100% Committed

It's now October. In San Antonio, we've done a lot. We got our Advanced Open Water and Nitrox certs this spring, followed immediately by Emergency First Response, and right after that we did Rescue. We got our Rescue certification in July, and immediately started on Divemaster. Here, we had great experiences with two dive shops. All of our training, we are doing with an instructor at Dive World on Thousand Oaks - Josh Nowitz. He's a younger college student, but is a great guy and a great instructor as well. We got our Nitrox cert through Duggan Diving. Both shops are great, friendly, and have been extremely helpful.

Thankfully, Diamonds parents have been awesome for us - we've been able to save and pay all our old bills and such, while preparing for the move. I have been in touch with Andy from Utila Dive Center a lot since we moved, and just yesterday, I paid our deposit of $200 per person for our IDC which is the Assistant Instructor and Open Water Scuba Instructor courses combined. We reserved our spot for the March 10th class, with the Instructor Exam following right behind it. Once we're done with that we'll do our Master Scuba Diver Trainer internship for more experience and more certification.

There are a couple things you have to have by this time, or close to it. We already have our passports, though her name needs changed on hers, but that is getting mailed out today. Our divemaster certification is just a few weeks away, so that is a certainty as well. Deposit is paid to reserve our spot in that months class (it appears the classes sometimes fill early, especially for the early months). We have our DAN diving insurance already, and we've got a little money saved up. I just bought our plane tickets (one way) to San Pedro Sula, Honduras. San Pedro Sula is still a little ways from Utila, so, we'll take a small plane to Utila. I have not made those reservations just yet, though I have found our schedule for all of this so far.

Keep in mind, this is not as commercial as the United States is, so dealing with things not being 100% is going to be a reality.

So far, we have plane tickets on Spirit Air (remember, trying to keep prices down). We fly at 3:30 PM from San Antonio to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. From there, we fly at 11:30 PM to San Pedro Sula, and arrive at 12:55 AM Honduras time. Honduras time is -6 UTC/GMT, and they do not observe daylight saving time (thank goodness). What that means is that during the summer months, Honduras is on the same clock as Mountain time, and during the winter, it matches up with Central time, US. We were able to get tickets for roughly $200 per person, including all the baggage fees and such.

Currently, we have all of our gear, and we've been happy with it all, so we are pretty much set there... It's a good idea to have your own gear and be familar with it's operation. I have also learned to service our own regs just in case there is ever a problem. We plan on taking some backup gear as well, we'll have one or two additional 1st and 2nd stages. Everything else is pretty reliable, and we have a backup depth timer in case a dive computer fails.

As of right now, this is current - I'll post more as I get info... Or if you have any questions, simply post a comment and I'll try to answer them in the next posting...