UASC Members:
Our next meeting is just around the corner, this Wednesday March 27th, at the Chicago Maritime Society museum space on the 6th floor of the Helix Building, 310 S. Racine at Jackson. Light refreshments will start at 6:30, business at 7:00, and the featured guest speaker around 8:00.
This month our featured speaker will be Kira Kaufman, who will be presenting on the survey work on Wrecks in Indiana Waters. With five years of supervisory experience in underwater archaeological techniques and research, and has conducted underwater archaeological survey, excavation, and documentation projects in the Midwest and Southeast United States, as well as in Ghana, Africa. Dr. Kaufmann has served in a supervisory capacity for a number of maritime‐related projects, for which she conducted survey, recovery, remote sensing, monitoring, and report writing.
One exciting piece of business at the March meeting will be the raffle drawing to see which of our new members will win free entry into one or the other of the two workshops we have coming up this spring. By my count we welcomed 25 new memberships between Our World Underwater, the Chicago Maritime Festival, Ghost Ships, and the February meeting, plus we will be honoring the show special one last time at the March meeting on Wednesday, so hopefully we will see a lot of those new faces in the crowd. Two free entries will be drawn - One for the two-day hands-on ROV workshop to be delivered by Mark Gleason in April and the other for the research methods workshop to be delivered by noted historian Brendon Baillod at a date still to be determined.
For those of you not eligible for the new members raffle, or who are new members but not lucky enough to win the raffle, we are now taking payment for the ROV workshop, to be help April 20th and 21st at Haigh Quarry. The cost is $80 per student which should include a picnic lunch, but which does not include entrance to Haigh. ( Non-diving entrance fees at Haigh are lower than for divers. ) We also plan to book a block of rooms at a nearby hotel Friday and Saturday nights, and may conduct some class activities there as well. The cost of the class includes the use of all materials necessary to build and operate an ROV, but does not include keeping the ROV at the end of class. ( A materials list to make your own ROV after the class is over will be made available. ) THIS CLASS WILL ALSO COUNT FOR NAS 3 CREDIT, so those who are following the NAS training program will want to make special note of that.
The March meeting will also be the last chance for continuing members to renew their memberships without being dropped from the membership rosters and mailing lists. As a temporary fix to our mailing list capacity problem, there are currently _two_ UASC members mailing lists:
On a more positive note, the food for Wednesday's meeting will be pot luck, which always turns out to be quite a feast, and I know several people have already volunteered to bring dishes, so it should be a good time. If you would like to contribute to the cause, ( or maybe for a later meeting ), contact Dan Kasberger to get your name added to the list.
Hoping to see you all on Wednesday,
John