Underwater treasure hunter. It has a nice ring to it. Have you ever watched diving movies about treasure hunters and wished that you could be doing the same thing as Paul Walker and Jessica Alba in Into the Blue and Matthew McConahay and Kate Hudson in Fools Gold? The ability to find things underwater is always a useful skill, whether it be for retrieving something dropped from a boat, searching for buried treasure, or on the first step to becoming a police or military diver.
The PADI Search and Recovery Diver course takes place over two days with four dives included. You will learn the basic search patterns, using a divers reel for searches, and how to plan and execute an underwater search. You will also learn about techniques for searching in limited visibility, and expand on your underwater navigation techniques building on what you learn in the PADI Advanced Open Water diver course and the PADI Underwater Navigator course. Finally you will learn how to tie secure knots and how to rig and deploy a lift bag. This is becoming a pre-requisite course for PADI professional training and a really valuable course to take in preparation for your PADI Divemaster training and IDC.
The dive sites around Phuket such as Racha Yai offer good training grounds for the search and recovery course providing flat bottoms and good visibility to learn the initial techniques. After this we make the course a little more challenging, moving to a dive site with reduced visibility and giving you the chance to search when you can’t see everything. This course prepares you to begin to find things underwater and is one of the most fun and rewarding courses in the PADI system.