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diver, Frits has almost abandoned tanks in his photography, finding that their clumsiness outweight their utility in shallow water.

    A promising new club activity was introduced last summer by three new members who began collecting marine fauna for Kasetsart University, Thailand's leading agriculture and fisheries school. Frank Nicholls and Lew Wrenshall, respectively director and research chief of a United Nations sponsored research corporation, joined forces with Charles Bell, an amateur of dilettante rank in marine biology. Through the kind assistance of Dean Chote Suvatti of Kasetsart's fisheries faculty, Miss Supahp, curator of the university's marine museum and visiting Prof. Karl F. Lagler, a leading American fisher scholar, the collecting trio obtained a simple kit consisting of a few hand nets, some jars of formalin, a bag of rotenone fish poison, and a couple of handy plastic garbage containers to keep it all in. The nets proved unwieldy under water, and the fish seemed to like the rotenone, but our collectors plucked starfish, sea urchins, salps and soft corals from the water to fill their jars. Each time they brought a set of specimens to the university, Miss Supahp and her staff catalogued them into the collection and gave the club a list identifying each one. In this way we hope over a period of time to compile an extensive, if not exhaustive list of the marine fauna inhabiting the shallow island waters where we dive.

    An attempt was made to build a "slurp gun" (a suction weapon to trap fish alive). Illustrations from an American magazine were used as models, and were carefully followed by expert designers. The result was an impressive instrument of gleaming plastic which unfortunately failed to slurp anything but sand, mud, loose bits of dead coral, and hapless plankton. Research is continuing, and new developments are hopefully awaited.

    Among possible scientific projects for the future would be an ecological study of the one particular reef, including the count and identification of each of its perennial inhabitants and an attempt to discover their relations to each other and to their environment. Such a study, which we believe has not been done in these waters, would require many separate visits and much time, but contribute something new to the knowledge of the Gulf.

Special Trips

    A 24 man party took advantage of the Chinese New Year long weekend at the end of January 1965, to make the club's first major trip to the Indian Ocean. Their goal was Puket, 

[Stuart's surf ski is manageable enough, if you keep your eye on what you're doing.]