Scuba diver hovering beside a reef with soft corals in clear blue water

PADI Specialty Courses

A speciality course explores one part of diving in depth, and it’s often where divers discover which kind of diving they enjoy most. We teach three specialities to our volunteers: Enriched Air Nitrox, Deep Diver and Self-Reliant Diver, all taught by our own instructors.

For volunteers onlyOur courses are open to MCP volunteers, not walk-in students. You can take one PADI course for each four-week period you start, so a 6-8 week stay gives you two.
All-inclusiveGear, transport, marine park fees and tuition are included. You pay only the PADI manual and certification fee. See all course prices.
Fitted around our workOur conservation dives come first, so course days are fitted in around them and a speciality can stretch over a week or two.

PADI Enriched Air Nitrox

Price: 85 USD
Days: 1
Prerequisites: Open Water Diver

Many divers assume nitrox lets them dive deeper. It doesn’t. What changes is the gas you breathe: air is about 21% oxygen and 79% nitrogen, while enriched air has extra oxygen added, typically 32% or 36%, leaving less room for nitrogen.

Less nitrogen means your body takes it up more slowly, so you can stay down longer before you reach your no-stop limit. With the right mix for the depth, that time is often almost doubled. It makes the most difference between 20 and 30 m, where divers on air usually run out of no-stop time long before they run low on gas.

Nitrox is also your first step towards tec diving.

What you’ll learn

Analysing your cylinder before every dive
Labelling cylinders and keeping fill logs
How nitrox is blended and handled
Choosing a mix and its maximum depth
Oxygen exposure limits
Setting up your dive computer
Planning dives with nitrox (training dives optional)

PADI Deep Diver

Price: 85 USD
Days: 2
Prerequisites: 20 logged dives

On the Deep Diver course you learn to plan and make dives to 40 m. Over three or four training dives you work through dive planning, gas management and how depth affects you and your gear.

The clear, warm water makes deep diving here feel easier than in colder, darker seas. At 40 m in the Philippines, there’s still plenty of light, and you can often look up and see the boat and your own bubbles rising all the way to the surface. The physics of depth are the same everywhere, though, and the course teaches you to account for them wherever you dive.

What you’ll learn

Planning deep dives
Gas consumption and turn pressures
How depth affects you, including narcosis
Ascent rates and deep stops
Gear set-up and gas sharing options
Team coherence and discipline
The right attitude to deep diving

PADI Self-Reliant Diver

Price: 65 USD
Days: 2-3
Prerequisites: 100 logged dives

The Self-Reliant course teaches you to plan and make dives without relying on a buddy, using redundant gear, your own gas plan and the skills to handle problems yourself. It is for comfortable, experienced divers, which explains the high entry requirements.

It also makes you a better team diver. Two divers who can each look after themselves make a stronger buddy pair, and many divers find that this course is where the real value of the buddy system finally clicks.

We do all our scientific diving in teams, so you won’t dive solo with us. We still teach the course to divers who meet PADI’s requirements, because these skills make anyone a better diver.

What you’ll learn

Equipment redundancy
Managing gas and reserves
Advanced dive planning
The psychology of self-reliant diving
Three dives to no deeper than 30 m, with no planned decompression

Other specialities

We also teach these when our conservation or research work calls for them, and now and then on request.

PADI DPV Diver
PADI Search and Recovery Diver
PADI TecRec Gas Blender

Good diving is a moving target

Psychologists have a name for a quirk most of us share: the Dunning-Kruger effect. When we’re new to something, we tend to rate our own skill higher than it deserves, because the knowledge it takes to do something well is the same knowledge it takes to see where we fall short.

Diving is no different. Deep, Enriched Air and Self-Reliant each offer something new: more depth, longer dives or more independence. A new card can feel like the finish line, and a few smooth dives in warm, clear water give little reason to think otherwise. We’ve all been there.

What tends to change the picture is technical training. Tec 40 sets a standard for buoyancy, trim, gas planning and teamwork that few recreational courses ask for, and it tends to reset your idea of what good diving looks like, at any depth. That’s why we recommend tec to everyone staying with us for 16 weeks or more, even if they have no plans to become tec divers. Enriched Air Nitrox is your first step towards it, and Tec 40 comes free with a 16-week stay.

Read about tec diving at MCP →

Add a speciality to your stay

Your training fits in around your conservation work, on the same reefs we survey and protect.

Apply to volunteer See all course prices →

Questions before you apply? Read our volunteering FAQ, browse all our PADI courses or take a look at the gear we dive with.