Here’s a synopsis of the 3 days we were there:

Day 1: Thursday, Oct. 23: arrived too late in the day for one of the seminars we has signed up for, so we just called up Dan Knauss, a PADI Instructor we knew there and go out to dinner. Later on, we attended the the Dive Matrix party at the Tempo lounge at the Hilton and met some favorite and very interesting people there.

Day 2: missed an early morning seminar we had signed up for, because we wanted to sleep in, but got to attend a fascinating one conducted by Captain Mike Lever of the Super Dive Ship, the Nautilus Explorer [www.nautilusexplorer.com], which makes regular runs to Alaska, British Columbia and Guadalupe Island in Mexico for Great White Shark Dives, which we signed up for in 2013: the soonest the Waiting List would allow us to [!]

This was the same ship that Barb took to Alaska last June to help film a documentary on Captain Mike and the Alaska to Vancouver dive trip, so Capt. Mike remembered Barb and she introduced me to him.

Probably the most remarkable part of the video presentation was that covering the above mentioned Great White Shark Dive at Guadalupe Island and the efforts that Capt. Lever has made to introduce young children [his own] to Great White Sharks.

He set up his 8 and 12 yr. old son and daughter with hookah rigs and accompanied then into

a cage, 10 ft below the surface, to view the Great White Sharks at Guadalupe Island and the resulting video shows how unafraid and excited they were at seeing the Great White sharks, sometimes as close as an arm’s length away.

He made a good point, which is: if you expose children to sharks in a safe manner, they come to be fascinated with them and become goodwill ambassadors for them back in school, to help dispel the myths and fear surrounding them.

We can’t wait to go on the Great White trip in 2013!

The other thing he and another gentleman named Mike Oh [sp?] have pioneered is getting Chinese and Asian brides to forgo the usual ‘sharkfin soup’ at their weddings, due to the devastating effect shark finning is having on the shark populations of the world and spread awareness of culinary alternatives available for wedding parties.

Day 3, Saturday, Oct. 25: this was the day we spent actually roaming the floor of the DEMA show, looking for people we knew, such as Mike King of the ‘Ships to Reefs,’ Raymond of ‘Art to Media,’ the group which prints out 3 D Underwater Dive Maps of various wrecks around the world, such at the Yukon, off Mission Beach and uses Barb’s underwater video in the making of the maps.

They have recently released another 3-D map of the Ruby E., off of Mission Beach, which also used Barb’s video to make. We came away with a 2×4 wall map of the Yukon, which was pretty cool.

We also strolled the floor looking at all the booths of dive gear and drooled over all the equipment we can’t afford, such as $9,000 ‘underwater communications devices,’ and other cool toys.

So, while I wouldn’t necessarily want to go every year, as many dive shops do, it was definitely and interesting experience to be sure and we had a good time.