How To Get A Scuba Certification

Hi, I'm Howard Payne, I'm an instructor with Dive Wimbledon. We're a 5 star IDC center here in Southwest London. I teach both recreational and technical diving.

I've been diving for about 8 years, and today I'm going to give you a little bit of advice on equipment and how to SCUBA dive. Okay, in terms of how to get a SCUBA certification, there are a number of different ways, certainly the party system, open water would be the entry level certification, that's a four day course, typically in most centers, and a lot of fun. It contains a number of different elements.

You'll learn some theory topics where you're learning the theory behind diving so you have an understanding of what you are doing. You then have some basic skills that you learn, the kind of building blocks if you like of diving where you are learning the things such as mask clearing or how to swim alone or how to control your buoyancy, so the things that you'll need to go diving. And then you actually go out and go diving with your four qualifying dives.

We repeat some of the skills that you've done in a confined water environment perhaps a swimming pool or some shallow water. We then repeat those skills in the open water environment, just to build your confidence and make sure that you've remembered how everything works, and consolidating really those skills that you've learned in the confined water environment. And then beyond that, in terms of certification, you can go on and do advanced open water, which is an increased depth rating to 30 meters, so that will open up some more cool diving for you.

You can go out and do perhaps some deeper wreck diving, but it will also teach you things such as navigation, buoyancy, perhaps focuses on things like how to dive off of boats. Underwater photography is also very popular right now. We do that a lot with people at entry level.

We find that people really enjoy taking photographs underwater. For about 300 pounds, you can buy a really good digital camera set up and do your entry level course, and move on and do perhaps a specialty course and digital underwater photography. We've found that a lot of our students really enjoy that side of it now and they're getting good results with their underwater photography.

So, pretty much whatever way you want to go with diving, there's a way through party and preferably Dive Wimbledon, if you join us, and we can show you how to advance your skills and move through the system so that you're gaining confidence ad you're gaining your ability. .