A few days ago I finished my Advanced PADI certification, taken from Scuba Education Amsterdam. I figured I’d blog about my experiences since it was quite tough to find English websites and information on diving and PADI education in Holland.

Roel Suk and his merry group have been quite fun to go diving with, and they’ve been very accommodating to me, given I’m the only non-Dutch speaker there. Also from talking to a friend that went to a different local Amsterdam dive school, Roel takes you to many more varied and interesting dive sites than another company (who always went to the same place). We went diving in Oosterschelde to learn to dive in currents, Scharendijke to try and do a navigation dive, Vinkeveen for more navigation dive training, Oostvoorne for a deep dive, search skills, and how to rescue heavy objects from the bottom of the lake. We went back to Vinkeveen at sunset for a final night dive.

At times it was a little disorganized, but I’m sure herding and training that many people is always a challenge. All in all, I’ve had a great time. I’ll be going back in a few weeks for my Nitrox certification with them.

And as many have said, if you can dive in Holland, you can dive anywhere! Doing a search / navigation dive when there’s less than 1 meter visibility really shows you know how to read a compass. On one dive, three of us descended straight down simultaneously about 8 meters, and couldn’t find each other when we hit the bottom. Those be challenging diving conditions!