At the beginning of season 2024 Cristina started her Divemaster Course. The first step of being a PADI Professional! Curious how it went for her? Read on!
30 years ago, Cristina did her first dive and became a certified diver. After many dives in different countries, she came to Sicily in April to start the divemaster course. Together with Cristina, we made a program for the divemaster: a mix of workshops, training in the pool, being in the sea and lectures in our classroom.
The best part of the divemaster course according to Cristina:
- Guiding dives
- Making a map of a dive site
- Assisting with courses
Guiding dives 🤿
One of the tasks of a divemaster, is to guide certified divers for a fun dive. In the course, we usually start with letting our divemaster candidate (DMC) close the groups and showing them the divesites.
But being a diveleader starts way before the actual dive. When everyone is setting up their equipment on the boat, Cristina already started scanning to people: is anyone looking nervous? Is all the equipment here or does someone need some help? She also made sure everyone got a weightbelt with the right amount of weight on it.
Then the dive briefing starts. It’s a very important part of the dive, because here you tell the plan and discuss the communication. You tell the maximum depth and dive time, but also to let you know when they reach 100 bar for example and what to do if we hit a current.
On the dives itself, our instructor Swann was with her too, to assist her where needed.
Making a divemap 🗺️
One of the assignsments during the divemaster course, is to make a map of the divesite. We can say that Cristina took this assignment very seriously.
On a morning when Cristina was off, she started her divemap. She couldn’t find all the information she wanted to know online, so she went to the coast guard of Giardini Naxos. Unfortuanetely it was for nothing: they told her to go to a local diveshop, because they would know the site and depths better for sure.
Still it resulted in a very precise and well done map, which is still displayed in our office.
Assisting with courses 👩🏫
