PADI materials are easy to understand, come in many different languages and are comprehensive enough that a reader will get to know what he needs to know for the current level of diving. The PADI philosophy is that divers should get in the water as soon as possible. After all, it’s in the water you learn to dive, not in the classroom. The actual SCUBA training is focused on the needs of the individual students. A PADI dive license will never expire, but divers getting back in water after several years of inactivity are encouraged to seek refresher training.
PADI Courses
PADI (Professional Association of Diving Instructors) was founded in 1966 and is a training agency that publish instructional manuals on SCUBA diving. They have created a set curriculum (The PADI standards.) that instructors use to teach students. PADI is currently the worlds largest recreational SCUBA diving agency, and if you train at MCP, you can use your PADI license anywhere in the world afterwards.
In addition to scientific diving, volunteers at Marine Conservation Philippines can do the PADI range of dive courses for free. (Except for the manual and certification fee which usually runs 65-85 USD/course.) Learn more about PADI.
PADI Courses
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Open Water Course
Your first scuba certification. Most dive shops finish it in three days. We spread it out and add extra experience dives, so buoyancy control is automatic by the time you start conservation diving. You qualify to dive to 18 meters with a buddy.
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Advanced Open Water
Five dives that take you to 30 meters and build your navigation skills. The deep and navigation dives are set by PADI. Where dive shops let you pick the other three, we choose them for survey work, usually peak performance buoyancy, safety and rescue, and deploying a surface marker buoy.
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Rescue Diver
The course experienced divers most often call pivotal, and often the most fun. Your attention widens from yourself to the whole team: spotting trouble early, giving oxygen and thinking clearly in an emergency. We usually run it over four days, which leaves room for extra scenarios so the new mindset sticks.
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PADI Specialties
Focus on one kind of diving with an instructor beside you. We teach Self-Reliant Diver, Enriched Air Nitrox and Deep Diver. Other specialties may be available when our projects call for them, or occasionally on request. Conservation dives come first here, so a specialty can stretch over a week or two, depending on how busy the schedule is.
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Technical Diving
Decompression diving with twinsets, sidemount and stage tanks, from Tec40 up to Tec Trimix. It is not a natural next step after recreational diving. We only train interns who need it for deep research, or volunteers staying at least four months, and reaching Tec50 or Trimix level typically takes 24 weeks.
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While there are a multitude of certifying scuba diving agencies, we’ve chosen to employ the PADI system of education because it’s recognised worldwide and enjoy an excellent safety record. This is partly due to superior educational material, but also in part due to a rigorous quality assurance program. If Scuba instructors don’t adhere to strict protocols and safety rules, they’re simply expelled from PADI. This assurance has served PADI and their students well for decades.