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UF Divers club is only one year old and has major plans for the future
By Alexis Mitchell
@Alexis Mitch14
You don’t have to be a biology major to enjoy Scuba Diving here at UF. Students from all kinds of different majors are exploring diving with the UF Divers club, and even going as far as becoming scuba certified.
“I’ve always wanted to become scuba certified. One of the things on my bucket list is to go scuba diving with sharks, and so I need to be certified before I can do that,” said Shelby True, a member of Scuba Club. “It just worked out perfectly that I was able to get certified right here at school.”
So far 16 students have been certified, and even two faculty members have participated in getting scuba certified themselves.
Jaelyn Current, UF Divers president and co-founder, has been certified for nine years. Even though scuba diving is one of her passions, putting together this club was not easy.
“My biggest challenge was finding a company to work through,” said Current.
Luckily Current teamed up with Columbus Scuba, the third largest certification agency in the country, and were able to get the students classes to get certified as well as the equipment at a discounted price.
Through this agency, the club has had a few great opportunities to dive in waters much deeper than the Croy Gymnasium pool, sometimes even taking weekend-long trips as a group.
“So far my favorite part of the club has been doing our exit dives for the SCUBA certification, which we did at Gilboa Quarry about 25 minutes from here. We took the weekend and camped overnight at the quarry and just went diving all day and hung out together as a club,” said True.
As a good studying break this year during finals week, Current is hoping to have a “discovering scuba” session in the Croy pool open to all UF students — not just club members. The cost will be $20 and her hopes is to get this amount paid for by SGA.
With Current being a senior, she hopes that the group this year will stay close and continue their passion of Scuba Diving. Also before she graduates in May, Current’s big goal is to have the club go down to Key Largo and scuba dive in the ocean.
“My main thing is to have it (the club) keep going, stay alive,” said Current.
The UF Divers meeting dates are Nov. 16, Dec. 7, Jan. 11, Feb. 15, March 15, and April 12 at 9 p.m. in BCHS 100. Contact Jaelyn Current at currentj@findlay.edu with any questions.
