Earth Day during our Whale Shark week April 23, 2010
Posted by gstoyle in Uncategorized.Tags: Earth Day, Honduras, IDC, IE, PADI Instructor course, utila, Whale sharks
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Whale Shark week…. sightings every day!!!!
Whale shark sighted at Blackhills with sonar tag
It’s been a very exciting week on Utila and there have been daily Whale Shark sightings all over the North and East sides of the island. In the last week there have been several Whale Shark sightings all day long, also accompanied with Manta Rays and several Dolphin sightings on the boat rides, even our April Instructor group who had been studying hard the last 2 weeks were rewarded in their Monday fun dive with a sighting. This magnificent Whale shark was photographed by PADI Instructor Michael Bichsel, during a surface interval at Blackhills dive site on the East side of Utila, on April 18th. It was estimated to be 40-45ft/12-13mt long. What’s interesting with this photo is the Whale shark has a SPOT (Smart Position Only Tag) tag attached to it, and you can actually track this creatures movements on this site http://www.seaturtle.org/tracking/?tag_id=50768. This data is collected by scientists to further their understanding of the Whale sharks movement and behaviours.
As yesterday was Earth Day is seems fitting that we are reminded this week of the beauty that the Oceans provide us, and just how dependent we are upon them for survival and enjoyment. This year we have been working with PADI’s Project Aware and the University of Queensland, on their Coral Watch program, and UDC Instructor Madeline Thiebauld has been working hard with our Divemasters to survey corals around the island on a weekly basis and upload the data to the UofQ coral database. This data will also help us on a local level to determine the state of corals at certain dive sites and how we can best protect them.
Another outstanding performance from our April Instructor candidates!!!!!
Now we're Instructors!!!!
Congratulations to our April Instructor candidates and IDC staff from Utila, at the completion of the PADI Instructor Exams at the Mango Inn pool celebrating their success and continuing our success rate in 2010. You see many smiling faces in this photo, taken at 5pm on Wednesday 21st April, and rightly so as all our candidates worked so hard to reach this milestone in their dive careers, now the faces on Thursday am told a different story after an amazing party night and celebration!
Semana Santa and UDC Management travel to Mexico for further training/exploration April 15, 2010
Posted by gstoyle in Uncategorized.Tags: andy phillips, cave diving, frank gutierrez, padi idc, side mount, utila
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As our regular writer and Instructor Sam Wilson has been busy teaching and preparing for an upcoming trip to the UK I have been presented with the opportunity to add some news to the blog, so whilst I don’t have Sam’s professional writing ability, I figured I’d supplement this entry with some cool pics!
There’s been quite a bit of actionrecently at Utila Dive Centre and off the island. March was one of our busiest months of the year due to the Latin America holiday of Semana Santa (Easter week). The island was very busy, and at UDC we hired a few more Instructors for the week to keep our class sizes small and to everyone’s satisfaction. We also finished our March IDC/IE which ended in success and you can see many happy faces below.
March Instructor course 2010 ends in success
As we entered April we started our April IDC and Guillermo started another Tec Deep course, which has proven to be very popular this year since PADI made revisions to the program, and allowed it to be more modular, and introduce decompression diving at an earlier stage. The end of the course was followed by an infamous G house party, for which the photos have been censored!
Myself and our Manager Frank Gutierrez took a well deserved (I know, modesty modesty!) vacation to Mexico with the goal of getting trained in side mount cave diving and enjoying some exploring of remoter cave systems few had seen before. We had both already been trained in back mount cave diving so this was an Advanced level course to train us to enter more restrictive cave systems with a more stream lines equipment configuration. We both had an amazing time, and trained with friends at Protec training facility in Playa Del Carmen, and a big thanks to our Instructor Nando, and Matt, Patrick and Mauro for their support, encouragement and sharing cave systems with us that few had seen before and were off the beaten track. In addition to the training course we spent several days with our rental truck visiting remoter cave systems, and pushing the boundaries of our experience, whilst recognizing our new limitations. I’ve not yet figured out how to imbed the videos here but you can visit the link for an example of what we were doing .
Frank entering Dos Pisos
Stalactite decorations from ceiling
Our plan now is to take the training we received, and integrate side mount configurations into our technical dive courses on Utila, and add more options for our technical dive students, though you won’t have to carry the tanks the way we had to at times.
Never complain about carrying tanks again!
Looking ahead to next month our thoughts and best wishes are with two of our senior Instructors, Fernando and Maya as they travel to Denmark and Spain to get married on May 15th and we look forward to seeing them back here.
Thanks for your time and best wishes for now.
Warm regards,
Andy
