.  Home  Newsletter 14 - Spring 2005
HD News Huatulco Miscellaneous Guest Comments & Photos Previous Editions 
 Hurricane Divers News
New Rental Cameras We now have three underwater cameras for rent. We finally decided to get them after repeated requests by many of our divers. They are Reefmaster RC cameras, made by Sea Life. They are 35mm cameras, rated to a depth of 50m/164ft and very easy to use. They have a viewfinder and an extra Macro Lens you can put on and take off underwater. We provide them with batteries and a 400 ASA film with 24 exposures. .
 New Compressor
We also bought a new compressor in May. It´s the same make and model as the first one we bought and still operate, a Bauer Junior. This means we doubled our filling capacity and all the parts are the same, as well as the filter, which makes maintenance nice and easy. Besides that we, now have a spare compressor in case we need to repair one, which otherwise would close us down for the duration because we have to get parts etc. from abroad. We bought Charlie´s air bank as well, so we can fill tanks immediately if required and when it's busy we don´t need to fill tanks until midnight anymore! .
Brochures After more than 5 years with black & white brochures, we finally had color brochures printed. Not only did we have them printed on nice paper, we were also able to use photos. Because of the space they take up, we did two different versions, one in English and the other in Spanish. .
 Snorkels & Caps
Snorkelers, and divers for that matter, often don´t like the idea of using a snorkel that someone else used already. Well, if you come snorkeling with us you don´t need to worry about that anymore. We now have new snorkels that we give to you in their original plastic wrapping, so you know you´re the first to use it and you can keep it! They have our name and website printed on them, so it´s also a nice little souvenir. The logo you see on the left is a negative of the normal one; the blue in the logo is light grey, so we can use it on a blue background. To try it out we had some navy blue shorts for our staff embroidered with this logo and it came out really good. In the near future we´ll have navy blue caps embroidered with it, which will be for sale in our dive shop. .
 Diving with one leg
Carlito suffers from cancer and had his right leg amputated because of complications with his illness a few years ago. His dream had always been to learn diving and Hurricane Divers made that dream come true last January. You see him in the photo with Nata, who was his Instructor for the course. Obviously it´s not as easy as with two legs, but once in the water Carlito was in his element and completed all the course requirements without mayor complications. He is now a proud PADI Open Water Diver and is thinking about doing the Advanced Diver Course! .
 High Season
The high season we just had was the busiest ever. From November until May we had a charter flight coming in from Denver and boy, did we get a lot of divers from the Denver area this season! Did you know that Colorado has the highest amount of certified divers percentagewise of all the 50 states? It seems strange, but I believe it after this season. There were more tourists around in general and we went out more times and with more divers and any other high season so far. Many people took my advice to book well in advance for the two weeks around Easter because we were pretty much fully booked by February. Springbreak was also in March, which contributed as well to March being the best month we ever had!
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Yesterday, 17 May to be exact, we had a team from "Azteca" filming a dive outing with us. This will appear in a program on Azteca (a Mexican broadcast company) on channel 13 (here in Mexico) starting in July. It´s a program about travel and is adequately called "TV Travel". They´re doing a feature on Huatulco and the activities you can do here.
Staff News In the photo on the right you see Roberto, Brian, Natanael and, in the front, Luli, who started working for us recently. She is from Argentina and, for those of you who know him, she is the sister of Rodrigo (the one from the Dublin). She´s manning the dive shop for us, attending the customers and maybe we´ll teach her diving one of these days! Brian finished his courses with us and is now back in Canada where he is working for a rafting company in the summer. He´ll probably be back in the winter to take another course with us. At the moment we have Didier, from Holland, taking his Rescue and Divemaster courses with us. He´s preparing for a carreer in diving as a PADI professional and may take his Instructor Course with us as well. If you are interested in making your hobby your living, check out GoPro!  . New in Our Website: We now have most pages available in a "Printer Friendly Version". No photos or images and the text is smaller and in black and white. Click on the link at the bottom of each page and you´re ready to print! We now issue a "Weekly Huatulco Weather Report", including diving conditions and hurricane activity over the last week, see Huatulco Weather ..
 "A Day Like Today": May 2000
Five years ago in May, we became the very first DAN Partner in Dive Safety in the whole of Mexico! Although DAN is thinking of discontinuing this program/recognition, we´re still very proud of that fact. And don´t think for a minute that after five years we´re not as fanatic anymore; it´s still "safety first" here at Hurrican Divers! For more details on the DAN Partner in Dive Safety program/recognition, go to DAN PDS .
 Diving Huatulco
Sorry for bothering you again with a picture of a giant Manta Ray, but they´re always impressive to see and over the last half year we´ve seen them very regularly. This photo was taken by Chad, in Santa Cruz Bay, at the dive site we call "La Morena", around the corner from "La Entrega". It stayed around for practically the whole dive and we were able to get a real good close-up look at it! Like I mentioned in the previous Newsletter, there are now up to 10 sea horses around regularly in Maguey Bay and lately we find some at Violin Beach as well. The stingrays that visit us every winter were around much longer than normal, even now in May we still had hundreds around at "El Chelo". By now most of them are gone though.... We can´t complain about the water temperature this past winter season, most of the time it was around a comfortable 25°C (80°F). We had very few thermoclines and very few divers needing a full suit. By now it´s back up to 30°C (90°F) and it´ll stay like that until December. Even the visibility was pretty stable over the last few months, in general we had between 10m and 20m (30 to 60ft.). There were very few days that it was any less than that. The one day that Pauline decided to come for a dive for the first time this year it is was actually pretty bad, maybe 2m (6ft.) at most, but the next day it was nice and clear again! Some days we had some cooler water coming in and that normally brings in the clear water as well, we had some occasions with over 30m (110ft.) viz. for a couple of days. We now issue a "Weekly Huatulco Weather Report", including diving conditions over the last week, see our Weekly Huatulco Weather Report .
 
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HD News Huatulco Miscellaneous Guest Comments & Photos Previous Editions
 Huatulco News
Apart from the fact that there were quite a lot of people around and the fact that Huatulco is slowly developing over the last year, there´s really not an awfull lot to write about. The charter flight from Denver seemed pretty succesful, we´ve had a lot of people round from Colorado and in general they were positively impressed with Huatulco. Let´s hope the flight continues next year and brings lots of people again! Same goes for the direct flight from Houston, more and more people seem to discover that they can fly here through Houston, without having to go through Mexico City. The weekend of 30 April and 1 May the annual fishing tournament for Sailfish took place again in Santa Cruz. Many participants went out, but not many Sailfish came back this year. Like the last few years, it was a local fisherman taking home the pick-up truck that was the first prize. An interesting (and relatively new) website with lots of info about Huatulco, a message board, photo archives, etc. is Huatulco Paradise Another site I "rediscovered" is Maps of Mexico. It has all kinds of maps of Mexico (some interactive), photo galleries and 360° cam shots. For example, they have a map of Huatulco (by the way: Playa Bocana should be way over on the right) and by clicking on the appropiate icon you can see three different 360° shots of the Santa Cruz Beach: Huatulco .
Hurricane Season The Pacific Hurrican Season has started and yesterday (19 May) the first hurricane named "Adrian" made landfall in San Salvador. It´s extremely rare for a tropical storm or hurricane to turn landinward in this region, normally they take off in a northwesterly direction (in the direction of Hawaii). NOAA´s outlook for the 2005 hurricane season predicts a season with "below normal" hurricane activity. They predict 11 to 15 tropical storms (average is 15 to 16), with 6 to 8 becoming hurricanes (average is 9), and 2 to 4 becoming major hurricanes (average is 4 to 5). Anyway, the start of the hurricane season means that we will be no cruise ships coming to Huatulco until October, they mainly go to Alaska and Hawaii in the meantime. For more on NOAA´s 2005 outlook and up to date info about tropical storms and hurricanes in the area, go to National Hurricane Center We now issue a "Weekly Huatulco Weather Report", including hurricane activity over the last week, see our Weekly Huatulco Weather Report .
HD News Huatulco Miscellaneous Guest Comments & Photos Previous Editions
 Miscellaneous
PADI Introduces the eRDP PADI recently launched something entirely new: an easy to use electronic version of the worlds most popular dive table, the Recreational Dive Planner (RDP). We already knew the table and the wheel version, this is a third format of the RDP. It provides the same maximum dive times, surface interval information and pressure groups as the RDP table version. It allows planning of single and repetitive dives. The eRDP is not a computer, but a specialized calculator and is not submersible, but will resist a little moisture. It comes with an attached "Rules for Use" slate, an "Instructions for Use" booklet and a normal battery that can be changed by the user. You can switch it to Metric or Imperial. Source: www.padi.com
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Headaches and Diving Reading an article about headaches and diving in the Alert Diver magazine from DAN (it also appeared in the Undersea Journal from PADI recently), I noticed there was one particular cause of headaches that was not mentioned: dehydration. I´m not a medical doctor or physician, I´m merely speaking from more than 15 years of experience working as a diving Instructor in the tropics and in my opinion it is one of the major causes for headaches occuring while diving or after a dive. Obviously the tropics is an area where you mainly deal with tourists coming diving and I think most people don´t realize how much the climate affects your hydration level. Just because of the hot climate you already need to drink much more fluid (water, fruit juice, Gatorade, etc.) than you need to at home. On top of that there is the (often) higher than normal alcohol intake and on top of that the diving, which dehydrates you even more. The combination of the three, or even two of those factors causes massive dehydration if you don´t drink a awful lot of fluid. I´ve experienced dehydration myself while diving and for me it was like a "tight" feeling in my temples, especially when equalizing (that´s the warning signal) and sure enough, after the dive I ended up with a headache. So, if you´re on a diving holiday in the tropics, make sure you drink, drink and drink! You should drink at least 4 liters (a gallon) more per day than you´re used to, have a water bottle with you all the time and drink it. And no, that nice cold beer that tastes so good in the heat, does not hydrate you, on the contrary!
To view the DAN article about headaches and diving, go to www.diversalertnetwork.org Note: I´ve been in touch about this with DAN and they agree with me. They´ll publish the e-mail I sent them in the "Alert Diver" of September/October 2005! . 
New Records for Mandy-Rae Last April the Performance Free Diving Team was in Grand Cayman attempting to achieve new free diving records, and they did! During this event Mandy-Rae successfully achieved a depth of 50m (164ft) in the discipline of constant ballast no-fins where athletes swim down to and back from depth without fins. In addition she also set the free immersion world record to 74m (243ft) where athletes pull down to depth and back without fins. Other members of Team PFI achived the following records: Martin Stepanek successfully achieved a depth of 80m (264ft) in constant ballast no-fins and made the last record attempt of the event, reaching 136m (447ft) in variable ballast. In variable ballast athletes ride a weighted sled to depth and then swim and/or pull back to the surface unassisted. Dr. George 'Doc' Lopez, joined Mandy and Martin in Cayman for his second year and successfully achieved a US National record of 61m (201ft) in Variable Ballast. Mandy was in Huatulco in 2002 to record an ESPN program about freediving and to attempt to break the world record in static breathholding. Source: www.performancefreediving.com .
 Tsunami Aftermath: Help Needed!
Andrew Hewett, the owner of Adventure Club in Tonsai Bay on Phi Phi Island, is in charge of the project called "Phi Phi Tsunami Dive Camp", which is funded by donations from private people from all over the world as well as Project AWARE. The objective is to clean the beaches and reefs which have been littered with everything you can imagine. Andrew has now built his own air lift to remove sand covering objects to be able to surface them. There is assistance from local dive operators and boatmen but it's a huge project and more hands are needed. On the island they need snorkelers and divers, with minimum 100+ dives experience, to help out. There is a need for two snorkelers to a diver. Without snorkelers it's an impossible task.
Please help to spread the word and raise the awareness that the post tsunami recovery work has just started! For more information contact: email: andrew@hidef.com
Source: www.projectaware.org through www.divenews.com Divenews.com now has a neat new feature: "Tropical Cyclone Data", check out their website!
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