Scuba diving is one of the best activities that a person with a disability can take part in, with a number of boundaries are immediately broken down. There are very few disabilities that actually prevent you from taking part in diving and in the past our PADI Course Director Mark Slingo has taken paraplegics, quadraplegics, people with muscular dystrophy, amputees, Downs syndrome and other disabilities scuba diving.
Mark is himself a wheelchair user following an accident in 2005 when he was a PADI Open Water Scuba Instructor having just graduated from Newcastle University. He didn’t let being a paraplegic stop him and rose through the PADI teaching levels, teaching hundreds of students and eventually becoming a PADI Course Director meaning that he can train other divers to become PADI dive instructors. Mark has now made it one of his missions in life to help as many people in his position get into scuba diving and see the wonders that it can offer people. He points out that in the water he is the same if not better than able-bodied people and wants to train as many instructors as possible to work with disabled divers so that they have more options and places to dive around the world.
It is not just Mark saying this now. Scuba diving has been recognised as a valid rehabilitation sport for people following an injury and has been adopted for recovering US military veterans through the Soldiers Undertaking Disabled Scuba (SUDS) and other diving for the disabled programs such as Deptharapy in the UK.
Contact Buccaneer Diving for your diving for the disabled experience or if you are a diving instructor wanting to learn to work with disabled divers then check out our Disabled Divers International Instructor course training program which is run with Mark.
