Discover Rescue!

Hi, would you like to try this?

I recently trawled through our student records from the past year trying to find out how many of our students completed a Discover Scuba Diving experience with us before enrolling on their Open Water Course. The result – nearly 80%! For me, this shows we would rather give something a go before we commit – The ‘try before you buy’ attitude.

Once you’ve experienced the aquatic world (even if it’s just in a swimming pool), you have done something that, in the grand scheme of things, very few people have done! PADI has certified millions of divers, however with a global population of 7.7billion people, that’s just a drop in the ocean! Once qualified as an Open Water diver, you are free to explore the hidden depths and just go diving. A big proportion of students will continue on to their Advanced course or another speciality, a proportion of those will continue on to Rescue or maybe a second speciality, and the pattern continues towards the professional ranks of Divemaster and above. I have deliberately omitted Master Scuba Diver from this list – as it’s a combination of requirements including 5 specialities, Open Water, Advanced and Rescue, along with 50 dives; it’s often something that divers will be aiming for long-term while slowly ticking off courses along the way. Having said that, we have had quite a few students who have aimed for MSD from the very beginning and we have been able to put course packages and plans together for them to achieve that rating.

In my blog from November last year, I went into detail about the requirements and content of the Rescue Diver course. In summary, the aim is to teach you how to prevent and manage problems in the water and become more confident in your skills as a diver. We explore problem-solving techniques, how you can be a better buddy and how you can help yourself in the water too. In the same way that 80% of our Open Water students over the last year started off by Discovering Scuba, we have scheduled a ‘Discover Rescue’ event to introduce everyone to this course and let you have a go. Details of this can be found here.

For those of you reading this certified as Open Water divers – what an achievement! As I said, you are part of a relatively small group of people who are qualified to scuba dive and explore the world’s oceans. If you’ve completed your Advanced course, then well done! You’ve furthered your learning and decided that there were areas of diving you wanted to understand more about; perhaps it was drift diving, dry suit diving or wreck diving along with the 2 compulsory dives - deep and navigation. Whichever 3 options you chose, you’ve now broadened your understanding and increased your certification depth. The Rescue course takes the skills you’ve already learnt and teaches you to look out for other divers – this is why it’s challenging but one of the most rewarding courses we offer.

We will very soon be launching a ‘Discover Pro’ event so do keep a look out for that if you are possibly thinking about being part of that even smaller group to continue on from Rescue certification.