Summer Holiday preparation
Who is now completely fed up with this rotten weather?
Who is already regularly drooling over the web pages showing beautiful white sandy beaches, crystal clear blue waters and images of coral and fish life that blows your mind?
The answer to both questions above is probably that the majority of us have looked and we will all soon be planning our trips to sunnier climes. Every year we have a plethora of people going to an amazing destination with everything planned and with the absolute ideal of going scuba diving yet they do nothing about it until about 3 weeks (or less!) before they are due to leave! Yup, those that did it to me last year know who they are ?. They had enormous fun getting their qualifications but under un-necessary pressure. So, this year, those of you that are planning your holidays to an exotic dive destination with the intention of going diving drop us a line now. We can get the ball rolling and get you qualified way in advance. If you learn early then you can even get a few more practise dives in before you depart for your holiday destination.
Why would you want to waste 4 days of your holiday learning to dive when you can get certified way in advance of your trip?
In order to clarify what is involved with learning to dive you should first compare it to learning to dRive as no-one would call a driving school telling them that they had to learn to drive in two weeks because they had organised a fly drive across America in two weeks time, would they?
Learning to dive is based around 3 primary modules:
- Theory work; this can be done either manually with books or the more modern approach is via online learning. At Oyster we focus primarily in online learning as this is a much more comfortable approach, completed in the comfort of your own home at a pace to suit YOU.
- Confined water dives; these are conducted under controlled conditions in a heated swimming pool and comprise of learning a number of potentially life saving skills to enable you to cope with any situation that may occur whilst in or around water when donning scuba equipment. It also gets you familiar with the equipment, how to set it up, how to look after it and obviously how to use it.
- Open Water Dives; these are held in Open Water, such as a lake or quarry, in safe and calm conditions. Here you will be expected to repeat many of the skills you learnt in the pool to ensure that under slightly more stressful and realistic circumstances you are able to cope with many situations that can arise, therefore maintaining your own safety and without panic.
As you can see this is not really what you want to do when you have just organised a lovely break somewhere exotic, hot and sunny with crystal clear waters which are just beckoning you to plunge into and explore.
Equally give yourself plenty of time to learn. Scuba Diving is an amazing and safe sport if you know how to do it properly and it is also like every other sport. You get better with practise so allow yourself time to practise before you go on the trip of a lifetime. Don’t rush it; Enjoy it; Get it right.
Happy and safe diving to all of you.