Stephen Weir articles, editorials and popular social media weir postings

worker in the shark lagoon - Toronto DIVER MAGAZINE FACTOIDS §       There is a gift shop and food services in the aquarium. They are prepared to accommodate meat eaters and vegetarians §       The Aquarium will be open 365-days-a-year, starting in the early fall of 2013 §       The 96-metre-long (315 foot) moving walkway through an acrylic tunnel – which you will be able to step off and admire the sharks will be, according to Ripley’s, the longest indoor underwater tunnel in North America. §       Ripley’s has two other aquariums – one in Myrtle Beach, S.C., and the other in Gatlinburg, Tenn. §       Robert Ripley was a cartoonist, an adventurer and collector. He was born in 1890 in California and died in 1949.   His Believe It Or Not cartoons continue to be published. Two recent panels show a bull shark fetus with two-heads and a one-eyed shark (called Cyclops the Shark). Neither are coming to Toronto! §       Ripley’s Aquarium has pledged not to have

WELLAND, ONTARIO HOSTS SHIPWRECK 2013, AND DIVER MAGAZINE WILL BE THERE article for divermag.com The Niagara Divers’ Association will present its 19 th Annual Shipwrecks Symposium on Saturday, April 6, 2013 and Diver Magazine will be there!  The wreck festival, a popular event for Ontario and New York State diverss, will be held in Welland, Ontario. This one-day symposium on shipwrecks features multimedia presentations with internationally renowned speakers from both the United States and Canada.  This year two of the eight speakers are Diver Magazine writer contributors - photographer / journalist Robert Osborne, and longtime freshwater wreck specialist Cris Kohl - will appear on stage. There are  eight primary multimedia presentations on the programme.   Scheduled to give presentations at the Shipwreck Symposium this year are:

The sinking of the MV Keith Tibbetts - The Russian Destroyer Diving Cayman Brac's Historic Russian Destroyer Off the north shore of Cayman Brac, in 1996, while film cameras whirled, Diver Magazine columnist Jean Michel Cousteau rode a decommissioned Cuban/Russian warship 30 metres down to sandy bottom close to shore. One of the world’s first artificial reefs for divers, the well publicized sinking made a worldwide statement about turning weapons of mass-destruction into eco-friendly tourist attractions! The wreck is the only diveable Russian built warship in the Western Hemisphere.    Prior to sinking, the 285 ft long ship (known as number 356) was named the Captain Keith Tibbetts after a local dive operator and businessman.   The name hasn’t stuck too well, more often than not she is called the Russian destroyer even though she is a much smaller Koni II class anti-submarine frigate. 16 years after her sinking underwater journalist Stephen Weir, wearing a mini-under

. Shipwreck to hold you breathe for! Frame Grab from a Stephen Weir YouTube video about snorkelling on a Cayman shipwreck My wife and I are going to Little Cayman on October 5th to photograph spawning coral (full moon phenomena every fall in the Caribbean).  Thought it was time to post videos on YouTube from my last trip.  Picture above is a frame grab from a short video I shot while snorkelling on the wreck of the Kittiwake.  She is an artifical reef off Seven Mile Beach, Grand Cayman Island.  Diver Magazine will soon be publishing a feature on three shipwrecks on three Cayman islands.  (No idea who the snorkeller is!)

 . 18th annual Shipwreck Festival sets a record for number of paid attendees Over 500 wreck aficionados crowded into a high school theatre in Welland to hear North America's top shipwreck experts talk about their latest underwear finds.  Shipwreck 2012, Ontario's largest underwater event, is  an annual symposium staged by the Niagara Dive Association (NDA).  This year's wreckstock set an attendance record. " We reached that magical number of 500 paid attendance" said volunteer organizer Ian Marshall on Saturday at the Welland Centennial High School , just as the Shipwreck 2012 conference was wrapping up, "We do know that we sold over 500 passes, but, there were a number of  divers who bought tickets but didn't them up so the actual attendance will be a little lower than tickets sold. But, of course, we have to add in all the unpaid exhibitors and speakers numbers too, to find out how many made it here this year. Going to be next week before w

. INSIDE OUT AND GETTING WET IN ANTIGUA (repost request) By Stephen Weir As spectator sports go, Antiguan Starfish Flipping has a very small fan base. That is because you have to be a certified scuba diver, have the patience of Job and a high tolerance for low jokes to appreciate watching a Oreaster Reticulatus turn itself inside out. Antigua is a small vibrant island of 67,000 English-speaking people. Situated on the Eastern edge of the Caribbean Sea, the former British colony is within sight of the islands of St. Kitts, Nevis, volcanic Montserrat and its political partner Barbuda. Although this popular scuba diving destination is not blessed with an abrupt deep coral wall drop-off, it does have a rich healthy ring reef system that is close to shore. These shallow reefs are almost untouched and are filled with unusual sea life including a vast number of bottom dwelling starfish. “ If you came back from a dive and said you didn’t see anything, then you didn’t really dive, you just go

. Water too cold in Toronto in April - new underwater camera tested in local pool In anticipation of the completion of a product review article that I am writing for Diver Magazine, I have shot and posted an underwater video on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W83vzlzMxYA . The review is about the new Kodak Play Sport. The video camera looks like a cell phone but is in fact built to be taken underwater without a housing! Members of the Etobicoke Underwater Club assisted as I taped Marianne Collins conduct an underwater magic trick. After filming her waving her magic wand and making a flower grow underwater I decided to call her the World's Worst Underwater Magician.

. New Scuba Products For The Holiday This Year - The Third Day of Christmas (Unedited story in 6-parts - Feature for December issue of Canada's Diver Magazine www.divermag.com ) By Stephen Weir With only a few weeks left until Christmas, the expert buyers at Diver Magazine have once again come to the rescue of weary holiday shoppers with our well-informed gift suggestions. This time, the buyers have zeroed in over 20 last-minute gift suggestions that are all new (or improved) this year. Holiday trip for divers with deep pockets. Sir Richard Branson the owner of Virgin Air, is leasing his newly refurbished Necker Belle to discerning and rich travelers. The Necker Belle is a magnificent 32-meter long 14-meter wide catamaran that has a top cruising speed of 20 knots! She has a crew of seven, including a dive master and a marine biologist and has four double cabins to accommodate eight divers. Necker Belle will be available for tailor-made weekly Caribbean charters in February 2010. T

. Diver Magazine at Volunteer Driven Festival Welland, Ontario Shipwreck Symposium marks its 15th Year - Niagara Diver’s Association For the third year in a row, Diver Magazine will be at the day long Shipwrecks Symposium in Welland, Ontario. The Magazine’s travel editor, Stephen Weir will be at the annual conference to meet subscribers and to take pictures of the popular dive conference for Diver. The Niagara Divers' Association’s 15th Annual Shipwrecks Symposium, "Shipwrecks/2009" will be held Saturday, April 4th at Welland’s Centennial High School. This year the volunteer driven event features nine multimedia presentations given by both world-renowned wreck experts and local divers. Jonathan Moore is one of the headline speakers. Moore is an underwater archaeologist with Parks Canada’s Underwater Archaeology Service. He will be showing never before seen pictures of the government protected wrecks of Lake Ontario’s Hamilton and Scourge (War of 1812 shipwrecks

The Make-Up of Seaside and Lakeshore Trash By Stephen Weir Writer Posts and Reader Responds divermag.com I don't usually post on this site articles of mine that Diver Magazine has posted on its website www.divermag.com. Diver's website gets an impressive numbers of daily visitors ( I get in the 10s they get in the 100s and 1,000s). However, one of the drawbacks of the Diver site is that there isn't a forum yet to show how readers have responded to the articles. The following story was posted a few days ago (July 15) and almost immediately I received a thoughtful response that should get posted. So what follows is what was posted followed by a response from a reader. The Washington-based Ocean Conservancy earlier this year released its annual report on trash in the ocean with new data from its 2007 International Coastal Cleanup Project. Their findings? Seashore trash is hurting the world! Beach trash is clogging shorelines and killing birds, animals and fish. Accordin

This article appeared in Diver Magazine. No, I didn't get a by-line. sigh. (And I am the travel editor). Here is the orginal story, it was edited before appearing in the November issue of Diver. Art to inspire people to respect the planet Bateman retrospective takes aim at industrial fishing By Stephen Weir 11 September 2007 World-famous wildlife artist figures that the most important work he has painted isn’t a soaring eagle or a majestic lion, but rather it is a painting that shows a dead albatross and a drowned dolphin caught in a drift net. The canvas, entitled Driftnet, is the showcase work in a new traveling Bateman exhibition that will visit five cities in Canada and the United States over the next year and a half. “ The scene is painted inside a drift net. There is a dead Pacific White-sided dolphin and a dead Lysan Albatross,” explained Robert Bateman at the opening of his exhibition at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection near Toronto last month. “ It is a comm