We have become Dive Instructors

Thanks to the time off we had from COVID-19 we decided to take advantage in pursuing some sort of advancement in our career and adding some related attributes to our résumé to make it more attractive and help us get closer to our dream work/life goals.

I remind us everyday of our end goal: working and living from our sailing boat, cruising the Pacific islands.

No dreams are too big… we keep in mind that every step we make in life are to get us closer to our goal.

Fred is a chef of 25 years in the industry and me hospitality hotel and restaurant industry for almost 20 years. Getting closer to our 40th makes us think back on our achievement and how we spent our life. All we can see is the hard work, the very little time actually enjoying our life and the no real result either financially or happiness in what we do.

It sounds terrible… but since we sold our restaurant and decided to focus on our goals, as far away as we are still from reaching this goal, we are already much happier in our life. We actually have something to look forward to. We aim for our end goal and every decision we make in life is to get us there.

What have we done so far?

We sold our unit and bought a boat. A 36ft sailing boat. Fred has taken some sailing courses with RYA, so far he is a day skipper, doesn’t mean much but at least he learned to sail our boat.

He has been looking for further studies to get him to work on boats and het away from the kitcken. But so far he has been hitting a roadblock, every course requires some level of seatime which he hasn’t got enough of to meet the requirements to enrol.

That won’t stop him. How can we get on these boats? We have to show some sort of skills we can bring to any employer. So we decided to become dive Instructors.

Not only we love diving, and had already our divemaster under our belt, we were only a step away from becoming instructors, it made perfect sense to pursue this path.

So that’s what we did!!! We are dive instructors…. woop woop!

You might say… good luck pursuing that path. No work at the moment, the industry is suffering hugely from the loss of tourism. So many out of work.

That is true…. for now. But it will get better and when it does, we’ll be ready for it.

Combining Fred’s cheffing career with his dive Instructor level, and sailing experience, all of this will get him work on a boat when the industry starts up again. Not scared to move where work is available as long as he gets that seatime he is looking for to be able to enrol to the studies he wants to do and get certified as a skipper.

Why becoming a skipper?

So we can get a business started on our own boat. Without the skipper licence we won’t be able to be approved in using our own boat to take customers out.

Where are we at? What can we do?

Both of us dive Instructor with no work on boats and we can’t use our own boat yet. Options are to certify students in lakes. Great option as it is obviously much cheaper that way and can be accomplished much quicker.