Thailand Scuba Diving The Reefs And Wrecks.
Thailand scuba diving will introduce you to a whole new world underwater.
I think the picture above just about says it all.
Escape to Thailand’s other Kingdom.So you’ve done all the usual tourist attractions. And you’re bored with the “peace” of the beach. You’ve bought 10 belts, six caps, several T-shirts that you wouldn’t risk wearing at home, you’ve sampled different foods from passing vendors, you’ve had a gritty beach massage and you’re wondering how to get your Mickey Mouse Rolex through Customs. Then as you wander through the side streets of Pattaya you see a shop offering a special one-day Thailand scuba diving course on the coral reefs on the nearby islands.
Hang on a minute. Everyone knows scuba diving is only for super fit, young macho males. The training is arduous and takes months, the equipment is complicated and the drop out rate high.
Well everything in that statement was true – during and for some years after, world war 2. The military instructors had zero tolerance for anyone who did not quickly meet the requirements required for dangerous missions. Many of the instructors stayed with scuba instruction in peace time, but unfortunately brought their old style training with them and this led to the stories about how hard it was to learn to dive. Then, over in America a new style of dive training was launched in the mid 1960s. It was called PADI (the Professional Association of Diving Instructors. It’s philosophy was quite radical: “Don’t weed them out, rope them in.” They introduced a four-day course at a time when most people trained one-day a week in their local swimming pool and needed a year or more to achieve a diving licence. PADI caught on big time and now trains more new divers worldwide than all the other diving agencies put together. The majority of dive shops in Thailand are linked to PADI and use their training methods.
That doesn’t mean that the others are no good, far from it. Agencies like NAUI, BSAC and CMAS all turn out good divers but their lack of growth, due mainly to poor marketing and inflexible attitudes in the past, has left them as “poor cousins” lacking the financial punch that has enabled PADI to develop its training materials.
Thailand Scuba Diving Course.One step PADI took to encourage people to learn to dive was to introduce a special one-day course called Discover Scuba Diving. They realised that many people would like to try diving, but weren’t prepared to gamble four days of their holiday in case they found out that diving wasn’t for them. This course allows people to dive on a coral reef under the close supervision of a professional instructor after a short briefing on the boat followed by learning a couple of essential skills in shallow water by the beach. So if you are seeking a new challenge, adventure, excitement and the thrill of “flying” weightlessly over an exotic coral reef pop into your nearest PADI dive shop and have a chat with the staff. David Chandler is a very experienced diver, so if you are keen to learn more about Thailand scuba diving then please pay him a visit. But be warned. Going on this course could change the rest of your life.The writer of this article did just that in l986 on his first holiday to Pattaya. He returned to England and set up a plan for early retirement.
He settled in Pattaya 20 years ago; continued his dive training and became a dive instructor at the age of 55. He retired as an instructor at the age of 70 but not before training two of his sons to instructor level to enable them to run their own dive school.
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