hand the waiver forms to the boat captain (or some other representative) before getting on the boat. Otherwise the event coordinators have no way of knowing if all divers actually signed the forms. You could also use hand stamps, bracelets, etc.

2) It would be helpful to pre-assign divers to specific boats rather than the rush to find a seat. The coordinators could try to assign boats by team and fill in empty seats where necessary. We had 9 on our slow boat and the fast boat next to us had 4.

3) Each boat captain should be given a specific location (GPS coordinates) to take divers rather than a general list of locations. Keep it simple. The past two years our boat captains had no idea where to take us or deviated from the coordinators instructions.

4) It would be great if the locations were scouted out in advance to make sure there was a high probability of trash there. We had nine divers on our boat with no trash collected.

5) All boats should be equiped with working depth gauge. This isn't as important if you have charts and know where you are going. We ended up using a spool with a weight tied at the end to determine depth. Hey, it worked.

6) The t-shirt needs to have a dive flag somewhere on it so that it can take its proper place in our dive wear collections