Saturday, August 27, 2005
I want to learn to SCUBA dive
I found this on the web. Makes me want to buy SCUBA gear:


MONTREAL

Search for vanished cheese goes sonic.
Elusive fromage dropped into river; Using Saguenay as part of ripening process was meant to revolutionize the industry.

ALEX DOBROTA
The Gazette

Friday, August 26, 2005

CREDIT: ROCKET LAVOIE, CP
After five hours of searching in Baie des Ha! Ha! in Saguenay yesterday, divers were unsuccessful in locating barrels of cheese that had been dropped in the river a year ago. Cheese producer Pierre Boivin has enlisted the aid of sonar equipment to help find the missing food. The search for the elusive cheese dropped into the Saguenay River was taken to new depths last week with the arrival of $5,000 worth of sonar equipment. That technology should succeed where a team of divers failed, said Pierre Boivin, the cheese producer who dropped 2,000 pounds of cheddar into the river in a bid to revolutionize the cheese-making industry.

Ten months, a frantic search and a bout with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency later, the cheese is still missing. And Boivin's tab is growing heftier - $15,000 so far, including the sonar equipment but not counting the net $10,000 worth of cheese.
But the third-generation cheese-maker, who made headlines around the world for this unprecedented initiative, is far from losing hope. "We're still looking for it," said Boivin, who owns a cheese factory in La Baie, 250 kilometres north of Quebec City. "We're not discouraged."

The idea to ripen cheese in the waters of the Saguenay was inspired by a fisherman who told Boivin about a tasty block of cheese he fished from the bottom of a lake a few years ago. Encouraged by recent U.S. studies that suggested cheese ripens best when subjected to high pressure, Boivin sealed nearly one tonne of cheddar in barrels and dropped it in the Baie des Ha! Ha! That was October. Fast-forward to July, and the buoys attached to the barrels had mysteriously vanished, with divers finding only traces of it. The bay is about 45 metres deep, and Boivin suspects the barrels were carried away by strong underwater currents to areas of the river that are more than 60 metres deep. To make matters worse for Boivin, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has categorically refused to allow the product on the market, citing health and safety concerns for consumers. "The river is not a controlled environment," said Normand Giguere, the agency's dairy program specialist for Quebec."So the company cannot apply to get an authorization to market this product." That is, if the cheese is found and brought to surface in the first place. If it isn't, Boivin is willing to start all over again.

If only for the worldwide publicity it generated, the stunt was worthwhile, he pointed out. "If we don't find the cheese, we'll redo the experiment next year," he said. "We'll attach electronic chips to the barrels, so we trace them."
thus voiced The A, Mistah @ 8:40 AM
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