Hi!
I'm visiting the last week of September with my husband and we are interested in taking one or maybe more PADI specialty courses. Deep, wreck, nitrox (either PADI or TDI nitrox) and maybe an underwater naturalist or peak bouyancy course are on our list. We are both AOW certified. Are there places that will combine specialties (like nitrox/wreck)? Any ideas/comments/recommendations/wisdom? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!

Although I usually do not place commercials for dive operators, when I was on Bonaire, I took the Nitrox specialty with Wannadive (http://www.wannadivehutbonaire.com/dive/)
I really enjoyed the relaxed way they provided the course. For Nitrox I was given the option to either do PADI or TDI. Most of the guys at Wannadive are multi-disciplined so you can choose both the specialty AND the organisation (PADI, TDI,...)

Ask for Bob (actually Roeland) of Roger.
(And if you do, send them my regards! :-)

Grtz & HaPpY dIvInG


Michael

Wannadive recently had a deal of a good price for nitrox for the week along with the certification.

Bonaire has a truly outstanding naturalist named Jerry Ligon, with a well-earned reputation as a teacher and guide for both reef life and birds. I would jump at the chance to take any classes from him. Check his name on Google.

Personally I recommend RecTek Scuba, NV owned andoperated by Walt Stark (PADI/TDI and Lord knows what else). He is qualified to teach the longest list of Specialties I have ever seen and his instruction is one on one....visit his site at http://www.rectekscuba.com

I would recommend his Ice Diver Course, however the fees (as they include round trip fare to Antartica) are just a tad steep.

It sounds to me as if the person who posted this question wants to know if there are shops that will do more than one cert course concurrently - ie, Nitrox/Wreck together.

If that's the case, I don't have the answer. You're probably best off contacting a bunch of them (most have email addresses I think) and asking.

If that's not the case, then I recommend Capt. Don's instructors. We took the Nitrox course with Karen (a referral, but she still made sure we went over everything in the book before we got wet). At some point we'll want to take the rebreather course with Walt, though.

I think you'll find that many advanced courses will end up being pretty much one-on-one, since they aren't scheduled, but tend to be on an on-demand basis.

We need an instructor to answer the concurrent issue. I believe you can't apply one dive to multiple courses so you can't do one wreck/nitrox/naturalist dive and have it count for 3 dives. However, I bet you could have several courses going at once and apply each dive to the appropriate course - 1st dive of the day is deep, 2nd dive maybe nitrox, 3rd dive to night, etc.

Nitrox can be "piggybacked" on other specialties but that's it for PADI. SDI allows the computer diving specialty to be piggybacked on the deep specialty, but that's it for SDI. I don't know about the other agencies.

Bonaire Dive and Adventure (Formerly Sanddollar) offered alot of flexibility in their instruction. They also have a special on their PADI Peak Buoyancy for about $35, which includes the two tanks and weights (A steal on a PADI specialty).

My wife and I both completed AOWs with them and Fish IDs and Peak Buoyancy specialties and they combined some of her specialty dives into the AOW for the most efficient completion of both. They also ran the classes exclusively for us, at our pace which is really nice.