Hail to the Hive!

For nearly 12 months now I’ve had an opportunity dangling before me ,seemingly ever out of reach, and all this time in limbo has kind of prevented us from making a decision about which way to turn next in life.

But finally it’s all starting to happen, and happen fast.

Now to put this into context for you, the reader, I’ll draw a larger picture for you. We arrived back in the UK in March 2021 as Covid had muddied my waters and made a mess of the whole tourist industry and for me,running a dive shop in the Philippines, it was a disaster.

So we decided to return to the UK and embark on a mini adventure of our own, do something we’d always wanted to try, living on a narrowboat.

We did this for 18 months and absolutely fell in love with it. We would have happily continued if the opportunity to sell our little boat Badger and go and spend some time with my wifes family in Jamaica had not presented itself.

And then this is where the dilemma and uncertainty crept in. I was being sounded out for a potential role back in the Scuba Industry and it involved a lot of discussion, negotiation and planning and I wasn’t allowed to publicly say anything at the time. It started to take a lile longer than I hd realised due to the complexity of the new challenge and w found ourselves staying with a good friend for what turned out to be longer than we thought.

We kind of wanted a new boat but ther we no canals where w were staying and I had some temporary work there at that time.

I was wondering if I could have to choose between a life in the scuba industry

or a life on the idyllic canal network.

Then finally everything started to happen. The new role was to commence almost immediately and I hd to fly out to the TDI/ SDI headquarters in florida for some training.

Whats TDI / SDI? I hear you cry!

Well in the scuba world there are a myriad of different training agencies.

Source: photo courtesy of techdivingthailand.com

The 3 largest today are SDi, SSI and PADI. And what alot of folks don’t realise is you can dive everwhere in any dive shop with a certification from any of them. You can also go from one training agency to another, example do your Open water training with SDi and then Advanced with PADi and vice versa.

Source: photo courtesy of tdisdi.com

TDI is Technical Diving International, deep diving , specialist diving on closed circuit rebreathers, or with mixed gases. This is for when you want to go DEEP, deeper than 40m and also for cave diving as well.

SDI is Scuba Diving International the sister organisation dealing with recreational scuba to depth of 40m.

They’ve been growing enormously and my old dive shop was both an SDI and PADI dive shop but we did mostly ( about 95%) SDI courses so I was familiar with them. The new project was to spearhead growth in the indian Ocean region and I have been selected for the role.

And the task is HUGE!

Source: goole earth

My region will be India, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Mozambique, Madagascar, Zanzibar/Tanzania.

And then at the same time a new narrowbboat comes into the picture 😄 which means I can , with a little imagination and travel, combine both life on the UK waterways as a base and overseeing a new regions growth for TDI/SDI in the Indian Ocean.

Ok I need to take a breath EEEEEK! So Excited 😆

A few of you have been asking what’s happening etc so I thought I would try and explain it as simply as I can but as you can see, it’s going to be quite interesting to say the least.

I’ll keep you posted. i am definitely back!