In the PADI Open Water course your scuba instructor teaches you how to scuba dive safely together with a buddy. At its heart scuba diving isn’t very difficult to learn – but there’s a number of things you might want to do with your diving (or while diving) that takes a bit of practise and getting used to and where the aid of an instructor can severely cut down on the time you’d need to learn the same things by yourself. The PADI Underwater Photography course is a good example of this. There’s also certain things that’s just too dangerous to learn by yourself, examples of this would be the PADI Cavern specialty and the PADI Wreck Diving specialty, where you can enter an overhead environment and lose your way. Another example would be diving with enriched air without knowing the dos and don’ts of this kind of diving.

In order to offer scuba divers the chance to learn all these activities without cluttering and overloading the entry level open water diver course, PADI devised their range of specialty courses. There’s a great number of these – some pertain to special conditions such as drift, boat or night diving or even ice diving. (Yes you can dive underneath the ice, but obviously that particular scuba course isn’t available in the Philippines.) other PADI specialties are less specific and can be of use regardless of where you dive – examples of such courses would be diving with enriched air, the PADI deep diver course or the self-reliant diver specialty.

On the PADI Night Diver Course you’ll discover how to plan and execute dives at night. Although diving in the dark might seem scary, you’ll discover a completely new and fascinating universe to dive into. To do so safely, there’s a number of considerations you’ll need to look into and procedures you’ll learn.

In the tropical water of the Philippines, where you rarely feel cold, even at night, night diving is all fun. Who needs the light of the day when your dive torch is focused on the most amazing critters hunting, corals feeding or the plankton bioluminescence? Night diving in many other dive location in the world means having to go freeze in cold water for a very dark dive; but in the most beautiful dive sites of the world, night diving is an experience you won’t forget.

On the PADI Deep diver course you’ll learn how to plan and execute dives to 40 meters. Although diving that deep is alluring, there’s a number of considerations you’ll need to look into, in order to dive safely to that depth.

In the clear waters of the Philippines, deep diving is deceptively easy. When you dive to forty meters here, there is still plenty of lights, even if the almost all colour is stripped, leaving the seascape in shades of blue. Sometimes, when you look up – you can see the tiny boat above you – as well as the inverted bubble shower your exhaled air form all the way to the surface. Diving to forty meters many other places in the world equals total darkness at depth and passing through chilling thermoclines on the way down. When you dive in such places, you can feel you’re deep. The lack of these characteristics and the warm water makes deep diving in the Philippines easier, but can also instill false confidence in the novice diver. This is important to keep in mind, because excepting the cold of the water elsewhere, diving that deep affect you the same way physically as diving there would. The laws of physics are the same, no matter how clear the water is, and no matter how easy it appears.

In addition to the specialties listed above, if required for our scientific work, we can also teach:

• PADI Drift Diver
• PADI DPV Diver
• PADI Search and Recovery Diver
• PADI Underwater Digital Photographer
• PADI TecRec Gas Blender