ATLANTIDE MEDITERRANEAN OBJECTIVE 2015

For more than 20 years, the Objectif Atlantide association has been innovating in the world of diving by offering new activities. Daniel Méouchy presents this new edition:
“We meet many diving centers in France and abroad. Often, they ask us to make custom animations.
One of the problems with dive centers is that they can only offer a limited number of dive sites, and divers are tired of always doing the same dives.
How can we restore interest to sites that divers feel like they know by heart?
In this new game we are organizing on the Mediterranean coast, we offer divers to search for specific species and photograph them.

We know that, as divers have to look for clays in clay, we get two interesting reactions:
- the first is that we give back an interest in sites which are often immersed.
- the second is that by looking for more or less rare species, divers have a new vision of the site, they look more attentively, more closely, and see details that they had never noticed.
During the event we are organizing with young people at the French Navy Diving School, we have been testing this educational game concept with cameras for several years now. We are proposing it today on a larger scale.

A NATURALIST EVENT

Objective: Create an environmental animation à la carte for divers, easy to implement, and with a stake important enough to motivate participants and encourage them to replay.

The game takes place on the Mediterranean coast for four months. Registration for the game is free. It is done on the Objectif Atlantide Méditerranée website. On the site of the game, the participant, once registered, can download a brochure presenting about forty photos of animal and plant species. The participant will also be able to purchase the submersible version of the pack at the dive centers partners of the operation listed on the site of the game. During his dive, the participant tries to photograph a maximum of species on the plate to score the most points. Once the dive is over, the competitor selects his photos and then places them on the Objectif Atlantide Méditerranée website. At each photo recording, a ranking is made. The best ranking appear on the home page of the website. All registrants who have submitted photos to the game site participate in a weekly prize draw.

In order to qualify for the final, participants must have posted on the site the photos of the 40 species of the two 20 photos pads as and when their dives. They have four months to do it, from the May 1er to the August 31. A draw will take place at the beginning of September. The results are checked by a biologist to check if the photos made correspond to those requested. For example, there are several species of sea urchins, and if the sea urchin photographed is not the one requested, it will not be taken into account. The quality of the photos does not matter, what is important is to be able to recognize the species without problem. To avoid cheating as much as possible, we impose a number of constraints. All divers can participate, from the smallest level to the most experienced, it is enough that they have a camera or that we put one at their disposal.

DISABLED

This game can be played at all ages. It is also open to disabled divers.

LOCATION

The interest of this game is that it can be set up for very large geographic areas, such as the Mediterranean coast.

Conlusion

Today we have the technical means to perform this type of event. Divers are increasingly equipped with digital underwater cameras.

We are thinking of answering a request from diving clubs that can organize challenges internally and create a new emulation to motivate their members. Giving objectives during the dive makes it possible to use well-known sites, or to choose sites that will achieve the best scores. A very important point, this game may be a motivation for young divers in approaching their training:

- By technical work on balancing, on the gentle approach to be able to photograph an animal.

- On underwater observation and knowledge of the marine environment: by knowing the species better, it is easier to find them. ”

Find out more: www.funexplorers.fr