PADI Courses
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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What is PADI?
PADI, the Professional Association of Diving Instructors, was founded in 1966 and is the world’s largest recreational scuba training organisation. It sets the standards instructors follow, publishes course materials and certifies divers when they complete a course. Dive centres and instructors pay an annual membership fee to teach PADI courses.
Your PADI certification never expires, and dive centres all over the world recognise it, so the card you earn with us lets you dive anywhere. Skills do fade if you stay out of the water for a long time, so after a long break a refresher is a sensible idea. That is one difference from a scientific diving qualification, which has to be renewed every few years and kept active.
Why we teach PADI
There are many scuba training agencies. We chose PADI for its worldwide recognition and excellent safety record. That record is partly down to clear, well-tested course materials and a strict quality assurance programme: instructors who fail to follow PADI’s standards and safety rules can lose their membership.
PADI’s approach also suits the way we train. The course materials are easy to follow, come in many languages and cover what you need for your level, no more and no less. The idea is to get you in the water as soon as possible, because that is where you learn to dive. Training is performance-based: people learn differently, and once you have mastered a skill, you move on to the next.
PADI courses as a volunteer
At MCP, scuba training is part of volunteering with us, alongside your scientific diving training. As a volunteer, you pay only the PADI manual and certification fee, 65 or 85 USD per course. Your gear, transport, marine park fees and tuition are all included.
You can take one PADI course for each four-week period of your stay. We add extra training dives to every course, so ours take a little longer than at a typical dive shop.
Digital, not plastic
PADI has moved its course materials online, and we welcome the change. You receive the materials digitally, so you can start studying for your Open Water course on your way to the Philippines. Your certification comes as an eCard in the PADI App, rather than a plastic card sent halfway around the world.