Wreck Diver Course

As instructors we get to do lots of different diving. I love cave diving, photography, sidemount diving, deep diving, technical diving, shark diving, seal diving, the list goes on and on. But I have to say one of my favourite things to do is wreck diving…

One of the many perks of my job is that I get to teach all our wreck diving courses. Which means one weekend every month I get to travel up to Terrigal to do 2 days of diving (4 dives) on the ex HMS Adelaide wreck and teach a new group of divers their PADI Wreck Diving Specialty!

Many students start off the course having never dived a wreck before, so it’s pretty cool to see their faces the first time you drop down the mooring and the outline of a 130m+ war ship covered in growth and marine life comes into view.

During the course you learn a lot of different skills and techniques for wreck diving. The first few dives are all about orientating yourself with wrecks and exploring them safely while identifying and avoiding potential hazards. The second day is where the real fun begins…

In the afternoon after the first day (after some fish and chips) we will learn and practice using a reel. Learning techniques like correctly tying off the reel, keeping good buoyancy, running line inside and outside the wreck, finning techniques, following line, line emergency procedures and heaps more. All these things will not only let you penetrate wrecks and do it safely and correctly but you will be amazed by how much they also improve your overall diving ability.

Without a doubt, the wreck diver specialty is my favourite course to teach and it always leaves my students with huge smiles on their faces and I can definitely see the improvement in their confidence and diving ability over the two days.

I’ve been lucky enough to use my wreck diving skills on numerous dives on the Adelaide, local wrecks all over and around Sydney, in the Solomon Islands, Palau, Papua New Guinea and the wreck diving mecca; Truk Lagoon (which I have visited twice and even planning a return trip sometime soon=)).

It really is a course every diver should do, and it also counts to your PADI Master Scuba Diver.