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About Us
 We would like to take this opportunity to welcome you to the Laurel Divers Web Page. We are an organization of approximately 50 divers whose goal is to meet others who share our love of scuba diving and provide opportunities for those people to plan and organize scuba trips as well as meet socially.
Our club meets the first Thursday of each month at TGI Friday's, Altoona at 7:30pm. At these meetings we discuss and review dive trips recently taken, discuss plans for future dive trips and conduct any miscellaneous club business. Following the meeting, plan on staying - this is a great time to make new contacts and share dive stories. We also hold monthly board meetings, of which the date and time are announced at the monthly meeting. Any club member is welcome to attend these board meetings.
Pennsylvania Employer Identification Number is 32-0032756, Laurel Divers, nonprofit organization.
Dues for membership are $30/year for first member of household, $22 for second member and $14 for each consecutive member. Dues entitle you to participation in all club events and you will receive our monthly e-mail detailing all our upcoming trips and information on past trips & events.
How It All Began - A Brief History Of The Laurel Divers
In June of 1975, current club member Jim Hostetler and former club member Bob Mulvehill decided to turn their interest in scuba diving into a local dive club. They traveled to Johnstown and recruited two members from the Johnstown YMCA class. The four of them met in a Coleman camper, in Bob Mulvehill’s back yard and became The Ebensburg Scuba Club.
Each of the four members donated $5 to form a club treasury, half of which was spent on a year’s subscription to Skin Diver Magazine. Additional funds were added by using scuba to clean the bottom of the Ebensburg Community Pool for $2 each time.
By the summer of 1976 Bob Maurer, Rose Maurer, Tom Maurer, Ken Charlesworth and a dozen others had added their names to the membership ranks. The Hollidaysburg YMCA was where most area basic scuba classes were being held, and the club soon changed its name to The Laurel Divers to include all of the Central Pennsylvania area.
The first Treasure Dive was held around that time at the same place where it is still being held today. Ten divers searched for colored golf balls used to mark the prizes. The top prize was a dive watch. A divers logbook, a handful of dive flag decals, and several discover diving bumper stickers rounded out the prize list.
Our club today is approximately 50 members strong. The Treasure Dive attracts about 60 divers each year. We have our own web page, and a local dive shop for equipment and airfills. It will be interesting to see what changes the next 20 years bring.
(Thanks to Jim Hostetler for supplying the above information)
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