Royal Caribbean Cruise Line Handing Out Scuba Certifications

 

Royal Caribbean is now the only cruise line out there with onboard Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI) Five Star Dive Centers, where guests can become certified scuba divers as part of their cruise vacation.

Program Details

Royal Caribbean’s partnership with PADI offers a range of programs; from a 30-minute Try Dive program ($29) for those who just want to get their feet wet, to PADI’s Reactivate Program for certified divers who want a refresher ($59).  Those who want to center their vacation on diving can enroll in the Open Water Diver course to earn their complete certification, which starts at $599 per person.

The course begins at home, with an online course that will ultimately leave more time for actual scuba diving while on the cruise.  Once on the high seas, divers will test the waters in the ship’s pool before heading out to complete the four mandatory, open-water training dives in some of the world’s most beautiful waters.  The training dives will be split among two ports, and upon returning home guests will be certified divers that will be able to plan and execute dives on their own.

How to Book

Guests can book their PADI course before boarding through the Cruise Planner, or while onboard at one of the PADI Five Star Dive Centers found on ten ships across the fleet: Oasis-class, Freedom-class, and Voyager-class ships, as well as Anthem of the Seas.

Featured photo: Flickr Creative Commons

Green Moray Eel signs modeling contract off Grand Cayman

When on a dive vacation, one needs to dive!  In my family’s case, we need to dive A LOT!  Both of my kids along with my lovely wife and myself enjoy the hell out of the whole dive experience.  It’s a ton of fun to actually go diving but, it’s also exciting to think about and prepare for the next day’s/week’s/vacation’s dive.  Kind of like SCUBA Christmas Eve, the night before every dive.  I just love it and it makes me smile wide when my dive crew gets excited about the upcoming awesomeness as well.  If you don’t yet dive or haven’t yet finished up your Open Water Certification, BY ALL MEANS, get your rump down to your local dive shop and sign up for or finish your dive classes.  Or you can do like my family did, (except for my wife, she’s been Advanced Open Water certified for many years, even since before she met me – one of the reasons I married her, how cool to meet a chick that’s already dive certified right?!) get your Open Water dive certification in a warm water location!  We did ours in Belize which took about three days total with book work, watching PADI learning videos and practical dive training.  I’m not much of a cold weather guy, let alone a cold water guy so, the Belize option was absolutely perfect in so many ways for my sensitivities and needs!  If you’ve ever wished you could just jump in the aquarium and swim around with all your new cool colorful fish friends, Scuba diving might just be your ticket to adventure.

The following pics were shot with a SeaLife Micro 2.0 camera and SeaDragon 2500 Light.

We went diving with Marie and Menno from DiveTech.  -Great dive operator and people!

-saltydog@sd

 

Another great dive off the west coast of Grand Cayman!  This green moray eel was modeling for our camera…

We took the pics but not the following video, great catch on the video guys!  Check out what a Moray can do, he sets his chopsticks down and then goes to work…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqwD7D50YIM

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