Completing certification dives in Cairns?

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There are plenty of place and a lot of people do their confined water and classroom over where they live and take the 4 training dives over here in Cairns. Called a referral. (few details here or here)

If its PADI then you have Pro Dive (on Scubapro) or Deep Sea Divers Den (on Ocean Quest). Both very good and I would look at a 3 day 2 nigh trip as best value for money. This way they get 2 training dives on the first day - afternoon of snorkeling.
Second day 2 training dives so certified by lunchtime. Afternoon do a dive with your buddy and the night dive with instructor.
last day 3 dives with your group or buddy.

You can do it quickly over 2 day trips, but why bother.

You will just fill out a dive medical questionaire and if that's all good bring your paperwork with you. Easy :)

Courses start every day except Tuesdays for referrals.

PM me is you need more local info
 
I was on a three month diving/backpacking trip in 2001 and got tired of PADI instructors asking me to do check-out dives because they didn't recognize my L.A. County card (PADI didn't exist when I started diving). When I was in Cairns, an instructor at Deep Sea Divers Den not only recognized my LAC card, he referred to it as a museum piece! He offered to give me the PADI AOW card for the price of the manual (I had to do the dives of course). I was impressed with their operation back then.
 
I was on a three month diving/backpacking trip in 2001 and got tired of PADI instructors asking me to do check-out dives because they didn't recognize my L.A. County card (PADI didn't exist when I started diving). When I was in Cairns, an instructor at Deep Sea Divers Den not only recognized my LAC card, he referred to it as a museum piece! He offered to give me the PADI AOW card for the price of the manual (I had to do the dives of course). I was impressed with their operation back then.

I was at an ocean conservation conference a year or so ago, and a speaker spoke of a similar problem. He was on a boat for a major multiple day dive outing in Australia in the late 1960s, and the boat captain demanded that everyone produce a certification card. He did not have one. He explained that his father had taught him how to dive when he was 7 years old, and he had completed thousands of dives since then without certification. The captain would not relent. No certification, no dives. He figured he was screwed, but fortunately some members of the crew talked the captain into making an exception in his case.

As soon as he got a chance, he went into a PADI (a new organization then) facility and got a card so he would not have that problem again.

His name is Jean Michel Cousteau. When his father taught him to dive when he was 7, that made him the second person in the world to dive with that new-fangled scuba apparatus. He did not have much of an opportunity for certification at that point.
 
Thanks for the assistance!

---------- Post added February 28th, 2014 at 01:02 PM ----------

I see mention of "getting a dive medical to Australian standards" in the pages you linked. Should we expect to have to get this (so allocate time for it), or would this be unusual to need this?
 
Thanks for the assistance!

---------- Post added February 28th, 2014 at 01:02 PM ----------

I see mention of "getting a dive medical to Australian standards" in the pages you linked. Should we expect to have to get this (so allocate time for it), or would this be unusual to need this?

Don't need a dive medical to Australin Standards any more. You just fill in the medical declaration form and only if thre is an issue (say you tick "yes" for asthma or somehting) would you need to get dive medical done. Only then would it need to be to Australian Standards.

In Cairns its very easy to organise as all the medical centres offer them for around AUD$65.
 
Don't need a dive medical to Australin Standards any more. You just fill in the medical declaration form and only if thre is an issue (say you tick "yes" for asthma or somehting) would you need to get dive medical done. Only then would it need to be to Australian Standards.

In Cairns its very easy to organise as all the medical centres offer them for around AUD$65.

When did that change???


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
When did that change???


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

About 6 months ago. Lots of sad doctors in Cairns now ha ha!

PADI Asia Pacific now in line with the rst fo teh world so as long as the nedical declaration is all OK then you odnt need to get the full mendical done.

Here is a link to the one used now (this is Pro Dive one but they are all the same)
 
That is similar to the RSTC form. If we have a medical condition requiring a YES on the form, can we bring with us the standard RSTC waiver signed by our home doctor, or do we have to have a new one done there by someone we have never met before?
 
Thanks for the responses. It would be PADI.

I was certified completely here and recognize the benefit that can be when diving in easier conditions. Having completed my own AOW while in Palau, I'm also fully aware of the folly of wasting your time in class while on vacation. I did advise him to complete his cert here so he can just go and enjoy, but he's got serious work commitments and literally doesn't have the weekends to complete the cert here before going. This is the big paid sabbatical from work for him so he's traveling multiple locations in the world and so won't be there long enough to do the whole thing there either. (Obviously not a very dedicated diver yet, otherwise that schedule would have been all different :) ).

I do dive here myself but not very often and it's not a question of being good at it. It's the ROI. It's more like a job than a purely fun thing. :) There are some very cool things to see here and I enjoy it and I wouldn't trade the experience of diving in the kelp forest. I haven't dove the really good spots here but the fact is that besides those places a lot of it is very poor viz and the fish you see are brown and tucked in a rock crevice. There's color on the rocks if you shine your light on them. The seals and otters are definitely cool. I dive wet so it's 85 lbs of gear on me. Even with the best fitting gear, it's pretty cold and even though I like cold, you can only handle so much and still be enjoyable enough to do a lot. I call it swimming around in my icechest. Sometimes a bus could drive by ten feet away and you wouldn't be able to tell. So there is a lot of cool stuff to do here but it's hard to compete with warm water diving for what you could see in the right places and the ease of doing it.

I'd mention that the majority of my diving has been shore diving so the rigors of that have certainly colored my experience. On an insta-buddy dive I did shortly after being certified had me shore diving and the other inexperienced member of the team ran low on air at the halfway point of the dive, and I had to come up as the other lowest member. So we were WAY out there and had to swim back in on the surface, around the kelp etc. I left him far behind but I can assure you that if you quit kicking, you stop moving toward shore. Still a great experience with seals and an otter arms length away but you can blow your heart up doing that. Next dive was from the Monterey Express but my buddy forgot his hood. He actually made one dive before popsicle head prevented anymore.

Get him to do his academics for the course online before going https://www.padi.com/elearning-scuba-registration/default.aspx which he can review at anytime later on(unlike losing your OW manual).
That will save time , you can do all the rest on a boat on the reef.
 

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