Diving Hvar, Croatia

A day after the "basic skills demonstration" exam we were on our way to Croatia for 7 days of diving. We hoped to do at least a part of our Divemaster practical training as this diving trip was organized by our diving center, Nautica Warszawa, and there were about 50 people. The practical training is a part of the divemaster training, it is a kind of internship - you participate, under your instructors supervision, in different courses: OWD, AOWD, Rescue one chosen speciality and you must also practice leading certified divers. This is one of the possible ways of passing the practical part of the divemaster course. The other one is so called Practical Training Excercises which basically is just simulation of the aforementioned courses. I think that the internship is a better way of learning because you deal with real divers and their problems and take part in real courses. This way you gather more experience.

It is important for us to get the Practical Training done as soon as possible because this is the most unpredictable part of the course. Our friend that was doing the previous divemaster course got stuck because nobody wanted to do the AOWD course in winter in Poland...

Unfortunately it turned out that nobody wanted to do any courses, they just wanted to dive... As there were no courses we did some diving ourselves.

Nautica Croatia is located in Stari Grad on the island of Hvar in Croataia.

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Sealife in waters around Hvar is not as rich as in Egypt (the water is much colder, around 15 degrees Celsius), but still you can find some interesting fish, like the angler fish below



Apart from that you can find lots of nudibranchs, urchins and other fish typical of the Mediterranean.



Almost all of our dives were boat dives, we did however 4 dives from the shore during the Map Making assignment of the DM course (we had to do something to push things forward!).




Additionaly we did the PADI Deep Diver course, so I'm expecting a new card to my C-Card collection :)