Wednesday, March 15, 2017

New Year, New Dive Sites and what has been going on since the last time we posted a blog?

I know, I know, we haven't been posting blogs like we should have been and I am fully responsible for this, considering I am the only one that has the information on how to get to our site and post anything. My bad!

As most of you know, as of last May 2016, Brian was let go from the Dive Center. I, (the owner Michele) and Brian had different views on how a situation was handled, therefore had no alternative but to ask him to quit the dive center and stop being our service tech and instructing for the center as well. It was best for all parties involved. Some of you were present on this day and it is now back to being a fun and crazy shop once more. Morale has improved and we welcomed Aaron Webster into the fold to take over duties of the technical service repairman. He is fitting in very well. If you haven't met him yet or seen the dive center in the last year, stop by on a Saturday and you might get to be introduced and check out what we have done with the classroom. That's us, always changing things up.

As far as instruction goes, I am unable to teach very much, if at all.:-( We have a great instructor to take up the slack and most of you have had the pleasure to be in his class already. Bradley Tonner had been helping with classes for Brian, at the beginning of last year and now is the full-time instructor for us. His teaching ethics are similar to the way Michele teaches and this produces confident divers that we are proud to have our names on their certification cards. It's always been said "You get what you pay for" and this is certainly true with our certification courses. Ask any one of our students, we will do what we need to in order to make you a confident diver, ready to go anywhere in the world and dive without the safety net of your instructor or Divemaster. From the first day in class, we treat you like a part of the family, as dysfunctional/functional as that may seem. HaHaHa We are sure it can't been any worse than your own dysfunctional/functional family.

If you haven't liked our page on Facebook yet, go and do so now. We try to keep you all up to date of the classes and trips that we have scheduled throughout each month. We recently did a dive to Jupiter, FL and everyone had an an absolute blast. You can look it up on Facebook for all of the pictures. We will try to start going back and diving Epcot's Dive Quest again. We have had some interest on this group trip again so that will be coming soon. Possibly in April, we just have to see what dates are available. We will be having an additional instructor joining up with us this year and we should be able to offer more trips down south for those of you who haven't gotten a chance to get out there with us yet, so look for these trips in the upcoming months. Brad has a trip coming up to Cozumel in April 2017. If you haven't heard about this trip yet, shoot us an e-mail or give us a call and we can give you all the details. I believe space is still available but April is right around the corner so you'll have to join up ASAP. I believe the trip total should be right around $1400 with airfare and all-inclusive resort.

Other than that, it was a pretty slow winter season. We fared the October Hurricane Matthew pretty well. A bit of flooding, OK a lot of flooding in the building but we didn't loose anything. All in all, it was not as bad as it could of been. Thank goodness for that. We are very glad we can still provide for the community and divers. With the election complete, it's time to start thinking about getting friends to get certified so you all can have built in dive buddies for all of your diving pleasure. You don't want to be the one that doesn't have a buddy so the dive charter puts you with someone who doesn't remember their training and hasn't dived since last season. Wait...maybe that is you? Oh my goodness, give us a call to get you back on track with a refresher course to help you remember. Can you remember how much weight you needed during class? What was that? You can't remember???? This is why you need a refresher so you don't have to waste time figuring it out as soon as you get into the water and now you are drifting away from the group and you will never find the group. Always better to be safe then sorry. We don't want to see anyone get hurt. Join us on a dive or three per year, even if it is just to keeps your skills up and #DiveDiveDive

Thanks for reading and Happy Diving.