Winterline

For four days we had the pleasure to certify 18 teenagers from the Winterline gap year program. The Winterline program provides hands-on learning and real-world skills combined with traveling and exploring the world. The youths travels with their different leaders around the world and learns in every country some new skills. These are skills you don't get taught at school. Like scuba diving for example. During their trip, they learned everything from business skills to outdoor skills to global society & leadership skills. Some of the skills they mightb use a lot in their future while some of them might never be used at all. But the objective is to open their mind and get a diversity of experiences. Teenagers from all over the world join this program as a gap year between high school and university.

We, Anna and Matthias, helped the instructors and divemasters to supervise the students. We were also responsible for all the dive gear and that every student had the right size of equipment in every of the four half days of exercise. This was a logistic a challenge. But these guys did a great job, and everything worked well and the students were able to concentrate for the lesson. 

Because 18 students were too many to handle all at once, we split them up into two groups. During the first two days, one group spent the morning in a classroom to learn the basics about dive theory and the afternoon in the pool to learn the basic skills for scuba diving, and vice versa.  

Nearly all students mastered all the skills in the pool and passed the theory exam. They were then ready for the open water dives in the ocean. 

On day three and four, we had one group come out in the morning on the boat with us to their open water dives and then the other group did it during the afternoon. That meant for the instructors and their assistants four dives a day. But we had a lot of fun with the students and they did a great job. We were able to certify the most of them to PADI Open Water Divers. All of them did a great job!

The ConnectOcean Team wish the group good luck and hopefully a lot of nice dive experiences in the future.