Each Friday during the school terms this year, Waitaki Girls’ High School year 12 student, Alex Campbell travels to Dunedin to attend a scuba diving course run by Dive Otago.

“The sky (or rather “the deep blue sea”) is the limit!!

Alex has a passion for water sports and regularly free-dives in her spare time. Last year in the school holidays she completed a Scuba Discovery course through Dive Otago and was keen to explore options to carry this on as part of her secondary schooling.

Alex and her family did some research and found that Dive Otago has a Gateway programme through which secondary school students can include diver education in their schooling, and WGHS agreed that Alex could incorporate the diving course into her timetable. The diving course requires a lot of specialist equipment and travel and isn’t subsidised by any current government training programme. Alex’s family have made a large commitment to enable Alex to participate in the diving course by paying most of the fees and also transporting Alex to Dunedin each week. WGHS has subsidised Alex’s fees to a small degree.

Alex recently completed the PADI (Professional Association of Diving Instructors) Advanced Open Water Course. This consisted of a deep dive (more than 18m under water), a boat dive, underwater navigation using her compass, “underwater naturalist” which involves looking for common marine organisms, and search and recovery. Alex's next course is the Rescue Course which involves rescue techniques such as recognising diving buddies in difficulty, signs of stress and then actually rescuing them, exiting the water and providing first aid. A very important aspect of learning to dive is to be aware of other divers and be able to provide assistance should someone get into difficulty. Alex is keen to continue developing her diving skills as she feels it will open up travel and work opportunities for her in the future. She hopes to complete the next level of diver education, the Divemaster course through Gateway next year.

Alex says “During this course I’ve made plenty of new friends, gained confidence and discovered another world under water. Doing a course like this means that both you and your family have to be fully committed especially if you live out of Dunedin, but it is fully worth the time and effort.”