Getting Certified On Vacation
Labels: education, scuba certification
We've entered the chillier parts of the year, when the thought of entering the Puget Sound may not be the most entertaining thing you can think of on the weekend.
(Fact: The Puget Sound stays relatively close to the same temperature year round...it's the surface interval between dives that chills you...)
However, thousands of people still NEED to get certified in order to visit the reef below on their mid-winter escapes. What's the answer?
PADI (and other certification agencies as well) offers "Tropical Referral" diving courses. In these courses, you do your classroom and pool work at home with your local instructor, then they give you a referral form and a contact in your vacation destination to complete the Open Water portion of the certification. Basically, you learn what you need to before you go...then you take your "test" in the warm water.
This is an ideal way to become certified if you don't like the cold. As an instructor, I'm not going to lie. I'm a girl first...scuba diver second. I don't like cold. While I teach year round here, I'm not going to tell you I smile when scraping ice off the windshield to head to a dive. My winter dives are usually later in the day to give the earth the maximum amount of warm up time available.
At GirlDiver, we LOVE Tropical Referrals...and someday hope to have a network of travel agents and wedding planners to enable us to do exclusively Referral and class based courses from November through February. However, this year, we're still growing that program, so we'll be at the waters edge at least two weekends per month.
In a tent, with a heater. Dreaming of palm trees.
Posts
