WELCOME to the first blog posting on The Greater Bellingham Dive Club! Although this name is not official, and is still subject to change i thought it was pretty clever (thanks Josh!) and will serve as a starting point. The point of this blog is just to relay information that was discussed at the club meetings and keep people up to date on information as it becomes available. This is by no means official, final, or the last word, but more my summery and general documentation of things. That being said, if you would like to add to the information presented, or correct me in anyway, DO IT! I would love help or any direction anyone has to give. BUT if i spell things wrong or I use poor grammar, let it go. So long as you can read it we are going to be okay.
A little background... (and i do mean a little, because seriously people we dont have all day)
This dive club has been the work of many individuals, and has been over a year in the making. Shout out to Ward, for pressing on and persevering when things seemed flaky, good work man! While the overall goal has yet to be truly and officially defined, there has been a lot of interest and basic foundation work done to encourage the building of a dive park in Bellingham. In fact, a possible site has been selected at the south east-ish end of Lake Whatcom. Discussion with the city or county or parks or whoever has been brought up and it sounds like they are just as excited about the prospect as us! It is a use it, or loose it type situation with the land so lets motivate and use it! (i know, i know, easier said than done). So what we are looking at is creating a non-profit/dive club/volunteer group/stewardship team/group of yahoos with a common goal that can dedicate some time and energy to this project.
Lots of interesting ideas and concerns were brought up at the meeting, but over all i think we walked away with a sense that the dive park was a big piece of the pie. There are lots of dive clubs out there that offer the social fluff (not to trivialize because i love social fluff), but the park is something that unite us and make this club something more. It is not a "dive shops dive club," and the idea is not be competing with dive shops/clubs that organized charters and group diving socials. It is an opportunity to be part of something bigger, longer lasting and very special, that we can pass on to the future divers of the greater bellingham area.
So now the next step is for us, the divers, to get serious (which has been the problem in the past). We need commitment, from our dive community, to get down to the nitty-gritty. There was discussion of a mission statement. We are definitely going to need one of those... So please everyone, come to the next meeting (at round table pizza in sunset square, Tuesday August 16th at 5:30pm for social time, 6pm official start time) with pens, paper and thinking caps! Some of the snip-its that were tossed around at the last meeting were:
To create an organization for the advocacy of diving and dive education in Whatcom County.
To develop a community of divers with a common goal of creating, maintaining and stewarding a dive park, or dive parks in our area.
We also need to define active rolls. nominate work parties that can take on different tasks such as researching permitting, legal obligations, environmental impact studies, mountains of paperwork... fleshing out this list! Not all the work is going to be fun, but if we play our cards right, it will be very rewarding. There is a facebook group, Community Divers headed by Brandon that can be viewed for current information as well as this site. At the last meeting we also updated/added to the contact list, so there maybe a phone tree or email list reminder about the next meeting coming your way as we get closer.
Next meeting:
Tuesday, August 16th
Round table pizza in Sunset square
5:30pm social half hour (come drink beer, eat pizza and be social. It is a club for god sakes!)
6:00pm official biz start time
Happy Diving!
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