Wednesday 17 October 2012

Diving Tenerife ~ PADI 5 Star IDC Resort



Amarilla divers has some great news to share with our divers. This month October 2012 we have been upgraded to a PADI 5 Star Instructor Development Course Resort. This is a very prestigious ranking in the PADI Dive shop levels and we are very very proud to share this news with everyone.

So what does this mean? 

Well we are now able to offer Emergency First Response Instructor courses, PADI Instructor Courses, PADI IDC Staff Instructor courses and PADI MSDT courses at our center. All our course will be at exceptionally competitive prices

We have our own Course Director to conduct these courses and Neil, our Master Instructor, will be on hand to staff the PADI IDC's too.

We may even have Mary upgrading to PADI IDC Staff Instructor in the near future!!





It also means that we can offer the PADI IDC via eLearning on the PADI website, which means you will be able to review the presentations in the comfort of your own home.

 Amarilla Divers will also begin to offer the PADI Instructor Internships, these will have fantastic savings and will last for a maximum of 6 months (depending on current level). You will get the benefit of on site training, theory sessions, practical applications and over 100 dives. 

This will be limited and will be on a first come first served basis.

So all in all a fantastic opportunity  for all our divers and staff.

We look forward to seeing you all very very soon.

Mary & Neil.






Diving Tenerife ~ Divemaster update October.

Well what has been happening with our Divemaster interns.



Walied is now nearing the end of his time with Amarilla Divers and has been here for 7 weeks. During this time he has completed the following courses.

PADI Advanced Open Water
PADI Rescue Diver
Emergency First Response Primary Care
Emergency First Responce Secondary Care
Emergency First Response AED use.
PADI Deep Diver
PADI Enriched Air Diver
PADI Divemaster.

Walied has also managed over 60 dives whilst here in Tenerife and has been diving with Turtles, Stingrays, octopus, Sea horses and much much more.

Walied has been working hard on his skill circuit and demonstrations as well his dive guiding and briefings and has come a long way since he first started with us.

We now only have a few parts left to complete and then we will say goodbye to Walied until next time:)




Next we have Thomas who joined our team as an Open Water diver. he has been completing many dives and has been great in the center. Thomas has been training lots and has managed so far to complete these courses.

PADI Advanced Open Water
PADI Rescue Diver
Emergency First Response Primary Care
Emergency First Responce Secondary Care
Emergency First Response AED use.

He has also been doing some skill practice and will now move on to some guiding and briefings. Thmas scored some exceptionally high scores for his stamina and this is great news.

Thomas has also been great in the center with his extra language skills and has been working with a lot of our French clients and even the Spanish ones too.

We will keep you updated on his continued progress.


At the end of September we was joined by Carl from the UK. He is a qualified life guard and wanted to add a few more 'watery' certifications to his CV. 

Carl will be with us for 8 weeks and has already shown himself to be a very competent and confident diver and we have high hopes for his continued success in our team. 

 We have already managed to complete his Open Water course, Advanced Open Water course and complete over 20 dives!! He has already seen the turtles, sting rays & sea horses....what can we show him next !

Well......it is almost Angel Shark season so hopefully we have a fair few of them to look at soon :)





Diving Tenerife ~ Amarilla Divers update

We have had such a busy September that we have not really had much chance to relax and upload the mountains of photos!!... However the weather has been great and we have lots of flat calm seas, which is highly unusual.

Here is a quick run down of what has been going on at Amarilla Divers.

We were joined by regular divers Karen, Pat & Doc ( Sam & Gareth). Karen was here to complete her Rescue Diver & EFR course with Neil, whilst Pat & Doc where here to sign off their Boat Specialty, Deep Specialty and Master Scuba Diver certification too.




We also had Rachel westbrook back with us for a weeks holiday, she was with her friend Cara and they had a couple of dives with us here in Tenerife.

Rachel is one of our interns from last year who is now currently working as an Instructor in Cambodia. She is doing a fantastic job and loving every minute of it. We miss her loads but are very very proud her xx





We have had lots of courses going on in the center and we are now preparing ourselves for the Half term holidays. We are looking forward to doing lots of diving and finding more sea horses :)



September also brought us a new Divemaster intern called Carl and he will be with us for 8 weeks to complete all his courses to Divemaster. We will update you loater with his progress.


Monday 8 October 2012

Diving Tenerife Underwater Photography Competition

Well September bought us a new Underwater Photography Competition called 11 Foto-Sub Guimar Open. This competition was split in to 2 different catagories for the divers, being Compact Cameras and the manual SLR type camera.

Neil & Thomas,  our divemaster Intern, went along to try their hands at some photography. They were joined by their 'models' Mary & Chris.


 








Now the idea is that you have a buddy / model and take pictures that fit in to 6 different types for marking accordingly.


The 6 sections were

Whole Fish
Macro Fish
Macro Non fish
Ambiental no model
Ambiental with Model
Molussco

You were allowed to take up to 240 pictures and had 4 hours diving time in which to complete this task.

The dive was lovely and we have been back since to have a good look around.

Neil took some great shots and he eventually came 7th out of 11 competitors, which we think is great for his first go. Now he know what the judges are looking for he can only gain confidence and hopefully higher his grade next time.







Thomas came 10th out of 11 divers, which is excellent as it was literally the second time he dived with a camera.

This was a fantastic experience for both Neil & Thomas and we even made the news lol.