Rescue to Instructor – Ivan Stanton Part 1
Why Scuba Cat Diving?
At home in the UK: SEPT 2011,
Ivan
I had decided that I wanted to take my Scuba Diving to the next level but really had no idea of what that meant, so I hit the internet I found myself on the website looking at a flow chart. I had Advanced Open Water and wanted to go further, I chose my target level which was Open Water Scuba Instructor (OWSI) or Master Scuba Diver Trainer (MSDT) depending on time and costs involved, first I contacted my local Dive Centre and did my Rescue Diver.
The real problem came with finding the dive centre to do my Internship :
- What was it going too cost?
- Where would I do it?
- What level of training would I get?
So I started contacting Dive centres across the globe, trying to get the information I needed, I visited the Dive Show in Birmingham hit all the stalls met some interesting people got contacts and sent more E-mails, did more research, checked out one dive centre called Scuba Cat Diving,
I hit trip advisor and it came up with a 5.
By now replies were coming back yes, yes we can do your IDC;
the ones that said come have fun and become an instructor got binned, yes I wanted to enjoy the course but “Fun” was not my main priority, I wanted professionalism and high level of training.
Finally I narrowed my search to about 10 centres across the world, weighed the pros ‘n’ cons and reduced it to 5.
Now anybody that has looked in to this will tell you that cost is a big part of making a choice, Value for money by the time I got to 5 places to choose from I had numbers swimming round my head, my poor dive buddy and my partner had both helped crunch numbers trying to make sense of it all.
- fees xxxx AUS$
- Accommodation xxx THB
- Course fees xxx THB
- Materials xxx THB
- ETC ETC ETC
Heads hurt, numbers became meaningless and just a bunch of zeros with strange letters after them….. I had as they say had enough, I sent out 1 email to the 5 places on my short list….. My head hurts how much is it going to cost me for everything excluding flights and living expenses??? 4 came back pretty much restating what had been sent out originally blah blah + blah blah but 1 came back with a simple answer,
It will cost you X amount in THB that’s approximately £xxxx gbp .
I was trying to find somewhere to learn, I sent 5 e-mails asking one question, I got 1 back that actually gave me the answer I needed, If I am going to learn then I need to have information presented to me in the simplest form in a manner that I can understand only 1 Dive Centre actually answered the question I asked in the manner that I asked for and that was Scuba Cat Diving.
The Decision was made………
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