PADI Open Water Dive Course

In preparation for a trip up to Cairns, QLD to dive the Great Barrier Reef at the end of May, I decided to get my PADI Open Water Diver certification.  I booked through Pro Dive Manly for $297 for the weekday course.  Anyone in the Northern Beaches of Sydney who may be reading this and is looking to get their PADI OW cert, I highly recommend doing the course with them.  Not only are they the cheapest one around by $50 but my instructor, Tom, was awesome.  He is an extremely accomplished diver (he's a specialty cave diver amongst other things) with 12 years of experience.  He's also only 21 years old and has travelled to/lived in more countries than most people have by the time they hit their death bed.  He has plenty of life stories to keep you entertained during the breaks between dives.

I got lucky with a small class.  It was myself, two Canadians, and a Columbian guy.  The course was spread out over three days.  Tuesday was the classroom and pool training, followed by three ocean dives on Wednesday, and finishing off with the last ocean dive and a BBQ and beers on Thursday.  The actual skills we had to do were much simpler than the book made them seem.  Hardest thing is to fight the instinct to hold your breath when you have to take the regulator out of your mouth.

For the ocean dives, we went to Shelley Beach in Manly.  Luckily, we had clear skies everyday and the water wasn't too cold.  Before entering the water we were told that we'd be seeing some blue grouper, blah, blah, blah, and some sharks.  My first thought was okay, he's just trying to freak us out.  I was wrong.  Within 5 minutes of being underwater, I saw the outline of a finned predator lurking about 5m away.  One outline turned into about 5-6 a few seconds later.  Once they got closer, I realized they were little baby (about 3-4 ft) Dusky Whalers, a relatively non-aggressive shark.  There's some footage of them swimming around in the video below.  I had a staring contest with one about 2m away which was a little uneasy but as I got closer it turned around and swam away.

All in all it was an awesome experience and I'm looking forward to getting to dive the Great Barrier Reef instead of having to snorkel and/or do an intro dive.  Met some cool people, had some beers, and learned to dive.  Sounds like a productive week to me :)

Gearing up @ Shelley Beach for our ocean dive(s)

Ready to get in the water!