Hi Mike,
Congrats on getting your OW and making the decision to Go Pro! A life as a scuba diving instructor can be a lifelong adventure. I often say an instructor's cert is a passport to live and work in some of the world's most beautiful locales, places others would love to go but can't because they'd have no way to support themselves.
But rather than look so close to home, why not start your journey with a real adventure? Why not come to exotic Thailand and spend 4 months diving every day while training to be an instructor?
No, we aren't "free" like the folks in Florida, but as we all know, nothing in life is truly "free" in this world. In fact, based on what I read on their website, their "free" AOW to OWSI program costs $4,000 including accommodations, and that's only for 23 days.
Aquanauts, on the other hand, is less than $8,000 for FOUR MONTHS and offers many more courses and much more diving so that by the end of those 4 months you have lots of dives and experience before becoming an instructor.
We beleive if people are truly serious about a career -- be it in diving, computers or hotel management -- they are willing to pay for it. Diving is not child's play, especially when you have someone else in your care. You want quality training with no gimmicks.
What we've done here at Aquanauts is try to make it easy to get to the pro level by packaging everything up into one all-inclusive program and take advantage of the tremendously lower cost-of-living in Thailand.
We proivde all your courses, books, PADI fees, accommodations, a full set of Scubapro gear, plus UNLIMITED FUN DIVING for 4 months. You get to live in a tropical beach resort where it's never colder than 80 degrees, where the water is 86 and you do it while living and diving with a group of like-minded people from all over the planet.
The link to our internship program is in the footer below and I hope you'll take a look beyond the borders of the US of A for your dive training needs.
