PADI (Professional Association of Diving Instructors) has recently introduced more stringent wording to ensure all students receive the educational materials they require for diver training.  Until recently some Dive Centres exploited a situation by saying to some students that they could either share training materials or in some cases loan materials in order to reduce costs.  In order to teach PADI courses Dive Centres must ensure that;

“as of 1st January 2013, student divers must have a personal set of current PADI materials for study and use during the course and for reference afterward, to include, at a minimum, the course manual (book or online version) unless unavailable in a language understood by the student diver”

At Bubbles Dive Centre in Gozo we have always given each student diver their own set of materials as we believe in ensuring the best possible training and to ensure that customers are able to refer back to what they have learnt in the future, we are pleased that this loophole cannot be exploited anymore.

So while we hope you come to us for your diver training, if you do travel somewhere else make sure you are given all the materials that you require and are entitled to, this will ensure your training is carried out safely and in the way PADI intended it to be.  If you are not sure about what materials you should have feel free to contact us and we will be more than happy to advise.

Happy diving everyone.

4th May 2013 to 11th May 2013

This is an amazing early season offer.  10 guided dive package including accommodation in studio apartment above the dive centre, transfers to / from Malta airport and 10 guided dives with one of our instructors showing you the best diving on Gozo all for €199 per person.  This offer is limited and subject to availability so book now to avoid disappointment.

The offer is based on 2 people sharing a studio apartment, for more information see http://www.diving-gozo.com/accommodation/st-michaels-studio-apartment for more details on the apartment.

To reserve your holiday email info@diving-gozo.com for more details

Those of you that have dived with us will know our passion for marine conservation and how seriously we take keeping the seas around Malta, Gozo and Comino free of debris.  On every dive we ask our customers to pick up one piece of debris on the dive, they then place this in our dive for debris box at the dive centre and the contents are recorded every day and sent to Project AWARE as part of their global database which lists all the debris found.  This data is then used to inform people what debris is making it’s way to the oceans and put more pressure on manufacturers to reduce their packaging and waste items.  We may not be a huge dive centre but we are very proud of what we all do, customers and staff alike and we are playing our part in cleaning up the oceans around us.

This award is not really for the dive centre it is for every customer that has dived with us and helped in our campaign and our greatest thanks go to you all.  It is not long now until the new season starts and we are looking forward to even bigger and better things, keep an eye on this blog as we will be updating you all very soon with some innovative and unique ways to help protect our seas this season.  We are all looking forward to this season and welcoming many of you back again, so thank you once again and happy diving wherever you are.

“PADI Five Star Dive Resorts excel in providing traveling scuba divers with memorable scuba diving experiences, customer satisfaction, scuba diver safety and underwater environmental awareness by providing professional and outstanding service.”

Not every dive centre can claim this, indeed many have been around for a long time and not achieved this prestigious status, so to achieve this so quickly is nothing short of remarkable and it is all down to the care and commitment of our team and the feedback by our customers, so it’s a big thanks you all round.

It doesn’t stop there though, we still have a long way to go in our environmental campaign to bring more awareness to low impact diving in and around Malta and Gozo.  It was fantastic to win 3rd prize in Project AWARE‘s global campaign on Dive Against Debris and we will continue this by asking all our customers to bring up one piece of debris from every dive.  We will also continue our regular underwater clean ups where our team and customers offer their time freely to this fantastic effort.

We still hear stories of bad diving practices such as feeding the fish for human entertainment when diving, something we will never do and will continue our campaign to stop everyone doing this.  Divers can, and are playing a leading role around the world in improving the underwater environment and we can make a difference.

Bubbles Dive Centre - Dive Against Debris

Well, what can we say after the biggest and best season for Bubbles Dive Centre so far?  An amazing season and it’s all thanks to our wonderful customers and team.  We have had so much fun over the season and so much has happened we couldn’t possibly put everything in this blog.  So here are some highlights which we hope will provide an insight into what happened over the season and of course for some of you reading this you were actually involved at the time.

We have the best customers because…

Simply amazing! Our customers have actually been bringing us presents out from their home countries.  The various types of ginger goodies were a very welcome present from many customers and we all had a lot of enjoyment eating them but I guess Donna enjoyed them the most.  Check out some of our presents on our facebook page. www.facebook.com/bubblesdivecentre

Many customers took away our SkiHire2U leaflets which feature the other half of our year with ski hire in Chatel.  New for this season we had our partner Chalets information leaflet and judging by the response, some of you are coming out to see us in the winter, which is very exciting for us and we look forward to seeing you in a very different part of the world.

The best team…

It’s true we surely have the best Dive Centre team around. Tthere can not be any person that is part of our team that can be singled out as special because they are all so special. Our Divemaster trainees have worked incredibly hard over the season and sometimes it must have seemed very tough but they all just kept smiling and got the job done. Donna and Nana in the Dive centre were great, looking after our customers and ensuring everything was done for them during their holiday.  Finally the Instructors who have been so professional in their training and approach to customer care.

The best diving…

A brilliant season diving with our customers diving around Gozo. We have introduced new divers to the water and completed every certification right up to Divemaster as well as our first Tec 40, 45 and 50 customer.  I don’t think there is course we haven’t taught this season.

The best fun…

We had so much fun, how can anyone call this a job J ?  It’s all down to our customers being so nice and valuing what we offer – it just makes the whole experience perfect and if anyone was in any doubt about what we offer the feedback in TRIPADVISOR speaks for itself.  Thankyou to everyone that left a comment.

Marine Protection…

Every single dive of every single day throughout the season we have worked with our customers to remove debris, particularly plastic from the sea floor. We will never completely remove everything but the seas around Gozo are without doubt less polluted this season than they would have been without the brilliant efforts of our customers and staff.

We also did the Dive Against Rope and we removed over 200 kilos of rope and waste from Marsalforn bay. While some said this would not be possible because of problems with boat owners etc we did it anyway and did not receive one single complaint, in fact some commented on what a great job we had done and some others asked if they could re use some of the rope / debris  – what a great idea and we were only to happy to help.  There were of course a few grumbles from another dive centre complaining we were bringing bad publicity to Gozo but given that we received many thanks from the Ministry for Gozo, the MTA and Project AWARE we don’t think that was the case at all.

The Vikings are invading…

This was our standing joke over the season, we had Nana and Cecilia working for us, both from Denmark and then many many customers from the Nordic region that sometimes it seemed like they had all come to see us in Gozo.  Some of us did try learning the language but soon gave up after a few good laughs we had by the Danes listening to us trying to pronounce the words.

The future…

We have already started on planning even bigger and better things for next season. Our Divemaster internship applications are coming in thick and fast and this is something we plan to expand since our industry reputation of training brilliant Divemasters expands.

Already we have taken customer service to new levels on Gozo and we have not stopped there, next season will see even more improvements and new innovative ways of looking after our customers to ensure they experience the very best diving in Gozo.

And finally…

Just a MASSIVE thank you to Nana, Chris, Jonathan, Caroline, Graham, Cecilia and Gary for such hard work throughout the season and see you all next year.

Very best wishes

Dave and Donna

New customer diving vehicle

We haven’t just sat around during the winter, some of you will know we run Ski hire in Chatel business www.skihire2u.com but we have also been busy with Bubbles Dive Centre, we have just announced our new customer diving vehicle, Mitsubishi L200 latest model.  We already have an L200 and was so pleased with the feedback from our customers last year that we decided this was the best vehicle to add to our fleet.  Our commitment to personalized diving continues as the vehicle only carries 4 customers ensuring that relaxed comfortable journey and more importantly a relaxed small group to dive and have fun with.

New compressor 

You may also have heard that we have purchased a brand new ultra silent compressor which features the very latest energy saving efficiencies helping to protect our environment.  Keep a look at our website www.diving-gozo.com for more details on this next week, as this is when it will be installed and we will share the very latest developments and pictures.

New team 

We announced some time ago the details about our fantastic new team that will be joining us for this season for more details see http://www.diving-gozo.com/about-us the first person Nana, from that team arrives next week, we have taken a lot of time to select the very best people to join us, who all have a passion for marine conservation and underwater environmental development programmes.

Marine conservation programmes

The new team this year will free up some time for Donna and others to help her in developing our commitment to marine conservation programs, some of these are already underway such as our ‘Dive for Debris’ campaign working with http://www.projectaware.org/ we have some other projects that will be undertaken this year, some of which will be quite challenging but we are determined to help and work with those who genuinely want to protect and develop our marine environment and challenge anyone who does not.

Thankyou to everyone that has supported and if you are coming to dive with us this season we are already looking forward to seeing you, if you are off elsewhere in the world then we hope you have happy and safe diving and don’t forget to share your pictures on our diving gozo Facebook page

New compressor and building

As we were closing things were hotting up with our licence for the compressor and I am pleased to say that not only will we offering full air filling up to 300 bar and Nitrox but we will also have a large new building in addition to our Dive Centre that will be used for all the air filling as well as kit storage, washing and cleaning down as well as servicing and maintenance operations.  This will also be done with a new environmentally friendly process that reduces the amount of fresh water used.  We will be monitoring this throughout the season to show just how much can be saved and once we have all the information we will be publishing the results in the hope that other Dive Centres will follow suit.  This is another step in our mission to protect and improve the environment.

The very best team

The best thing we have to announce for this season is our team and what a team we have.  It has taken us a long time to carefully select everyone this year and ensure that everybody is committed as we are to our policy of caring.  Details of our new team can be found at http://www.diving-gozo.com/about-us The thing for us that was so important with this team was making sure that everyone had the same passion for protecting the marine environment that we have and without doubt we have the best team to do that on board.  I know some people are disappointed that they couldn’t join us this season, the amount of people applying was amazing but at the end of the day we chose the right team for our customers.

Personalised service

It seems a million miles from where we were this time last year, you may recall the problems we had during the application process to get our Dive Centre licence, that is all behind us now and as we look forward to this season, it’s going to present itself with some quite different challenges.  We will continue to offer only high quality personalised diving for our customers in small groups to ensure everyone has the best time possible diving on the islands of Gozo, Malta and Comino.

More marine conservation projects

Donna with the help of Nana will be planning and putting into place even bigger and better Marine conservation projects and we will continue to develop our relationship with PADI’s Project AWARE foundation (http://www.projectaware.org/) particularly in our underwater cleanup programmes.  I still can’t quite believe we won 3^rd prize in Project AWARE’s global underwater cleanup campaign last year.  We may not emulate that this year but it doesn’t matter really what matters is that we can make a difference to the diving in and around these wonderful islands and that we will definitely do.

Continuing our philosophy

The philosophy of Bubbles Dive Centre will only be successful if our customers support what we offer and like our approach to customer service and diving generally.  The feedback so far has been fantastic we and we are absolutely convinced this is how you want to dive in Gozo,  so we promise to continue to build on what we started last year and make your diving with us the best it can possibly be and working together to make Gozo one of the top dive destinations in the world for marine protection and low impact diving.  We already have so many customers booking again with us for this we, we are so pleased thank you.

Thankyou everyone and we look forward to welcoming you to Gozo’s most caring Dive Centre

Dave, Donna and all the Bubbles team

Our customers have been great and we’ve had lots of fun and great diving with them. We’re sure they enjoyed it too judging by the fantastic comments on our website (www.diving-gozo.com/guestbook) and facebook page (www.facebook.com/BubblesDiveCentre). And as for us, well as Donna keeps telling me it’s hard for me to describe this as a job. It’s been just so much fun diving with you all, whether it’s been your first diving experience or 1,000th dive we’ve loved every minute.

Unfortunately we are continuing to get negative comments from some of the other dive centres but we know what we do is right and we’ll continue with our philosophy of great customer service and low-impact diving. We do also continue to get good support from other dive centres and these are the ones who will take diving in Gozo forward and we’ll continue to work with them. If there are some dive centres which are unable to cope with that well it’s something they will have to deal with. It’s important to continue to improve the quality of diving for our customers whilst also giving something back to make sure the island is protected.

We’ll be closing on October 10th this year because after starting Bubbles Dive Centre and SkiHire2U all in one year we’re going to take a break for a few weeks. We’re off to the Maldives – and yes I will be diving…2 dives every day . In November we’ll begin working on SkiHire2U our winter business in Chatel. I know many of you have asked about coming to Chatel for a winter holiday so check out our website www.skihire2u.com. There you will find links to the very best chalets in the area that use the best ski hire service around . Feel free to contact us directly if you need any more information and we would love to see you.

We said a fond farewell to Iva our other instructor who left us this week to return home, but we look forward to working with her again next season. Thank you Iva for all your hard work – it’s been a lot of fun and you did a great job for us. We would never have thought at the start that we would need to employ another instructor this season. As our thoughts turn to next season we will definitely be employing more instructors so if you know anyone who shares our passion for low impact diving, improving the environment and giving great customer service, ask them to get in contact. The same thing applies to anyone who is interested in completing a Divemaster internship with us. We had a very successful season this year and next season will be even bigger and better so please get in touch soon as places are limited and we have already had some enquiries.

So once again thank you to everyone for your support this year it has been nothing short of amazing. We’ll post another blog at the end of the season but until then happy and safe diving.

Bubbles Dive Centre has only been open 5 weeks and so much has happened its a bit difficult to know where to start. Firstly we were very honoured to receive 3rd prize in Project Aware’s Dive for Debris http://www.projectaware.org/update/when-winners-emerge-scavenger-hunt-spans-globe event held in July. We didn’t take part to receive an award but getting this recognition is further proof that what we are doing is absolutely right. Watch this space because in September we are planning something even bigger.

The Dive Centre is really buzzing. We’re far busier than we thought we would be and we have taken on another instructor to cope with the demand. So a big welcome to Iva who is fitting in well with the new team and who shares our passion for low impact sustainable diving and customer service.

Today we have our first boat trip going out so we are a little bit nervous and hope everything goes to plan, though with the great customers we have I am sure they’ll take everything in their stride.

We’ve just got our comments page up and running on the website and the comments we’ve received have been nothing short of amazing. Customers love our service and our new approach to diving. It’s clearly a unique experience and one that is going from strength to strength. Check out the comments at www.diving-gozo.com/guestbook.

We still keep getting sarcastic comments and remarks from some dive centres here and some of the actions they are taking is nothing short of bizarre. We’ve heard one dive centre owner drove all the way to Malta because they didn’t believe we had a licence. What a waste of time and do you not care about the environment? We do! Do something good for the environment in Gozo and reduce carbon emissions – don’t drive all the way to Malta, come into our centre we will happily show you the licence or anything else you want to see, we have nothing to hide.

On the other side we are are very grateful to to other dive centres who have been supporting us, either by helping us or by offering words of encouragement, we are truly grateful. It goes to show that there is a good core to the diving in Gozo and something that can and will be built on. We also know that our strategy does not fit well with some dive centres but we will not stop in our mission to make Gozo one of the best diving destinations in the world that promotes and supports low impact diving as well as an island the actively cares for the environment. Some may say this is impossible but we don’t think so. We’ve already brought Gozo an environmental award in only 5 weeks, it won’t be quick and it won’t be easy but we are in it for the long haul and if you care about low impact an sustainable diving or just want to know more then come and dive with us.

Hope to see you soon.

Dave and Donna