NEW SEASON 2010

Welcome to the 2010 diving season.

We began in late March with the annual visit of regular Universities doing their open water training.  So far we have seen Portsmouth, Bristol, Imperial, Oxford, Oxford Brookes, University of West of England, and a couple of groups, Dive Nuts and Sussex.

Easter weather turned out well, except the Saturday, where we had Easterly winds so unfortunately had to cancel the afternoon charters.  However, Sunday made up for it with flat calm conditions and even the sun was shining!  Both The Kitten and The Rib were out on Good Friday proving to be a good start to the season.
Plans are in for a new shop to be built on the site of the old one.  The old one has just been knocked down and temporarily replaced with a very stylish towing caravan!  We are hoping that it will be ready for the May bank holiday, although maybe a bit optimistic. It is going to be timber framed, so it will fit in with the rest of the buildings on the beach and the beautiful surroundings.  We are planning to have a nice warm comfy ‘information area’ with lots of diving materials to read so you can sit down and warm up after your dives. This will also be used as a lecture room for our dive courses. We will also have a separate shop and office in the same building. It will be bigger (and a lot smarter!) than the old one. Plans are to get more schools involved with the diving and start courses such as Bubble Maker and possibly Seal Team as we will also be getting a swimming pool at some point in the near future, so we can involve more training here.

Training

The Beyond Open Water experience, Discover Local Diving (escorted dives) and Drysuit Courses proved very popular last year.  They are run with a ratio of no more than 3 students to 1 instructor, so you get good quality training from our experienced instructors.  Don’t forget, we can run a whole range of courses, from Open Water to Instructor, and many Specialities.  If you are interested, let us know.  We are also currently sorting out some special discounts on our courses (i.e. discounted undersuits when doing a dry suit course) so keep an eye out for the updates on this.

Boats

Celtic Kitten proved to be a popular addition to our boats last year, due to the ease of boarding and speed of getting to the dive sites, click here to see an example of the places we go to.  This also reduced the turn around time for her charters, so during the really busy periods we were able to accommodate more divers in a day.  We will be running Celtic Cat, Celtic Kitten and the Rib again this year.   They are getting booked up, so get in quick if you want to secure your places, particularly for neap tide periods.  Celtic Kitten and the Rib can run with a minimum of 2 people, the Celtic Cat with a minimum of 6.

Sea Life

There was a wide variety of sea life spotted last year.  Most notably an electric ray, a Tadpole fish and a very old, large lobster spotted by Andy.  Andy also had a seal follow him on the whole dive when he had a customer on an escorted dive, and there was a pod of Rissos Dolphins spotted in the area, which are unusual visitors to our shores.  Basking Shark action during 2009 was so not good again in our area, although there were plenty around the North coast.

Staff

Unfortunately Andy has decided to leave after 8 years of great instructing and skippering at Porthkerris.  We are very sad to see him go, he has been a great part of the team but we wish him good luck in whatever he moves onto.  This means Dave, Jeremy and Mike will be skippering the boats this season as well as being our resident instructors. We will have a new addition this year, Darren who will be running the wagon, and hopefully completing his Divemaster here too.  And of course Jo and Sarah will be running the shop and keeping everyone in order! 

Facebook
Keep an eye on our Facebook page for news as it happens, courses and boat spaces.  We have just posted some Easter photos on there so take a look!

Job Vacancies
We will be requiring a qualified Instructor for the summer season at Porthkerris to join our friendly, busy team.  The job involves all aspects of the diving industry (and more) and so you need to be prepared to get stuck into all parts of the job. 

We are also looking for keen, enthusiastic divers wishing to further their knowledge in the dive Industry and complete their Divemaster course this year.  At Porthkerris we prefer to train our Divemasters using the Internship method. This gives you genuine day-to-day experience of assisting in training real students and guiding real divers. As a Divemaster Intern you will be part of the team at Porthkerris working alongside an instructor to gain experience in assisting with training at entry level and advanced level, running the Scuba Review and Local Orientation courses, acting as a Divemaster on our boats, and escorting nervous, rusty or simply lonely divers! The course lasts about 6 weeks, and we can also help find cheap accommodation. 

Please contact us on 01326 280620 or send an email to info@porthkerris.com if you are interested…..