Much of Mark’s work in scuba diving over the past few years has been devoted to assisting more people with handicaps to try scuba diving and become certified, as well as training fellow dive professionals to work with scuba divers with handicaps. Mark is actually a wheelchair user himself after an accident in 2005 left him confined to a wheelchair. He had just left university and been certified as a PADI Instructor, however did not let the wheelchair stop him and continued to teach PADI courses and take more instructor-level certifications until he attained the rank of PADI Course Director, the highest rating of dive professional that you can hold in PADI. He contends that actually in the water he is better than many of his able bodied peers and loves to pass the gift of scuba diving on to other in similar conditions. Read more about learning to work with scuba divers with disabilities below by clicking on the article thumbnails.

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Into The Blue (2005)

Starring: Paul Walker, Jessica Alba, Scott Caan, Josh Brolin

Fools Gold (2008)

Starring: Matthew Mcconaughey, Kate Hudson, Donald Sutherland, Ewen Bremner

Thunderball (1965)

Starring: Sean Connery, Adolfo Celi

The Cave (2005)

Starring: Cole Hauser, Daniel Dae Kim, Piper Perabo

The Abyss (1989)

Starring: Ed Harris, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Michael Biehn

Dark Tide (2012)

Starring: Halle Berry

Men of Honor (2000)

Starring: Cuba Gooding Jr, Robert De Niro, Charlize Theron,

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Mark is himself a wheelchair user following an accident in 2005 when he was a PADI Open Water Scuba Instructor having just graduated from Newcastle University. He didn’t let being a paraplegic stop him and rose through the PADI teaching levels, teaching hundreds of students and eventually becoming a PADI Course Director meaning that he can train other divers to become PADI dive instructors. Mark has now made it one of his missions in life to help as many people in his position get into scuba diving and see the wonders that it can offer people. He points out that in the water he is the same if not better than able-bodied people and wants to train as many instructors as possible to work with disabled divers so that they have more options and places to dive around the world.

It is not just Mark saying this now. Scuba diving has been recognised as a valid rehabilitation sport for people following an injury and has been adopted for recovering US military veterans through the Soldiers Undertaking Disabled Scuba (SUDS) and other diving for the disabled programs such as Deptharapy in the UK.

Contact Buccaneer Diving for your diving for the disabled experience or if you are a diving instructor wanting to learn to work with disabled divers then check out our Disabled Divers International Instructor course training program which is run with Mark.

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Brief History

The vessel MV Dania, started its career as the MV Rodriguez and was built and launched in Hatlow, Norway in 1965 and registered to the Honduran port of San Lorenzo in Central America. She was used in Central America until the mid-1980s when she was moved to ply the Gulf and East African trade routes. She was renamed in 1993 and converted into a carrier for livestock to move cattle between the Southern African countries of Mozambique and South Africa and the island of Mauritius.

The MV Dania was decommissioned in 2001 and due to be taken to India. Buccaneer Diving proposed that the vessel be sunk as an artificial reef. The ship was then put into a private berth in Mombasa, Kenya in June 2002, where it was subjected to stripping, cutting sealing and cleaning to prepare it for sinking, free of contaminants and diver friendly. Once preparations were completed they were inspected and approved by Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) biologists so that the sinking could go ahead.

The Sinking

On Sunday 25th October 2002 the ship was towed to the designated site, which was located 1.5 km off Bamburi Beach, positioned outside the natural reef. Once in position the Dania was scuppered and slipped beneath the waves at 13:05. The ship landed in a straight-up position and was fitted with marker bouys and moorings for boats to attach to rather than anchoring. In addition an “isolate danger buoy” was positioned over the centre of the vessel and cautionary buoys mark the fore and aft of the reef.

Watch the video of the sinking below and contact us to arrange your dive on the Dania when you come to Kenya.

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Our carefully structured dive career internships give you the skills and experience to come out a well rounded dive professional, with a qualification that you can use anywhere in the world that there is water to dive in. Obviously this gives you images of trivial destinations but you can also use them in colder water as well. It is a license to work wherever you want.

Dive Pro Africa @ Buccaneer Diving offer scuba diving professional internships to the levels of PADI Divemaster and PADI Open Water Scuba Instructor. For those of you who want to become even more qualified as a PADI Instructor the. We offer the instructor continuing education internships to the level of PADI Master Scuba Diver Trainer and PADI IDC Staff Instructor.

The internships also include other skills that you might require as a dive instructor such as basic web design to promote yourself, and job seeking assistance to help you look for work when you have completed your internship. They include a range of special diver courses so you learn different types of diving and find out which types of diving truly interest you such as wreck diving, underwater photography or search and recovery diving.

Africa is a fantastic place to do your diver training and begin your diving career. There is so much to do, both near our dive bases in Kenya and Zanzibar and further inland, from African wildlife safaris, adventure sports, climbing the mountains of Mt. Kilimanjaro and Mt. Kenya, and much more.

If you would like to qualify yourself in a range of activities then it is also possible to do wildlife management or sailing internships alongside your diving internship with internship partners Ol Pejeta Conservancy and sailing school 3 Degrees South.

Embrace the chance to work in paradise. Check out our different scuba internship packages today.

The post Make a career change to scuba diving for the best job in the world appeared first on Dive Pro Africa.

Ol Pejeta is one of the leading conservation movements responsible for a number of innovations in conservation such as the present move to include aerial drones to combat poaching.

The experiences are really worth doing an can be included as a full internship or as an add on to one of the other scuba diving internships available at Buccaneer Diving. Check out the Wildlife Management internship or contact us for more details. Make your GAP year, career break or long vacation more diverse and add experience to your resume by enrolling on this program and helping to conserve the wildlife of Africa for future generations.

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In addition to the fabulous array of wildlife on land, Kenya also has a plentiful underwater eco-system with protected coral reefs and marine life in its National Marine Parks. All of these are located within short boat rides from the resorts located on the Kenyan coasts. As well as coral reef diving, there is also the opportunity to cavern dive at Vuma near Kilifi and wreck dive on the purpose-sunk MV Dania.

So when you are at the coast it is an ideal opportunity to learn to scuba dive or at least go snorkeling to sample the underwater world. But scuba diving offers you the opportunity to go even deeper than just seeing the life from the surface. You are in a weightless environment like an astronaut in space and can enjoy the underwater world to the full.

Learning to dive on a PADI Open Water Diver course can be done at any one of Buccaneer Diving’s bases located on the north and south coasts. The course can be done in 3-4 days and includes a session in the classroom, pool training and then 4 dives in e ocean actually seeing the life. After this you have a licence to dive with a buddy anywhere in the world, independent of a dive professional.

If you are worried about wasting time in the classroom on your holiday thn you can do the majority of the dive theory online before you even come to Kenya, via PADI eLearning. This means that you can spend the bulk of your time doing what you really want to and that is actually diving. Also the ocean dives do not take up the whole day as they do in other countries due to the fact the coral reefs are located so close to the main shore in Kenya. So yo can do whatever you want in the afternoons following the dives in the morning.

Just to note if you have done a PADI Discover Scuba Diving experience within the last year or earned a PADI Scuba Diver rating or referral, then this can be counted towards the Open Water training and save you more time and money. So what are you waiting for? Get certified on your vacation at the Kenyan coast. You will not regret it.

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Gap years have changed over the past few years with regard to the prospects that they can offer people in terms of life experiences. To benefit your future prospects, it is no longer acceptable to just go and have fun travelling around. Colleges and employers like to see that you have used your time in another country and culture effectively. Well we looked at this and decided that there is no reason that you cannot do something worthwhile and have an awesome experience at the same time.

Dive Pro Africa @ Buccaneer Diving offer a variety of internship packages and adventure experiences with our partners at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy area near Nanyuki and 3 Degrees South sailing school in Kilifi. All of these projects involve interaction the local community and involvement in marine conservation, assisting with tourism program’s or wildlife management conservation in Kenya.

All of our program’s are based around a core scuba diving program, many of which allow you to go to the professional levels of PADI Divemaster or diving instructor. Many PADI courses can be counted towards college credit in certain countries and professional qualifications such as minor teaching qualifications.

The courses are based out of the Buccaneer Diving dive bases in Kenya and Zanzibar, Tanzania unless you are involved in the wildlife management program, in which case a period of your internship will be spent on Ol Pejeta Consevancy working with the African wildlife there including rhinos and chimpanzees.

The diving in East Africa is superb with a number of national marine park sanctuaries. There is a massive array of marine life which includes the giant whale sharks at certain times of the year. Buccaneer Doving also sank a former cargo ship the MV Dania to create Kenya’s first wreck dive in 2003, Wah now after 10 years underwater is a rolling wreck dive and artificial reef.

The other wonders in Kenya and Tanzania are also a great reason to base yourself here for your GAP year. To name a couple there are the numerous wildlife havens such as the Serengeti, Ngorongoro Crater, Masai Mara and Aberdare national parks, adventure sports activities such as white water rafting, mountain biking, and mountaineering to the walkable peaks of Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya, and of course interaction with the local people. There really is too much to do to list it all here.

So what are you waiting for? Do something awesome and worthwhile with your year out and check it our internship packages for the adventure of a lifetime in Africa.

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