Learning to dive and sail

Hey all,

I'm appealing to all the experts out there with a very open-ended question!

I've 3-4 months free, with savings to support myself and want to become a highly qualified SCUBA diver and / or sailor. I wanted to know if anyone had done something similar (learning to dive and sail simultaneously), how you can organise it, where would be good territory and what costs I could expect.

I'm looking for:

1) decent teachers (I speak only English and fair Japanese!)
2) recognised qualifications (PADI and RYA)
3) excellent conditions and marine life (e.g. was toying with Tonga or Virgin Islands for the renowned waters and varied life)
4) opportunity to do the odd weekend of something else (other watersports, hiking, travel, whatever - just for the odd break!!)

Thanks for your help, suggestions and tips.

David

Hi,
your next few months are going to be a fantastic time,which I am sure you will not look back on. I will try to answer your question as if you have no experience in either pastime,so forgive me if ths is not the case.
The PADI courses I would say realistically you could obtain up to a level of Divemaster. If you calculate say ten days from Open water to Rescue and four weeks for Divemaster, I think you could manage this comfortably, with a day or two rest now and again.
As far as sailing goes, this is another story. learning to sail to a hgh level can take years if not a lifetime. i would recommend a course in sailing dinghys, it is alot of fun and you will be amazed at what you can learn in a short time. after that? look on crewing websites for positions, make a profile now.You wll be surprised at the ammount of Captains that do not mind if you have no experience, only that they have another pair of hands/eyes.
If you have your heart set on RYA qual in a place with Diving. i would recommend South Africa/Mozambique. All round excellent tuition,diverse,lots of sailing,other sports/activities,English spoken(S.Africa), good value for money. of course there is Australia,although I am not familar yet down under.If you are looking for Caribe wait until December. Good luck in what you decide,hope this helps
Here are crewing websites:
www.findacrew.net
www.7knots.com
www.floatplan.com
www.crewfile.com
www.crewseekers.com

I think that you should go to the red sea mabey Egypt to go diving clear tropical waters lovely
Fiona

Dahab in South Sinai, Egypt has both sailing and diving.

Santa Barbara, California

www.anacapadivecenter.com

http://sbsail.com/instruction.html?gclid=CP7L5PCRi5QCFQUrHgodtVvsWQ

www.santabarbarahikes.com/

http://www.sb-outdoors.org/

http://www.flyaboveall.com/index.php

Utila, Bay Islands Honduras. I did PADI Open Water and Advanced Open Water (9 days) for $178 although that was back in 1997. I still think it's one of the cheapest places.

Oh, and they speak English too.

I agree with Stevej Utila is the place and you can learn to sail here also !! If you have any questions about Utila drop me a line !!

After doing some Google-ing, it looks like your talking around the US$500 mark for doing both the Open Water and Advanced Open in Utila.

Cheers to all - useful stuff.

As further info I'm only an Open Water PADI diver so plenty of room to improve! Plus my sailing experience amounts to about 20 days' total on a fair size cruiser / race yacht in my life so still a novice there too.

It sounds like the diving half is easily possible - Utila looks ideal too as a place to do it. Anyone think there's a serious downside in learning more advanced diving in a place with such easy conditions? (to me sounds like it'd just be more fun, but would it be a major gap in my skills as e.g. rescue diver+ if I hadn't dived in low vis water or with strong currents around?)

Sailing-wise though I can't seem to find any decent schools there. Perhaps it makes more sense to combine diving with something less of a life-long skill than sailing (e.g. kitesurfing I've also tried to get into a few times and failed through lack of free weekends!). Is that popular enough in Utila to have a few instructors kicking around?

Thanks again.

Actually, there must be many places where you can both learn to sail and learn to dive. I suspect that it will be easier to arrange if you nail the sailing part first and then see if there are dive ops. I say this because there seem to be far more schools for diving than for sailing. Here on Phuket, for example, it is perfectly possible to learn to sail, but only at a few places, while there are so many dive schools that you are spoiled for choice.