Just looking for some advice, me and my partner would like to learn so we can both dive in Rhodes Greece.

I’d probably like to do some UK dives but don’t think my other half is too keen on diving here unless she has to.

Missus has never tried it before but is competent at snorkeling and I did a try dive when I was 16, enjoyed it mostly apart from a slight bit of ear pain.

We have a padi diving centre five minutes walk away (Canary Divers) and two fairly local bsac clubs Darwen and Chorley.

Which is the best way to go, not in a rush to learn but would like to.

I learned out in Asia earlier this year, did the padi theory online before I went, then a couple of days diving in nice warm tropical waters on holiday. I had no interest in diving in a cold miserable gravel pit or in cold murky British waters.

I went with PADI. Did my pool work and theory in the U.K. and completed Open Water abroad. Then came baxk and did Advanced and Rescue in this country.

U.K. diving (sea diving) was pretty good – especially in summer but we did have some January diving in scotland. I’ve never fresh-water dived yet.

Have a chat with whichever place seems like they’re a good bunch. Remember your life could be in their hands so find a club you trust

Do the padi course, the BSAC always used to be more in-depth and perhaps aimed at the more enthusiastic? Although cheap and cheerful Padi is perfectly applicable to basic holiday diving, imho. I did padi up to Rescue, didn’t want to do Divemaster, but at that sort of level BSAC would be a good choice.

The PADI/BSAC debate will make a wheel size debate look insignificant. The reality is that both have their strengths and weaknesses.

If you only planning on holiday diving I’d go for a PADI course. Do the school and pool work in the UK then do the sea dives on holiday. They have well planned courses and good consistency.

If you want to make it a hobby then a bsac club can be good. Most will have a weekly pool session with training and skills practice and then weekend trips away, heavily weather dependent. There are big differences between clubs though. It’ll take longer but bsac divers are well respected around the world.

Don’t expect the diving to be great in Rhodes. The Med is generally crap for diving and is over-fished and has little to see.

Try and do your qualifications in the UK. The instructor is far more important than the organisation but generally I’d say BSAC is the better bet unless you are into high fives.

To be fair there was loads of fish when we went snorkeling  in Anthony Quinn bay in Rhodes they were everywhere.

I like the idea of bsac being a learn at your own pace,  is it recognised abroad?  And seems slightly more affordable.

I’m open to the idea of UK dives don’t think other half would be.

Also would high blood pressure stop me doing it?  It’s well controlled with meds.

bsac divers are well respected around the world.

Ha ha ha! Oh wait, are you serious???

You won’t get BSAC training completed this side of the new year and that’s if you get a decent club. Many clubs are not decent by any stretch of the imagination.

For holiday diving PADI is fine, as previously said do the theory in the UK and the dives somewhere nice and warm. If you like it, it may be worth joining a BSAC club to continue your education but not a necessity. You need to find a decent club though.

UK diving is an acquired taste, especially after the clear waters of the Med.

FWIW, I started with PADI up to AOW, did Advanced Recreational Trimix with IANTD, Fundies with GUE and Rebreather MOD1 with TDI. My local BSAC club wanted me to start again from scratch even with the Trimix ticket!

I like the idea of bsac being a learn at your own pace

It’s more common that you have to learn at their pace, which can be glacial.

Also would high blood pressure stop me doing it?  It’s well controlled with meds.

You’d need a medical from a diving doc clearing you to dive.

The Med is generally crap for diving and is over-fished and has little to see.

Bollocks. There are some fantastic places around Spain, and I’m pretty sure the rest of the Med is the same.

Anyway, I’d do the theory part in the UK, then do the practical bit somewhere warm. If you want recommendations for some decent dive schools in the south of Spain let me know.

If you’re near Northampton a good mate of mine is Diving Occifer at one of the better BSAC clubs in the country.

Given that N’hampton is the furthest place from the sea in the UK, do they spent a lot of time at Stoney Cove ??

Not as much as you’d think; they have two ribs, one permanently based in Weymouth and they do quite a few hard boat dives as well.

I also would recommend a PADI referral, do the classwork and pool dives in the UK with a good instructor who gives you the time in the pool to nail the skills, save the fun bit for the warm water. the PADI and BSAC syllabuses are so similar it’s really not a big issue, the quality of the instruction outweighs the system.

Learn to dive in the UK…if you can dive here you can dive anywhere. I really enjoyed UK diving, there is alot to see, but then again depends what you want to see. If you want to see bright coral fish then you might struggle in UK waters…but then alot of the diving at coral reefs is being restricted and when I dove the Barrier Reef it was very restricted and as a result of the sheer concentration of tourist divers in a small handful of spots there was not a huge amount to see.

I was BSAC and the training I received was very thorough and alot more serious than the PADI training I received, but that will depend more on the club than the qualification…my club was made up of mostly ex-Navy types so they took a very military approach to the training, including stuff like what to do if your regulator is ripped out of your mouth or your air line is severed (I swear a couple of the guys were ex SBS or something)…not quite in the syllabus, but worthwhile knowing just in case you ever get attacked by a knife wilding Bond villain in the depths. But then again I once go out of the water and into the boat after a dive and as soon as I got out my reg line blew off from the regulator union, so if that had happened in the water it would have been interesting.

I’d say it will be easier for you to just do PADI if all your interested in is recreational diving on holiday…it’s much more internationally recognised…the number of times I had to explain what BSAC was on holiday and pull out all my log books and documentation it would have been easier to have the much more internationally recognised PADI qualification.

But alas I gave it all up when kids came along. It’s a great sport/hobby, but very time consuming and makes mountain biking seem like a cheap hobby. I suspect only Polo is a more expensive hobby.

My nearest  is chorley bsac which seems quite a good setup.  I’m interested in UK diving as there is some interesting looking dive sites the local bsac goes to.  And the initial cost does seem cheaper.  £250 rather than stumping up £400 up front.

The dive centre in Rhodes is a ssi which is five minutes walk from the hotel we stop at. Whereas the nearest padi one is 20 miles away in Rhodes town.

Might just be now as I think my other half would be medically unfit as she suffers from trigimenal neuralgia which is set off by stress,  wind and when the plane does a fast descent,  last year she was fine,  2016 she was in agony for 5 days out of a ten day holiday,  after a very fast descent into Rhodes popped her ear.

The Med is generally crap for diving

Last time I checked, the world renowned dive sites around the  islands of Malta and Gozo were still in the med…

PADI Divemaster (lapsed, haven’t “Put Another Dollar In” for a while) here. Above recommendations for doing your theory in UK and finishing off abroad are good. If you’ve got time to get your qualification dives in the uk, more the better.

In my experience BSAC teach you to be a proper roughty toughty, self suffient  diver, but it takes ages. PADI teach you enough that you won’t kill yourself doing something daft.

Bear in mind the PADI courses etc teach you the bare minimum of skill’s you’ll need if you want to dive as a hobby.  I did AOW and Nitrox etc but I didn’t feel anything like prepared enough to dive in the sea,  Maybe thats just me or a lack of confidence in the instructors (they regularly went in for a second dive at Stoney Cove with only 50 bar remaining as the school wouldn’t pay for their fills).

But its true to say that if you learn to dive in cold water in the UK you’ll be way above most other warm water only divers in terms of skill levels.

At the end of the day learning to dive is about knowing how to deal with things when it all goes tits up.

I learnt to dive via BSAC,  mainly because MIL is a instructor.

No point in going into a BSAC/PADI debate, but I found bsac method very thorough and gave me confidence before I commited to deeper stuff and the sea etc. I learnt in a winter diving in UK quarries obviously using a dry suit, etc. So when I did my first dive in the Red sea it felt like a piece of cake in comparison! So if you can learn in the UK will give you a lot of skills but this takes time.

My other 2p’s worth is regardless how you learn is not to rush things through, and get the basics right like bouyancy and been familiar with your kit and also if you can dive with the same buddy as I felt that helped a lot.

Last time I checked, the world renowned dive sites around the islands of Malta and Gozo were still in the med…

I did say generally and was referring to the marine life which I stand by but yes there are exceptions. Malta & Gozo are great but it is more about the stunning geology of the sites (shame about the loss of the Azure Window) as well as the WWII wrecks. There’s life there but it is the small stuff.

Northern Spain around Roses & the Medes Islands are protected sites and as such have an abundance of stuff to see and is well worth seeing visiting both above & below the water.

Cyprus has the fabulous Zenobia wreck but nothing much else. Much of Greece & Italy is like that too in my experience.

I did my OW in Cyprus. I think I saw 1 fish and 2 Sea Cucumbers in 5 dives…

Loads of bloody Urchins though.

Initially trained with BSAC, then ended up doing Advanced OW with PADI and have had good and bad experiences of both. The first BSAC club I was in was hopeless, the instructors were pretty much in it exclusively for the kudos of being an instructor and could hardly ever be bothered to do any actual instructing as it got in the way of their pleasure diving. The second club I was in was much better and the instructors were all keen to help divers push on with their training. With PADI there’s the reputation for just wanting to churn out trained divers in order to get the money, but again depends on the school/instructors. I’ve seen bad ones, but all the diving I’ve done has been with good ones.

Can definitely recommend going down the referral course route, as it’ll let you get the theory and pool work out of the way before you go abroad. And British diving can be great, a lot of people write it off without trying it as cold, gloomy and miserable, but it’s not (always).

My local BSAC club wanted me to start again from scratch even with the Trimix ticket!

That’s nuts. I’m AOW qualified (learnt in Greece then West Indies) with wreck penetrations to my name and I’ve been chatting to a friend who dives regularly with a BSAC club; she seems to think there are crossover qualifications should I want to start diving in the UK. As above, I believe the syllabuses aren’t hugely different, but BSAC seems to be more enthusiast-led (which can be a blessing and a curse) whereas PADI is – I believe – a US commercial system you buy into (very happy to be corrected on this), but pretty decent nonetheless.

…including stuff like what to do if your regulator is ripped out of your mouth…

I nearly had this inside a wreck down at around 30m. Reg hooked on an obstruction while swimming up a stairwell. I managed to bite into it before it was torn out, then I had to feel back to find cause. That was an interesting few minutes. 🙂

Yes, there are crossovers but the local club weren’t interested in even discussing them. I also pointed out that I was only joining to dive, not train and they still insisted.

Not all clubs are the same though.

You want the very best training available? With extremely high, very consistent standards? GUE REC1 is what you want. 6 days (I think, it may be more) and a vast sum of money but it’s what I’d pay for if my son wanted to learn to dive.

You’d be better of discussing this on a diving forum though; http://www.thediveforum.com or http://www.ukdivers.com

including stuff like what to do if your regulator is ripped out of your mouth or your air line is severed (I swear a couple of the guys were ex SBS or something)…not quite in the syllabus

Do current PADI and BSAC not teach how to retrieve a lost regulator anymore? That’s not a complicated thing. Not really “SBS” stuff.

By the way, apart from switching to a different set or an octopus, what do you do when you severe an airline? Is this the Bond villain who is busy cutting your hoses?

I’d breath off my buddy as a cut hose would empty your cylinder fairly quickly.  Once you are calm then you can get the cut hose, fold it over to stop the gas escaping then assess how much you have left to see if its worth switching back to your own octo.  Controlled ascent with a safety stop at 6m if you have the gas for it.

Do current PADI and BSAC not teach how to retrieve a lost regulator anymore? That’s not a complicated thing. Not really “SBS” stuff.

No, not retrieving a lost regulator….when someone comes up from behind without you knowing and rips it out of your mouth. It is more about managing panic and surprise and keeping a cool head rather than simply retrieving your regulator…which is one of the first things you learn. Oh and I forgot about the ripping the mask off your face too. Again putting on a mask underwater is taught, but not the ripping it off your face part. Not essential learning but all good fun though…I suppose.

A referral course would be my recommendation too.  It saves doing the theory and pool work while you are holiday.  While PADI and SSI qualifications are very interchangeable, you will probably struggle to do a referral with the PADI classroom and poolwork in the UK and then the open water dives with a SSI school abroad.  I think it can be done but when I looked into it in the past PADI weren’t very happy with it.   From what I have seen SSI is a bit more flexible in it’s training methods than PADI, but pretty much the same curriculum.

I learnt to dive years ago with a UK PADI school, while the instruction was good I don’t think I really learnt to dive properly.  The open water dives were just about doing the skills in a very murky lake and then heading to the surface. A decent dive school abroad will make the skills part of a proper open water dive.  Although looking back I have learnt a lot more about diving by just diving then any of the courses I have taken.

I have been lucky to dive in lots of places around the world (just back from two weeks in the Red Sea, and heading back later this year for a liveaboard) and have seen good and bad divers from all training agencies.

I have you thought about both doing a try-a-dive with your local shop/club before you commit to an open water course to make sure you are both happy under water?

Yeah both booked on a try dive with bsac then it’s 145 for bsac and club membership with the try dive cost knocked off.

Will also do a padi try dive also see which way we’d like to go.

Having worked as a PADI DM and then instructor in Thailand for a few years (quite a few years ago now!). I’d say go<span style=”font-size: 0.8rem;”> down the PADI route if all you are thinking of doing is some recreational diving.</span>

I did my initial UK training with BSAC, and found it incredibly slow moving and mired in old school attitudes….though I know some who have loved their BSAC clubs, so I just had a bad one I think.

You may find that PADI is more internationally recognised than BSAC. But most decent outfits will know and recognise all the major dive certifications.

Unless you’re in France. They don’t recognise any but the French qualifucation, at least for the higher quali levels. I know French PADI instructors who couldn’t work in France unless they retrained!

PADI here, OW in New Zealand, Advanced in Oz and then Rescue in NZ. Never dived in the UK but I would guess the conditions are not dissimilar to NZ, the coastline around Wellington can best be described as diving in a washing machine. Diving in less favourable conditions can arguably make you better prepared for things going wrong than learning in 30m visibility, so probably no harm in doing something locally before you go.

To be fair there was loads of fish when we went snorkeling in Anthony Quinn bay in Rhodes they were everywhere.

The only place that I’ve ever seen a moray eel. It was in a large rock pool (and wasn’t very big). I saw nothing when I went snorkelling there after lunch. A long time ago, though..

There was plenty when we went and the water was very warm. Had to walk through a shoal of fish getting in.

I’ve been thinking about taking up scuba diving to replace mountain biking, as at the moment i just seem to spend the whole time mostly being broken due to crashing…..

I guess scuba is safer, well, until it kills you, i guess??  lol!

The serious incidents I have experienced during dives were down exclusively to people diving without regard to the safety procedures inherent to the activity. Nothing negative happens for dozens of dives, people get lax and then shtf… I was a bit anal about checks etc so managed without incidents. Fail to Prepare – Prepare to Fail, as they say.

I’ve been thinking about taking up scuba diving to replace mountain biking, as at the moment i just seem to spend the whole time mostly being broken due to crashing…..

I guess scuba is safer, well, until it kills you, i guess??  lol!

I swapped Scuba for eMTB. The diving was getting more and more dangerous and it was getting harder to hide that from the wife.

Last year was a trip to Croatia diving wrecks in 60m. This year would have been a trip to Malin Head diving wrecks in 75-90m. One day I just decided that the rewards didn’t justify the risks.

The first answer (or two) had it nailed. It really doesn’t matter if you do PADI or otherwise. It’s far more important that the instructors and subsequent dive leaders are good.

We did out PADI OW over a decade ago in Indonesia. We did the whole thing there including the theory. It’s easy and a beer on a tropical beach while learning how to use a bottom time calculator is hardly a chore.

As someone who only dives when they’re on holiday and the water looks warm enough, I’d recommend whichever is more accessible for you. People do get complacent and forget that diving can actually be dangerous but coping with issues is more about experience than the thickness of the textbook you’ve learnt from.

Mifey and I have done more than 100 dives now (she’s beating me by 10-20) and have coped with a blown octopus, broken fin, broken mask and burst ear drum. PADI and experience prepared us for this perfectly.

We’ve continued to use PADI for NoX, Advanced OW and

One of the reasons I stopped diving was the fact that when you do your various drill in the pool you always know whats coming so you can take a nice deep breath.  If you are calm you could hold that for a minute, maybe more.  If you are in open water and your reg gets ripped out of your mouth you may have just exhaled and have no air in your lungs.  Try and see how long you can hold your breath for now…

A lot of what stopped me was cost. Having to rent / borrow equipment; make do with 2nd or 3rd best kit; if something went wrong you were reliant on someone else having to look after you (because you couldn’t afford to have a light AND a marker buoy to show where you’d surfaced so the boat could see you)

in biking, having a bling stem or carbon bars or invisiframe won’t be necessary to save your life. In scuba – everything you carry is something you may need and it just got a bit too concerning when your kit wasn’t up to scratch